Last Sunday, as Coptic Christians in Egypt were picking up the shattered remains of family members from the floors of their bombed churches, in Malta costumes were being unfolded in preparation for the traditional Holy Week pageants. They both belong to the same Christian faith, living just a sea apart, but do not share the same fate.

Affluence on this island, and secularism, have led to religious indifference. It does not mean Christianity in Malta is dead. Inversely. The feast of Our Lady of Sorrows is possibly the most powerful manifestation of faith held in many localities each year. They are processions shorn of any triviality, pageantry and commercialism. They are as real as they come but unfortunately a rare sight.

Writing in this newspaper, Fr Geoffrey Attard said he was not impressed by Good Friday pageantry. He calls them medieval expressions of faith that are growing into “exhibitions of power, vanity and self-affirmation”. He sees individuals wearing sumptuous costumes and expensive regalia at these religious manifestations as the cause of a silent exodus of hundreds of Catholics who seek refuge in Evangelical communities and Protestant faith groups. They must be people who want to look beyond the costume, in a search for the genuine.

In this age of relativism, people want truth and honesty above all else. They look for it in the Church and, especially, around Holy Week when events like the bombings in Egypt, the terrorism in Sweden and the chemical attacks in Syria become more poignant and their brutality comes across as more cruel and extreme.

In an age of digital over-information, people need truth and certainty but that is never easy find. Holy Week has become an opportunity to stop and think. The solemnity offered today, Maundy Thursday, and tomorrow, Good Friday, the silence of the church bells may create the right atmosphere to sit down and ponder.

But can people still work their way through the folds of modern-day pageantry to find Jesus?

Leading 20th century theologian Karl Rahner described the death of Jesus as a political-religious murder. He avoids the pitfalls of looking at that tremendous event through modern “political theology”. But he asks whether, today, people can live, as Jesus did, in opposition to the maxims of society or whether they are “cowardly conformists, merely reflecting the conventional outlook”.

Easter pageantry and public manifestations, whichever way you may look at them, are always a reflection of faith, even if it is in its most basic, and indulgent, form. A similar phenomenon is witnessed in the traditional village festas with empty church pews but crowded street band marches. They are part of the country’s Mediterranean character and the Church must work with that.

Rather than a hindrance or distraction, Holy Week pageantry can be an opportunity for the Church to reach out to the thousands of enthusiasts who may be proud to show their costume but not so much their faith. Life is not a pageant, although stage-managed events and marketing often make it look that way.

Holy Week is a rare opportunity to stop and shed the pageant costumes of our lives, to be a nonconformist, maybe even a revolutionary, to look for values and, above all, for meaning.

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