For many Maltese people, possibly the majority, Catholicism is no longer part of the Maltese identity in practice, anthropologist Ranier Fsadni told The Malta Independent on Sunday.
Following the news that the Archbishop’s Seminary has no new recruits for the first time since the 1980s, The Malta Independent reached out to Fsadni, who is an assistant lecturer at the Department of Anthropological Sciences at the University of Malta, to ask what the decline of the interest in religion could mean for our society and its future.
In mid-February of this year, this newsroom spoke about lack of vocations with the provincial prior of the Carmelite Order, Fr Charles Mallia, and he attributed this issue, at least in part, to Malta’s low birth rate. He called this a “very significant problem” and had remarked that due to Malta’s low birth rate, “we don’t even have enough workers”.
However, Fsadni (above) believes that “it is more likely that the low birth rate is a symptom of Catholicism’s decline, although it is not the only factor”. When asked to elaborate, the anthropologist explained that “it is evident that many Catholics do not consider the papal teaching of ‘openness to life’ to be authoritative”.
He made reference to the Eurostat statistics and said that the lowest birth rates in the EU are found in traditionally Catholic countries: Malta, Spain and Italy. According to Eurostat’s updated findings (2022), Malta’s EU-low fertility rate had fallen to just 1.08 live births per woman – down from 1.13 live births per woman compared to the previous year.
Fsadni also acknowledged that another key factor behind these low fertility rates is the fact that “women’s careers are more penalised by motherhood”.
“A lower birth-rate is more likely a symptom of decline of Catholic authority, rather than the other way around,” he said.
In this newsroom’s past interview with Fr Mallia, the Carmelites’ provincial prior entertained Archbishop Charles Scicluna’s proposal that the Church should retract its rule that has made its priests remain celibate as a lifelong sacrifice towards their devotion.
More recently, Gozo Bishop Anton Teuma told The Malta Independent on Sunday that he feels that “if the Church loses celibacy, it would be losing a lot”.
Gozo Bishop Teuma had acknowledged the existence of married priests locally, specifically Anglican married priests who later converted to Roman Catholicism, though did not support the idea of revoking the celibacy vow as he believes it would be difficult for them to live a life as a priest. He described a celibate life to be a beautiful calling, but “an ongoing challenge, including moments of frailty”.
“If a priest places the love towards God and his flock in second or third place, with the love of a woman first, even though this is beautiful, I feel that Catholic priesthood would lose a lot,” Teuma had said.
Fsadni explained that the celibacy rule was introduced in the 11th century for administrative reasons and that many theologians are in favour of removing it a millennium later.
Fsadni does not see the removal of celibacy as a complete solution to the vocations’ crisis, but only as something that “might provide some relief”. Arguing that other Christian denominations that have married pastors, such as Lutherans, are also facing a vocations’ crisis, the anthropologist said that this crisis “seems more tied to a crisis in the very idea of priesthood”, which he said, “needs renewal”. He made reference to the late Fr Peter Serracino Inglott’s beliefs that “priesthood should be vested in married couples”, and “not in individuals (married or unmarried, men or women)”.
A 2022 study showed that while most Maltese (83%) are self-identified Catholics, Sunday mass attendance sits at just 36%. According to Fsadni, this culture is the result of many factors. He said that practising Catholicism is more than simply participating in the liturgy – it also includes the practice of virtues like courage, justice, good sense and moderation.
“When you consider how many self-styled Maltese Catholics, in the past, failed to cultivate those virtues, the decline in practice is less dramatic than it might first seem,” he said.
He added that for an increasing number of people, Sunday Mass attendance is “no doubt” in decline because “the mass is boring, rather than compelling, beautiful or true, while the social taboo on non-attendance has gone”. In this regard, Fsadni mentioned the “anti-ritual bias” in contemporary modern culture that views collective ritual worship to be unnecessary to garner an authentic religious belief/experience, he said.
“Religion is considered to be a private matter and its public expression is deemed superfluous if not also superficial,” Fsadni stated.
While discussing the waning Sunday Mass attendance, the University of Malta lecturer said that “just because Sunday Mass attendance is declining doesn’t mean that religion is declining in Malta”. He said that many of the immigrants in the Maltese islands are religious and conduct their own lively services – Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or other. He also added that one should not assume that non-attendance of Sunday Mass means irreligiosity, even for all those people who were born and raised Catholic locally.
On the subject of Malta’s high immigration rates, Fsadni said that the “radical change” being observed in our country’s population demographics is because “the birth rate is below replacement level”. He said that since many of our institutions, such as our democracy and welfare state, “depend on a shared culture of how consensus is reached, legitimacy is recognised and solidarity is experienced, we need to do some hard thinking about how to instil a shared public culture”.
From an anthropological perspective, he explained that Catholicism could boost its relevance on the Maltese islands not through anything drastically new, but through the same means it spread in the first place. He said that according to the Gospel, “people marvelled at the teachings of Jesus not because he was saying anything new but because he made them feel they were seeing the world, as it is, for the first time”.
“A religion spreads and regenerates itself by becoming, in worship, solidarity and self-understanding, a new power in a stale world,” Fsadni reflected.
If the Church’s dwindling relevance fails to be curbed, then local churches may face the risk of being deconsecrated, according to Fsadni. However, depending on the Maltese Church’s creativity, this may not be the only scenario churches face if the Church can find an alternative to privatisation, he said.
“In Europe, many churches have been deconsecrated and turned into bookshops, cafes, restaurants, offices and clubs. That could certainly happen here.”
Fsadni concluded that history, and religious history included, “is full of twists and surprises” and that “things do not always turn out the way we expect”.