At 55, Mgr Charles Scicluna is several years younger than the average age of the diocesan priests who will assist him. Photo: Darrin Zammit Lupi

Mgr Charles Scicluna has pledged to give all of himself to the Catholic Church in Malta. But what can living for others mean in a society like ours, which is, from the very top, so corrupt?

How can one give meaning to a pledge to be dedicated to the common good in a society that is rapidly finding it almost impossible to conceive of public goods – goods that neither belong to the State nor to private parties but which, as is the case with the environment, we hold in common?

It will be tempting for the new archbishop to become the Beau Geste of tweets, firing away in every twitter feed. But Christianity’s starting point has always been flesh and blood, whether it’s the birth of a baby or the tortured death of a man. And it is to the flesh and blood context of the priesthood in Malta that we must turn in order to discern how Mgr Scicluna’s episcopate will be marked.

When he became archbishop in 1976, Mgr Joseph Mercieca was eight years younger than Mgr Scicluna is now. But the single most striking fact about Mgr Scicluna – a fact that will shape the pastoral and administrative character of his episcopate – is still his age.

At 55, he is several years younger than the average age of the diocesan priests who will assist him. He is almost certainly the first Archbishop of Malta in the last 100 years to be younger than the majority of priests.

Of the nearly 300 diocesan Maltese priests (including those incardinated abroad), just over a quarter are under 40. A fifth are over-80 and 58 per cent are over 60. Only 28 per cent (83 priests) fall into the 40-59 age bracket – the age where energy and maturity are usually matched.

To my knowledge, the statistics for the Malta provinces of the religious orders are similar or, from the angle of demographic renewal, worse. These might seem to be dry figures but each one is a sliver of an overworked priest’s life.

The figures inform the microphysics of the Church’s liturgical and pastoral life. If the shrinking, ageing religious orders were not in the process of handing over the leadership of their schools to lay heads, there would be no public issue arising about a rule specifying that Church school heads need to be ‘practising Catholics’ (one used automatically to assume that priests, friars and nuns were).

If the priests of the parish were not so overstretched, the annual blessing of homes would not have begun now, during Lent. Part of the blessing’s previous significance used to draw on its taking place after Easter, the new beginning. Its meaningfulness also drew on the relative pomp and dignity of the ceremony. It is now a rushed, almost casual affair.

One does not have to be nostalgic for the time when the occasion was used to police church attendance to see that the loss of priests is proceeding apace with the loss of the Church’s liturgical patrimony.

It is against this demographic background that Mgr Scicluna will strive to live up to his personal covenant. He has promised to live his life for the Church but he will be doing so, most likely for the better part of the next two decades, as part of the body of an ageing priesthood. The administrative implications cannot be disentangled from the theological and pastoral ones.

Mgr Scicluna will be the archbishop who will oversee the major part of a process that has already begun: the handing over, by the religious orders, of their properties and institutions to foundations run by lay Catholics.

Some orders will follow the model being charted by the Lasallian Brothers – a process meant to preserve the institute’s ethos by the laity, within a legal framework that would prohibit the use of property for anything outside the Lasallian mission.

The Church needs to figure out what its own new covenant means in response to the widespread cynicism

Others might opt to follow the different route of handing over the property to the archdiocese. Under such an arrangement, the archbishop could choose to preserve the original purpose and ethos of the institution. However, under the pressure of circumstances, he might have to decide whether to change the purpose entirely (say, transform a school into a home for the elderly) or even pass on the property to private hands.

The entire process will be momentous, a defining conjuncture in the Church’s history in Malta. It will raise a multitude of minor and not-so-minor decisions (of which the public behaviour expected of school heads will hardly be the most important).

Administratively, it would be tempting to harmonise the ethos of all schools under the archdiocese’s direction; but that would come at the great cost of sacrificing the pluralism of identities, charisms and esprits within the Church.

Given that the internal pluralism within the Church has been, since the beginning, one of its strengths, enabling it to speak and respond to the pluralism in wider society, the loss of ecclesial pluralism has direct bearing on the Church’s capacity to engage with the wider world.

Ecclesial pluralism should not be confused with diversity of opinion. It has to do with diversity of tradition. Entire ways of life – the different rules and collective life of the diverse religious orders – were needed to remember, cultivate, renew and reform each path faithfully.

In such a context, the conservation of tradition will require considerable innovation. A new translation of the Gospel into Maltese is needed: the cultural translation of charisms developed within religious orders into the lives of the laity, including married couples. Various religious orders have begun this process on a worldwide scale but, at the diocesan level, an imaginative, energetic archbishop makes all the difference.

A lot has already been written about the Church’s annual financial deficit. Mgr Scicluna has made clear that he has no intention of selling diocesan property to balance the books. But his leadership will also be needed with respect to some of the property of religious orders.

Some orders have already sold off – to private hands – lands and properties that they can no longer use effectively, given the falling numbers.

Over the coming years, important decisions will have to be taken about other convents or religious houses.

It would be a tragedy if such property were simply given over to the private market. In a society where it has become difficult even to conceive of public goods and the common good, the Church has a special role to play in reviving (some) property as commons: to give new life to what the Catholic economist (and adviser on the encyclical Caritas in Veritate), Stefano Zamagni, has called the civil economy.

The social contract of the Maltese society is being rewritten, with wealth becoming more concentrated at the top and State guarantees being undermined.

Meanwhile, the Church needs to figure out what its own new covenant means in response to the widespread cynicism. The imaginative use of Church property could serve to revive the Church’s contribution to Malta’s social, emotional, ecological and aesthetic intelligence.

It would mean that the Church could stop talking exclusively about deficits, moral and financial, and be recognised as a catalyst in the creation of value and commonwealth. It would embrace the margins and turn them into frontiers.

ranierfsadni@europe.com