Fifty-two years ago, on a hot day on 11th October, still a young MUSEUM teenager, my face was glued to the windowpane of Farrugia 'tar-radjijiet' showroom in High Street Hamrun for a full four hours, as we did not have a TV then, to follow the inauguration of Vatican Council II, that long procession of gloriously mitred and coped bishops from all over the world, taking their places in the aisle of St Peter's turned into a Parliament.
My friends laughed at me then. A year later, when Xavier Rynne took the world by storm with his first 'Inside the Vatican Council', I learnt about the discussions, the debates, the controversies, the drama of the first session. That was when the dream was born, the dream of a Church no longer fighting the world or running away from the world but updating itself, reforming itself, becoming the Church in the world as against a Church against the world.
Archbishop Cremona, who is more or less my age, is another child of the dream.
As the Church today beatifies the man who, after Pope John, really ran the Council and, as the Church today sees the end of the synod of bishops where, by many accounts (ignore the lurid reports on the international press and follow the real debate), the Vat II dream is still alive, out there.
Not here, however. It was never here. Ever since I can remember, it has always been a question here of who will become the new archbishop. So it was when Archbishop Gonzi had outlived his time and they wanted him out (especially when he was perceived to have come under the influence of Dom Mintoff and Dr Paul Farrugia). Earlier than that, when the Vatican appointed diplomat Bishop Gerada who had engineered the 'Easter Peace' with Mintoff, the accent on reforming the Church in the conciliar way was mysteriously transformed into the administrative reform of the Church, which practically centralized everything and, wonder of wonders, Bishop Gerada was turned into an ogre who was against the reform, and wonder of wonders, Archbishop Gonzi at 80 became the reformist.
It was all a game of mirrors with the ultimate prize being the succession of Archbishop Gonzi. In fact, Gerada was eased out on the 'persuasion' of the most vociferous voices in the Church and sent elsewhere (to El Salvador where he first promoted and later disowned and ostracized Archbishop Romero who was killed by government snipers). And Gonzi gained a new lease of life.
Those were the years of the heaviest internecine battles inside the Church for Gonzi's succession. In the end, the Vatican got tired of the incessant Snakes and Ladders game played here and they plucked what they considered as the safest pair of hands they could find, a humble priest from Gozo working in the Vatican basement, Archbishop Mercieca.
And finally, when the clergy of Malta rose in rebellion when Archbishop Gonzi dementedly issued a statement asking the new Labour government to pardon the 'hotheads' who had laid waste and burned down many PN clubs and the parish priests refused point blank to read the statement in the churches, Gonzi understood his time was up and he resigned.
Archbishop Mercieca was as wily as they come (he is from Gozo) and during his long episcopate he kept the leaders at arms' length.
Meantime, I had left so I was out of the loop. But from sources I have spoken to, when the time came for Archbishop Mercieca to resign, the same internecine battles took place, and this time the Curia party was beaten if not by the first choice, a Dominican as well, who is now a bishop in Albania, by the second choice, another Dominican, Paul Cremona.
Everyone remembers the surge of optimism and enthusiasm which greeted his appointment, and later the delusion that grew like a weed around and inside the Church.
So now we're back again at the bishop-tote, the only game in town (as long as one thinks of the Church as being a town). The Church in Malta has always been anti-cyclic: at the time of the Vatican Council and its 'apertura', the Church in Malta was interdicting Mintoff and fighting an election with the threat of eternal damnation.
Today, when the synod is trying to find a new way to relate to the problems of the families in the world and maybe, just maybe, opening up to the lives of divorced persons and maybe too to the lives of homosexuals and lesbians, the Church in Malta is once again discussing the personality of Fr X against that of Fr Y.
I find it incredible that the grand lines of the discussion in the Church and at the synod seem to have no relevance to the people in the parishes, who, as this summer's battles in Mgarr showed, and reportedly Zabbar, privilege the festa parties over everything else.
Faced with a sudden and as yet unexplained upsurge in criticism, Mgr Cremona's feeble response was to announce married deacons when this has been on the books of the universal church since Vatican II and when the discussion, in the universal Church has since moved on. It was a decision which had not been prepared before, was not the result of consultation and feedback, and, now with the archbishop gone, what's to become of it?
At a deeper level, what has become of the hopes and enthusiasms engendered by Vat II? Ratzinger himself, one of the leaders of the reform party, was deeply shocked by the exaggerations of post-Vat II and became the leader of the conservatives. Then even he ran into a brick wall and he moved out.
Meanwhile, the people out there try to live their lives as best as they can, mostly leaderless and rudderless. Nothing is clear-cut anymore. We in Malta have at last found a way of moving on, and divorce is now at last on the statute books. And gays have a legal standing at last, thanks to Labour. The social world has moved on and out of the Church.
The Curia - others - reformists battle misses out on the main and real issue. Whoever gets the top job will find it is no walk in the park. In my mind I have no doubt the reactionaries will win, eventually, as the main body of the Church is like that. The Church in Malta badly needs a prophet, not an administrator. Mgr Cremona was not just a child of Vat II but also a prophet. He has given up as Ratzinger did, but that does not mean he did not try his best. When everything is revealed, people will just be amazed by the pressure he had to cope with.
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