In 1775, two Maltese priests – Fr Gejtanu Mannarino and Fr Ġużepp Zahra – for numerous reasons led a revolt against the government of the Order of St John. The revolt was unsuccessful and its leaders paid a heavy price for their temerity. Despite the failure, the people of Malta were impressed by the clergy’s readiness to take a stand.
On June 11, the new Archbishop of Malta, Mgr Charles Scicluna, told an assembly of priests at the seminary he had no intention of tolerating corruption in silence and that he had every intention of speaking out, because it was not in his character to do otherwise.
Days later, he unveiled this new policy in public by granting the clergy permission to join the protest against the brazen development at Żonqor Point.
Since the revolt of 1775, the clergy of Malta has come to assume leadership beyond that of the spiritual, but they lost it all in a handful of decades.
It was in the late 1970s that the rot started to set in, when Archbishop Ġużeppi Mercieca was but newly come to office and Dom Mintoff was in his heyday.
Hundreds of workers, many the breadwinners of their families, were locked out and suspended without pay from July 1977 to February 1978 for following their union’s directives. It was a crushing blow for working men.
The archbishop not only remained silent but he cancelled a Holy Mass at the Floriana parish church that the workers had planned before a silent protest march down Republic Street, Valletta. Without this support, the protest failed.
Very differently were things then working out in Poland. There, another pastor endorsed Solidarnosc and was making himself a substantial challenge to the Communist government.
Karol Wojtyła showed no fear of the regime’s horrible machinery of repression. Still less did he mince words and that powerful cry of his – do not be afraid – came to echo around the globe.
Forty years later and, back in Malta, the new Archbishop, unlike Wojtyła, seems to me to be like a general charging alone into hostile fire as his troops cravenly cower in the safety of the trenches behind the lines. But this is not surprising.
The new Archbishop seems to belike a general charging alone into hostile fire
For the clergy was broken, by successive archbishops for so many decades, into an abundance of caution and an abundance of silence – a policy of cowardice wearing the mask of holiness. The fault for this pusillanimous spirit lies squarely on the shoulders of the previous two episcopates.
For the sake of a twisted understanding of prudence they strove to eliminate every sort of initiative and spirit from the rank-and-file clergy.
In the days of Archbishop Michael Gonzi, every priest had his little field of competence for which he was solely responsible. Most priests were to be found happily occupied with pastoral work in minor offices throughout each parish with little interference from parish or diocesan authorities. The product of this system was a cadre of highly autonomous priests of moral integrity that did not hesitate to defend the faithful.
The presence of priests in their villages of origin was an essential component of this dynamic, because it ensured that the pastors active in the village were as intimate with the history of their flock as they were with their current problems.
This system was gradually worn away by the strategy of the Curia that, from the very beginning, embarked on a campaign to uproot priests from their parishes, break their bonds with the local community and add their benefices to those of the overburdened, thus increasingly indifferent, parish priest.
Mgr Mercieca’s cri de guerre was a privative mockery of the Polish Pope’s non abbiate paura (do not be afraid), for it enjoined nothing other than abbiate paura (be afraid).
Later, the situation deteriorated further, for the Curia took this folly of fear as far as it could take it – into a demented war against the celebration of the festa.
Such was the real reason for all those documents against the festa – all issued by crabbed prelates deformed by irrational fears of some incident escaping their most minute control. Upon his succession, Mgr Paul Cremona preserved this strategy.
This is the way that the ghost of pallid fear fell upon the Church of Malta, sap its spirit and wear out its moral fibre.
It is this process that has left Mgr Scicluna an isolated cleric on the island with the courage and integrity to defy corruption without flinching and without fear.
But Mgr Scicluna cannot fight this war alone. And to do so, he needs to understand this historical process and have the courage to find its cure, which is simply the restoration of clerical dignity.
The time for fear is past.