My colleague and friend, Prof. Mario Buhagiar, has taken up his pen to lambast the works that are currently being undertaken by the present parish priest of Paola, Rev. Can Marc Andre’ Camilleri, (The Sunday Times of Malta, November 27).
To be fair, what Fr Camilleri is doing is merely to continue the project initiated by his predecessors to embellish one of the most important 20th century architectural buildings in Malta.
Prof. Buhagiar described the entire project as kitsch and a case of “immorality of bad taste”. For the sake of correctness, it must be said that the irreversible interventions that Prof. Buhagiar is lamenting were not undertaken by Fr Camilleri. But not one of our local academics spoke or pronounced themselves when these irreversible interventions were actually taking place before Fr Camilleri’s time.
I can still recall academics and others defining Guże Damato’s church as ‘kitsch’. Why should kitsch be defined as immoral? In America, kitsch is now being re-assessed, and kitsch objects are starting to fetch good money. I am pleased that academia is slowly starting to re-evaluate Damato’s work. I am even happier that this church has now become the envy and a source of controversy.
The truth is that Damato only found support from the people of Paola who, unlike the establishment of his times, showed unwavering belief in his capability. Their descendants continue to love their church and I am sure that Prof. Buhagiar’s letter expresses this love for a church that was once his parish and that of his parents and grandparents. But the Paola parish church does not belong to academia or to the Curia but to the present people of Paola.
They are the ones who fork out the money for its upkeep and decoration. What any Church Commission should not do is interfere with the wishes and desires of Paola’s parishioners. Whenever it did intervene, it created that irreversible damage that Prof. Buhagiar is now lamenting as being an “immorality of bad taste”.
This phrase expresses a sense of scepticism, but scepticism, as has been noted by Fulton J. Sheen “is never certain of itself, being less a firm intellectual position than a pose to justify bad behaviour” or, in this case, taste. To date, Fr Camilleri’s decorative interventions are all reversible if need be.