Well, thank God for DNA-testing, because now it’s even saving people from themselves. When John Mark Karr “confessed” to killing the child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsay, who was found sexually assaulted and bludgeoned in the basement of her home 10 years ago, his ex-wife said that he couldn’t have done it, because he was with her and their children that Christmas, hundreds of miles away. Yet the world had him down as a pervert (“He did it!” “He must have done it!”), because of his staring, vacant eyes in a pallid face, his weirdo demeanour, and – yes, I heard this one, too – his polo shirt neatly tucked into his trousers and belted high up on his body like a creep. In front of the television cameras, he looked like something that spent most of its time under a stone looking at pictures of naked little girls because he was too inadequate for the grown-up variety.

Then, when he was dragged off to the USA and his DNA compared to samples taken from the child’s body, the result was that it couldn’t have been him, after all. It was someone else altogether, and the problem is, they don’t know who. How much evolution there has been in the concept of due process in justice. Thirty years ago, the investigators would have been delighted to have somebody come forward and confess, because that meant they could close the file on the case and notch up another success. A confession meant there would be no long and arduous trial with a procession of witnesses and lengthy evidence put forward, to be challenged by the lawyer for the accused – just a quick sentencing and a huge sigh of relief. Things have become a whole lot more sophisticated – though not in Malta – and because high-profile trials are scrutinised by everyone who watches television and reads the newspapers, the pressure has become ever greater to avoid a miscarriage of justice – even if that miscarriage of justice is desired by the person putting himself forward as the perpetrator.

Then, of course, I thought about what a long way we have to go still in Malta. Despite the presence of DNA-testing laboratories right here on the island, our legal system doesn’t acknowledge the process. DNA-testing is never part of criminal trials, even when there is a strong case for it. DNA samples are not routinely taken when they could be – the most obvious cases being with rape and murder – and DNA evidence is brushed aside even on the rare occasions when it is put forward in civil suits, most famously in a case that ended up in the European Court.

The good thing about DNA-testing is that it is strong, clear scientific evidence that cannot be challenged, except where the DNA sample may be contaminated. It cuts down on the need to have other kinds of incontrovertible proof, like armies of eyewitnesses, though those will remain important. Many times, though, there are no eyewitnesses. Nobody saw JonBenet Ramsay being killed except the person who killed her – obviously – unless there was more than one person involved, and in any case, that person would be a co-accused. The DNA of her attacker was taken from saliva found in her underwear – yes, how disgusting. So in the unlikely case that the investigators do turn up a suspect, the only way to prove that it was him (or less likely, her) is through a DNA match. Thank God for DNA testing. The sooner Malta joins this real world, the better.

* * *

The soul-searching and agonising over the level of attendance at Sunday Mass has begun in earnest. Committees are being set up to discover how the Mass can be made more interesting and attractive. Popular priests are giving their opinion to the newspapers. The general public is being polled. And all the usual remarks are being trotted out: the Mass is boring; priests are out of touch with our lives; sermons are tedious and their content is irrelevant; the Church doesn’t accept separated people so what does it expect? And so on, and so on, ad nauseam.

Yet those are all superficial excuses, and the committees and commissions who take them seriously are just wasting their time. All you need to do is to think about it honestly, without decorating your feelings or blaming the Church for being boring and out of touch. The real reason you don’t go to Mass anymore (if you’re one of the nearly 50 per cent of the population who doesn’t) is two-fold: you don’t need to go to church to meet people and to feel socially integrated, and you don’t feel that you have to go because something bad might happen to you if you don’t. Where Mass is popular, in the Neo-Catucumenical or Charismatic Renewal movements, for example, or in Evangelical Christianity, it is a pivotal point of the group’s social life, and the social dimension – if you think about it hard – is almost more important than the religious dimension.

Mass was popular when people depended on it for social reasons. Now that people have diverse social lives, Mass is no longer so important. In the past, even the recent past, people flocked to Mass because it was the only social occasion of the week, month or even year. They would get dressed up in their good clothes, and spent ages chatting on the zuntier afterwards.

For the boys and girls, who didn’t have the equivalent of bars and Paceville, it was the only chance they got to eye up the local talent and to make eyes at each other. In most towns and villages there would be one particular Mass to which all the young people would go en masse, not because they really loved going to Mass (come on, let’s face it – we all hated the grinding bind) but because they wanted the rare chance to flirt and mingle. When I was a kid and had no say in whether to go to Mass or not, I would trot up the hill to the 11 o’clock rite on Sunday morning, and there, standing crowded together at the back near the door, even though there was plenty of room on the pews, would be (to my kiddie eyes) all the glamorous people in their late teens, wearing their super-cool 1970s outfits, their bell-bottom Wranglers, platform shoes, cheesecloth tops and blue eyeshadow, talking all the way through the rite and then rushing out during Holy Communion. I would have loved to whiz out too, but sadly, it wasn’t an option for 10-year-olds.

When I got to their age, in the early 1980s, the fashionable Mass was the 7.30 slot on Saturday evenings at St Patrick’s, where we would go straight from the beach in summer or straight out to a bar afterwards in winter. The Mass was just a meeting-point – and yes, we all stood at the back of the church, or rather, not even inside the church but behind the main door on the steps all the way down to the hall, gossiping and flirting and admiring each other’s horrible, 1980s, Labour-ban-on-importation clothes. And of course, we were all ticking away the minutes before we could rush off during Holy Communion, even when the priest got cross and said that Holy Communion did not signal permission to leave.

Mass was fully integrated into our social life for two reasons: we were barely out of childhood and still carrying on with childhood habits, and there weren’t many places you could go in those days to meet lots of other people your age, or to catch sight of the ones you fancied. Sunday Mass had nothing whatsoever to do with our belief system or our moral values: even the heroin-addicted and the serial sleepers-around were there with the rest. It was a social occasion, and not a religious one, full stop.

The other reason that kept many people going to Sunday Mass even when it meant nothing to them was the superstitious fear that, like Chicken Licken, the sky might fall on their head if they decided to break the habit they hated, and which disrupted their Sunday morning or their Saturday evening. Odd? Not really – those of us beyond a certain age were brought up with huge significance placed on the importance of Sunday Mass. It was indelibly woven into the Sunday routine. Not going felt horribly daring, and like all horribly daring acts, there was the fear of consequence. But of course, there is no consequence to not going to Sunday Mass. It’s just that the great importance placed on it in the years between birth and early adulthood made us believe, against our better judgement, that there would be. Once people discover that God is not going to smite them for freeing up their Sunday mornings from a bothersome obligation, then there’s no going back.

However exciting or “relevant” Sunday Mass becomes, most of us just won’t go back. We’ve kicked the habit.