At a moment in time of world history when humankind is just a few years away from landing on another planet to where future generations may have the opportunity to go and settle in new communities, a small crowd of Gozitan dinosaurs are up in arms just because their new bishop, perhaps the first forward-looking ever such spiritual leader to grace our sister-island, has appointed a new archpriest.

Incredible as it may all sound to foreign readers of this Sunday newspaper, the normal tempo of life in Rabat, the capital of Gozo, has ground to a virtual halt while approximately half its parishioners throw a parochial tantrum over the fact that the previous archpriest, there for no less than 12 long years, has been replaced by a new appointee.

Now I know it is very difficult to halt the normal tempo of a Gozitan town or village, because it hardly exists. Can something that does not exist actually be stopped or suspended, slowed down, downgraded or reduced? Yet, for the past couple of weeks we have had most of the Maltese media eagerly following very closely the “dramatic” events that have taken place since the appointment of the new archpriest without, lo and behold, any consultation with this particularly fastidious section of the Rabat (also known as Victoria) populace beforehand.

This pathetic spectacle of mediaeval thinking has culminated in the declaration of a not-so-Christian boycott of the new spiritual leader of the parish, as if life and death depended on whether the members of a particular band club or a particular feast took part or not. Paradoxically, it should unintentionally help towards doing away once and for all with this idea of perpetrating an old and infantile rivalry in a small town that has far too many bigger problems than a mere change of archpriest.

The parish priest or archpriest in this day and age is, and should, no longer be the focal point of civil society, even within such time-honoured, time-forgotten communities as that of Rabat and other villages in Gozo. He remains, of course, a very important figure, someone the villagers can look up to and seek guidance from when confronted, as they perhaps sometimes are, with a spiritual dilemma. But life in general on these Islands, and the rest of the civilised world, no longer orbits around the priestly figurehead appointed by the bishop or archbishop.

Most Maltese, though I dare not speak for the Gozitans, are today able to distinguish between civil authorities and their ecclesiastical counterparts. The separation of state from church, such a hot and divisive issue way back in the 1960s, has long been a much-welcome reality in our daily lives. Village and town societies are able to strike a working relationship with both. While the appointed parish priest rules the roost in matters of the soul, obviously always in relation to the number of practising Catholics in the community, the democratically elected mayor runs the place in all other aspects, for each and every citizen of that same community.

What is this resistance to change? Why resort to tactics and methods that belong to the dark ages when even looking into a girl’s eyes could land you on a burning haystack? It is this innate mentality that has forced so many young Gozitan men and women to leave their towns and villages for an existence on the Maltese mainland or in places like Australia and Canada. They simply could not stomach the dinosaurs amongst them any longer.

But these dinosaurs persist with their little crusades and their stupid social boycotts that, in the end, only generate more hatred and create silly situations that sadly lead to more useless parochialism.

At a time when Malta has just been accorded the European compliment of being declared among the leaders in IT adoption, we are ironically reduced to watching this ugly manifestation by a small crowd of angry villagers taking on their bishop over the appointment of a new archpriest. When they should be barracking their spiritual leaders over the urgent need of their support for the inevitable future introduction of divorce, they are instead letting off their humdrum steam on a non-issue that would certainly make them the laughing stock of the vast majority of European communities anywhere in the Union.

In all fairness, one needs to acknowledge the fact that another at least as big section of the Rabat community is not participating in this mediaeval farce. Sadly, though, this is not for the right reasons. You see, they belong to another band club and another feast and no one in his right mind – IS any one in his right mind out there? – would expect them to follow their rivals’ lead. On the contrary, they openly seek to be different and to be seen being so, but caught in the same ancient claptrap they would probably have acted pretty much the same.

The Church in Malta and Gozo is visibly trying to release itself from the cobwebs that have held it, like super-glue, to the tentacles of the parochial dinosaurs. In Malta, such mentalities have slowly but surely lost ground to the new idea of a Church genuinely interested in the spiritual well-being of those who want to be involved in the process, but in Gozo, at least from what we’ve witnessed so far in this current Rabat debacle, things seem to have been frozen somewhere between the first Ice Age and the Great Siege of Malta of 1565.

What has happened since has simply drifted past the simple minds of the dinosaurs, after all an extinct species represented by the fossils that have just had their DNA re-defined in Rabat, Gozo. Could they be the famous missing link?