The two Maltese Catholic Bishops issued their routine Santa Maria pastoral letter. It was an event with little intrinsic news value. And the value hardly increases if one turns to its contents.

There is nothing in it which they have not said a million times before. It is drab, institutional and devoid of inspiration and real engagement with the issues it sets out to address. It reads like a cut and paste job from some vast computer base nestled in the deep recesses of the Curia. It came and went as Maltese public opinion waters continued to move according to the winds of change. The bishops' words hardly caused a ripple.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that these two top men of God have given their office all they have got and they have nothing left to give and to say. As the flock scatters to pastures new, the words of these two shepherds are lost in the wind. And they do not seem to know what to do next, except to sit on a rock and wait for another opportunity to utter more words that will fall on equally deaf ears.

On a personal level, I say this with a measure of sadness. I do not really know the Bishop of Gozo but I do know the Archbishop of Malta, Mgr Guzeppi Mercieca, also a Gozitan, a bit better.

I always found Mgr Mercieca to be well-meaning, sharp, correct and magnanimous even in the face of viciously unfair public criticism. He always gives you a sense that he genuinely believes in what he says, even when you disagree with him. Like everyone else, he has his faults, but these never overshadow his virtues.

The two bishops themselves and their inability to communicate with conviction and success with today’s Malta are not the real problems. What is happening is somewhat deeper than two bishops finding themselves, literally, at a loss for words. The issue concerns the place of the Catholic Church and its values in the wider picture.

In the past, the Catholic Church in Malta was not just the inspiration of this society’s cultural beliefs. It was these beliefs. Thinking about such matters outside the church was a no go area as it was the sole arbiter of morals, ethics, even behavioural attitudes. As one of Malta’s top poets once told me, if you leave the Church you fall in the Mediterranean Sea. As a result, the formation of the Maltese identity was intrinsically tied up and regulated by church dogma.

It is not accidental that in the 1960s Dom Mintoff caused such a deep shock in the national soul. For his crusade amounted to this: the creation of another source of values, alternative to those of the Catholic Church. Behind the political veneer and Mintoff’s attempt to mimic the rituals and very language and semiotics of the church, the struggle was in essence a clash of world-views. It was a clash that was played out through revolutions and wars in many European countries over a century or two earlier. Mintoff’s crusade was an attempt to introduce some sort of secularisation in Malta.

Somehow, Mintoff and the church survived the 1960s and found an oblique modus vivendi in the subsequent years, as Mintoff himself became Malta. Occasionally, tension between the two would flare up, fuelled by the Socialist firebrand’s fire and brimstone rhetoric and culminating in the clash over the church school issue in the 1980s.

The church’s problems today are far deeper than those caused by Mintoff. In the latter, the Maltese Church found a formidable and indefatigable opponent. But at least he was identifiable and, to some extent, quantifiable. The church could devise a strategy to contain him, as Mgr Mercieca did in the late 1970s and early 1980s with his impeccably timed unassailable silences.

Today, the church does not have an opponent. Yet it is facing its biggest crisis yet. Its former monopoly on moral and ethical issues is not being challenged by a maverick like Mintoff, a political party or a movement. It is being ignored to an increasingly larger extent. The Catholic Church biggest enemy today is indifference. History has caught up with it and there isn’t much that can be done about it. The two well-meaning bishops are not so much the cause of a problem as its symptoms.

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