Rising of the priests

By Ivan Fenech
Times of Malta
August 26, 2014

http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140826/opinion/Rising-of-the-priests.533215

Priesthood is a vocation not a career.

Our latter-day generation of liberals must have been rubbing their hands in glee all last week as an apparent internal revolt against the leadership of the Maltese Church broke out. It is only apparent because no one really knows what is going on inside the Curia. Let’s hope we don’t have another Don Gaetano Mannarino in the making. His uprising didn’t come to a happy end.

In any case, Archbishop Paul Cremona made his position very clear last week: “I hold this position in obedience [to the Pope’s wishes] and will only leave in obedience… The wish, the idea is not mine, but it is the Pope’s.”

Those can only be the words of a man who must have dedicated his life to service and obedience and not to a career. Priesthood is a vocation, not a career. The rules that apply to most other institutions do not apply to the Catholic Church. It is wrong to think otherwise.

As all this was going on, two incidents happened last week: a priest in Gozo was arraigned over child abuse charges and Malta’s first baby was born through in vitro fertilisation using frozen eggs. The two totally unrelated events point to the incredibly challenging situation the Church in Malta finds itself in.

The court case weakens the Church’s credibility in society’s eyes while the IVF birth and the ethical issues involved underline how much that same society needs the Church today.

The receding influence of the Church upon society is not unique to Malta. Compared to other societies in mainland Europe, it’s not doing so badly. That does not mean the Church has been doing a good job of the influential position it supposedly holds. Given the Sunday Mass attendances, the Church schools, the religious education in State schools and the huge amount of organisations affiliated with the Church, it is no credit to the Church to watch the dramatic crumbling of values and ethics in this country.

Before joining the European Union, zealous Catholics thought Malta would be a beacon of Christian values in Europe. Nothing of the sort happened. It all collapsed like a house of cards. The religious formation of this predominantly Catholic population turned up to be very infantile. As one local theologian once put it: we instruct children until their confirmation, we abandon them through their most formative years and then try to bridge the gap through pre-marriage Cana courses.

The blame for the country’s severe lack in values and civic responsibility lies not with the Church alone. Our education system has let us down terribly too. Much of the problems of this country can be attributed to education; environment degradation, racism, acquiescence to the government’s shameless patronage system, the disregard of the law and the lack of any sense of civic responsibility, all point to a failure in our education system. The Church only shares the blame for that.

The local Catholic Church has been in freefall since that 1960s debacle – the imposition of mortal sin on Labour voters. It didn’t recover in any way during the long tenure of Archbishop Joseph Mercieca; it just struggled through.

In a letter, Dom Mintoff had described the former archbishop as a “man with a weak and indecisive character, desirous more of pleasing others than guiding with firmness”.

Eddie Fenech Adami in his biography says the former archbishop “often gave the impression that either he already knew what one was telling him, when in fact he did not, or that he was not quite understanding the conversation”.

He conceded, however, that the man was shrewd.

The Curia may have survived the last decades on an archbishop’s shrewdness but the Church is not the Curia.

It is anything but. The Church is made up of imperfect individuals who make up its rank and file. They have their failings, sometimes too many to bear, and, yet, the Church has survived 2,000 years because it is like no other institution. Its sins were big but it always overcame, reinvented itself and is growing still.

As one Vatican Council II document put it: “It does not escape the Church how great a distance lies between the message she offers and the human failings of those to whom the Gospel is entrusted.”

It is a most imperfect Church but its achievements should give any atheist much food for thought. Christianity is the best thing that ever happened to Europe and we benefit from it to this day. It is Europe’s conscience.

Leading German theologian Karl Rahner had foreseen the secular Europe we have today and to which Malta wholeheartedly belongs. He said Christian communities would be like oases in a non-Christian world. They should not withdraw in a shell but be thoroughly missionary. Christians, in accepting their minority status, would be able to engage and accomplish so much more “naturally and freely”, he wrote.

Our local Church appears to have withdrawn in a shell ever since the divorce referendum that relegated it to a minority, just like Rahner had foretold. Its position, or lack thereof, on the issue of gay marriage and, worse, on gay adoption was a huge let-down to the country. Another imperfection to notch to the long list of an imperfect society that is the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church has its tentacles everywhere in this country and much of what it does is good. It is manned by people who have taken holy vows, people who have given up their lives to service, just like the archbishop. They are fundamentally good people; they are always there to serve others. The rank and file of the Church is a living miracle.

I have a missionary uncle in Kenya, a man I rarely see, but each time I meet him, I am amazed by his humility: a true man of God. While we fret here over power cuts, he’s worried someone will crash into his church on a Sunday morning and machinegun the congregation. It has happened. That is what makes the archbishop’s words on the plight of Christians in Iraq so poignant.

The true Catholic Church is a suffering Church, it is not the Curia, and it is certainly not about power.

Victor Axiak, the former head of the Church Environment Commission, wrote in this paper to warn against the local Church resuming its “local mission” of religio et patria and allowing itself to be pulled one way or another to the tune of some political group. I found his words repulsive.

Everything that happens in this country is political. If the Church is to speak, it shall have to be political if what it says is to be relevant at all. Axiak is trying to instil that same fear that has pushed the local Church to the point of irrelevance: the trauma of the 1960s.

Yes, the Church tried to raise its head on the issue of divorce and failed. So what? It does not mean it was wrong. It would have failed too had it openly opposed gay marriage but it still should have spoken out vociferously against a Bill that has undermined one of the very pillars of our society: marriage.

We have an amoral government, a popular one to boot, for it reflects the immorality of a society that elected it in droves. The Nationalist Party is in the doldrums, so is the Church. That does not make them allies, there’s no religio et patria here, that’s only Labour hogwash that Axiak wants to dish out.

The biggest beneficiary of society’s fallen values is the Labour government that has institutionalised selfishness through its populist policies.

If priests are truly getting restless, they must have reason to.

The Catholic Church in Malta is a force for good and all evidence points to the fact that it may already be a minority. There is still hope because man, in his innate being and for all his failings (just like the Church), can be good.

Last week, a 56-year-old Gozo Channel employee found a bag in a ferry’s cafeteria containing more than €2,000 and a brand new iPad. He made sure it was returned to its rightful owner.

The kind gentleman’s daughter had this to say about her father: “Returning objects to the owner is the obvious thing to do. That is how we were brought up.”

In typical Gospel metaphor, it can be said that the land in Malta is still very fertile. There are good people out there and they just need some encouragement, maybe even a priests’ revolt.

If the Catholic Church in Malta accepts itself as a minority, its best years lie ahead.