It is tempting to see some of the recent public interventions by the bishops as, essentially, an assertion of clericalism as old as written Maltese history. How else to view Mgr Paul Cremona's statements on the family and values? And Mgr Mario Grech on "empty vessels"? Many have indeed resented those interventions for that very reason.

I myself do not. I think I can see better what the bishops think they are doing when I remember the clerical generation that they belong to.

This is the generation that felt its first pangs of priesthood in the 1960s and 1970s. With something like half of Malta's priests today being over 60 years old, it is the generation that straddles both sides of that boundary. Its attitudes pervade the Maltese clergy today.

For all the real and important differences that distinguish individual priests and specific religious orders, some generalisations can be made. There is such a thing as a "sociological generation" - people deeply marked by a shared historical experience that continues to guide their lives. Just as some Maltese define themselves by their experience of the 1960s (if Labourites), or the 1980s (if Nationalists), Roman Catholic priests define themselves in important part by which side of Vatican Council II they found themselves on when it happened.

In Malta, seminarians were still playing football together in their cassocks when the Council began. By the time its decisions came to be implemented, many of them were thinking of themselves as a vanguard for the new theological emphasis on communion and renewal of liturgy and society.

Our public memory of the late 1960s and early 1970s Church tends to be skewed by images of the older generation of parish priests and other clerics involved in the conflict with Labour. It is a memory in which the clergy is invariably depicted as anti-modern. It edits out discordant memories of a younger clergy, many of whom saw themselves as out to modernise not just their Church but also society. Or, as they might put it, "to challenge it".

In a new parish like Sta Luċija, served by young priests and one former missionary, cultural reform was initiated from the top. It was not just the inevitable folk Mass with guitars and melodies adapted from popular songs. The first man to wear jeans for Mass was a celebrant priest - the denim hems unashamed to show themselves beneath the alb, as the entire congregation noted and later privately discussed. A short while later, the first women stopped wearing the lace head-veil: they were the altar flower-arrangers.

One should not overdo the degree to which religious change was led by the priests or the degree to which it was coherent. What is important is not to underestimate the extent to which young priests felt that they were modern, and modernising, not despite being clerics but, actually, because of it.

Particularly in the religious orders, where formation usually included a period studying abroad, clerical education served not just to deepen the faith received from one's family, but also to cast a critical, modernist eye on it. Directly or at second-hand, young men imbibed Herbert Marcuse's then-fashionable critique of soul-less industrial civilisation - as well as Freudian, Marxist and other critiques of traditional religion and society (while excluding their own religiosity from such criticism).

The traces of this background may be seen in some of the most controversial interventions of the current Church hierarchy.

Clerical suspicion of popular religion is as old as Christianity itself and it may seem eccentric to suggest Mgr Anton Gouder has a modernist impulse. However, his drive for the "restoration" of feasts bears the traces of the anti-ritual bias - the inclination to see effervescent ritual as superstitious - of the "sociology of modernisation", whose intellectual heyday was the 1960s.

Mgr Grech's talk about "existential voids" identifies which dated period his intellectual capital belongs to as readily as John Lennon's round spectacles identified his.

As for Mgr Cremona, his discussion of family in terms of "values", with three Muslims by his side, shows the degree to which he is ready to think of "values" as separable from traditional Maltese social practice, culture and national identity. The message may have been socially conservative but even conservatism is modern when it speaks under the assumption that it coexists with other voices and cannot speak for the whole nation.

The source of the tension between the bishops and an increasingly more significant segment of society is not that the bishops are anti-modern. It is rather that, like so many of us, they are shackled by the modernity of their youth.

That modernity prepared them to want and work for "secularisation" (the institutional separation of Church and state). It taught them to gird their loins against "secularism" (ideological hostility to public proclamation and dissent by the Church). What it did not prepare them for was "secularity", the culture of secularisation, which profoundly affects even how religious belief is held.

Such a predicament is not without its contradictions. Not the least of them is this: A great fervour emerged out of Vatican Council II for "inculturation", the implantation of the faith in popular culture. But today, the generation of priests so deeply inspired by that enterprise finds itself engaged in "exculturation" - preaching a faith bereft of, and sometimes hostile to, popular culture.

ranierfsadni@europe.com