Earlier this week the Curia announced that a Mass attendance census will be carried out this month.

The fact that no date has been mentioned as to when the census will be held has already caused the raising of a few eyebrows. There are only two weekends left in November, so there was no real reason not to announce the date. If it isn’t held this weekend, it will be the week after.

Why did the Curia choose to not to announce the date of the census? Of course, if the public does not know when the census will be held, there is a greater chance that the results will be more credible.

If this was the case, then the Curia should not have announced that it will be holding a census anyway.

But then, exercises such as a census must be announced in advance, and this raises another question. It has become a regular practice that the Curia’s census is carried out at the same time as the census by the National Statistics Office. This is done intentionally, because the Curia needs the NSO figures to be able to obtain a more comprehensive and correct result in its own census.

The NSO census was announced several months ago and it has been known for quite some time that this will be held in late November and early December.

So one wonders why the Curia left it so late to announce its own census. It would have been better to announce its intentions at the same time that the NSO launched its census campaign. If the Curia did not want to give the exact date of its census, it could then have said that it

would be held some time between the date of the announcement and the end of the year.

Giving an option of two weekends is… well, not really an option. The Curia wanted a random Sunday for a census, but two weekends is not really going to provide them with a random result. There is a possibility that more people will be going to Mass over these two weekends than normally do during the year, or the possibility that fewer people will be going because of the census.

Past Church censuses have shown a steep decline in the percentage of people who attend Mass every Sunday, and the results of the forthcoming census are bound to confirm this decline.

In 1967, 83 per cent of the population attended Mass. The number fell to 72 per cent in 1982 and fell further, to 63.4 per cent, the last time a census was held – in 1995. The question is: do the majority of the Maltese population still go to Mass on Sunday?

It would be perhaps more interesting to know why people do not go to Mass, but such reasons will not be made known in this census. It would therefore have been a better idea for the Church to have asked this kind of question.

The census will only reveal the number of people who attend Mass. Maybe the Church should have considered sending a questionnaire to all households in Malta asking the relevant questions about Mass attendance and reasons for non-attendance.

In this way, it would obtain a better picture of the situation as it is today. Knowing why people do not go to Mass could help the Church to plan ahead and possibly introduce changes that will encourage more Catholics to practise their

religion.

Of course, going to Sunday Mass does not

necessarily mean that one is a practising Catholic in the true sense of the word. There are many

people who go to Mass every Sunday and yet are not what you would call true Christians and, on the other hand, there are many others who do not go to Sunday Mass but who live a Christian life in the real sense of the word.