Society’s hunger for celebrities or celebrated royalty is satisfied in the most unlikely quarters when no other candidates show up. Malta is remarkably short on the equivalent of Prince Andrew and Kate Middleton, Jude Law or even Jade Goody. And so we now have Paul Cremona, the smiling archbishop whose cheek muscles appear to have remarkable strength. When a person is so jolly, rather than irritatingly jocular, and radiates dynamism, rather than fake energy, he is irresistible. We can’t help but like him. Wreathed in genuine smiles, with the frank and open personality that is magnetic, he has carried the crowds before him.
There is the curiosity factor driven by the pleasure of the new. The previous incumbent had long outstayed his welcome and had been annoying us greatly with his anachronistic pronouncements from the Curia pulpit. Television newsrooms and newspapers, in their efforts at outdoing each other, have accorded the new archbishop celebrity status. The fever in the streets has been somewhat muted by comparison. We have become more urban, more secular, and the very idea of mobbing a priest in a frenzy of religious admiration embarrasses us. We leave the hand-kissing to the old ladies with their rosaries and their votive candles.
Paul Cremona is going to be a refreshing change from Joseph Mercieca, who had become so unsuitable for the reality of present-day Malta. Raised in a Gozitan village at a time when Gozitan villages might as well have been in the remote mountainous interior of contemporaneous Sicily or Greece, he failed to adapt to the style of urban Malta in the dying years of the 20th century and the first years of the 21st. He is a very nice man and a kind-hearted one, but that is not enough for the job. He was like a man plucked out of one period and thrown into another, reacting with shock and bewilderment at what he saw. He seemed to have the rather touching naïve belief that, if people tried hard enough, things could go back to what they were in the Gozo of his 1930s childhood, with the churches packed solid and the parish priest interfering in daily life to keep us all on what the Catholic Church says is the straight and narrow path to heaven, while the spirit of Christianity gets trampled on in the rush to the confessional box.
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Yes, it’s true that Catholic doctrine can’t change and won’t change, as Archbishop Mercieca reminded us in his farewell speech. We shouldn’t even want it to. It’s there, solid and unchanging, like a rock, and reassuring in its refusal
to compromise. We can’t seriously expect the Vatican to suddenly declare that contraception is all right, that sex outside marriage is fine, and that divorce is OK, though a little less obsession with sexual relationships and a little more focus on the importance of kindness and compassion would not go amiss. If for no other reason, the Catholic Church cannot stand down on these dictums because to do so would be to betray the faith and loyalty of the millions who made huge sacrifices, who led damaged or hamstrung lives, purely to abide by the rules and ensure that they got to go to heaven.
How do you tell the woman who had 20 children that contraception is fine, now? How do you tell the people who never had a sexual relationship because they never married that they could have had a little fun after all? How do you pacify the woman who refused all courtship, after her husband left for Australia and abandoned her with two babies when she was 25, that she could have found another man for companionship, support and yes, sex, without earning the promise of hellfire? You can’t. The Catholic Church is damned to stick by its own laws, because it’s damned if it doesn’t. Those who don’t like the rules and don’t agree with them should leave the club, instead of staying in the member’s room and whining for change. To those who bang on about change, I have only one thing to say: look, the door is open; just leave. They don’t want to leave because they like the security of belonging to the club. They want to be Catholics who divorce, use contraception, have sex outside marriage, and lie in bed on Sunday mornings instead of going to boring old Mass. But if Catholicism were to allow these changes, it wouldn’t be Catholicism at all.
It’s perfectly possible to live happily and well without a Catholic identity, as thousands of us know after having been told otherwise throughout our school years. What has impressed me most about the strong media coverage accorded to the new archbishop is the underlying suggestion that he will somehow reach out to people like me, wave his magic wand, and turn us into rosary-reciting, Mass-going Catholics. He won’t. It’s perfectly possible to like somebody as a person without feeling the concomitant need to share his beliefs, live his way of life or convert to his religion – just as it is possible to share a person’s beliefs without liking the person. I like Archbishop Cremona already, but then I also happen to like the Muslim Imam and the Jewish Rabbi, and several Labour politicians. On the other hand, I don’t like several Nationalist politicians.
The perception of people who are “lapsed Catholics” as being lost sheep, who can be returned to the fold by a charismatic bishop, is really quite annoying. Most of us never belonged to the fold at all, which is why we broke down the fence and left at the earliest opportunity. We were only in that fold because we were popped into it 24 hours after birth. Now we look at the other sheep crammed behind the stockade and all we can think of is what a relief it is that we’re not in there with them, and can roam in the large green pasture outside instead, the one called Christianity or nothing at all.
Nothing on earth will persuade us back into that fold. If people do not choose their religion, but are raised in it from birth, indoctrinated all the way, and brainwashed about the evils of other ways of life, a high percentage of them will reject it as soon as they are old enough and free enough to think for themselves. This much should be obvious. It is because some people believe Catholicism to be the one true way of life that they think of all others as lost and waiting to be found, or runaways who need to be recaptured.The thousands of lapsed Catholics in Malta are neither lost sheep nor even lapsed Catholics. We would never have been Catholics in the first place, given a choice. We were raised as Catholics, liked nothing about it, argued all the way, were scathing about the unconvincing answers we were given by our religious educators, and were delighted to shed the lot. A few went on to search for other forms of Christianity or even other religions, because the need for religion is deep and the loss of one leads to the search for another. Others, like me, feel no need of organised religion at all. Rather, we feel the need to avoid it at all costs. We are perfectly happy to believe in God and Christ, and even to pray, without constant reference to a rule-book and the words of priests and pastors.
The only way to ensure that those who are raised as Catholics stay Catholic all their lives is to use force or the law, as the Inquisition did in the past. You can also prevent them from becoming apostates through rigid social control, stricture and censure, as Islam does even today. Neither option is desirable. At 42, and well grounded in my life, I am neither searching for God nor lost in the wilderness, thank you very much. I respect the beliefs of Catholics and their right to believe what they do in much the same way that I respect the beliefs of Muslims and their right to believe what they do. But just as I would never become a Muslim, so I would never become a Catholic. The idea that because I am Maltese then I am Catholic by default is quite absurd. Organised religion is interesting to me only from the standpoint of an observer, and no charismatic bishop is going to change that.
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The hallmark of a good archbishop is not whether he smiles and is jolly, whether he is an attractive person, or whether he goes down to Paceville on his first official day out and speaks to the kids there. That’s good public relations, and it’s reassuring to know that Archbishop Cremona is a good communicator who is more in touch with 21st-century Maltese life than Archbishop Mercieca is.
No: the hallmark of a good archbishop is whether he gives unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s. A good archbishop is one who bears in mind all the time that he is a religious leader and not a secular one, that he should stick to God’s business and let Caesar get on with his. He also needs to avoid doing what his predecessor did and the Prime Minister still does today: taking it for granted that all Maltese are Catholics and that Catholicism is our natural state and our default setting, and addressing the nation in this manner. It is deeply insulting and offensive to all those of us who would like to know that we are not living in the Catholic equivalent of an Islamic State. The archbishop is free to preach to his flock. He is not free to dictate the rules to the rest of us.
Archbishop Mercieca saw it as his duty to do what he could to prevent Malta from introducing divorce legislation, so that Catholics would have no choice but to stick to Catholic rules. He sees all Maltese as Catholic on the basis that they were baptised and raised as such. He doesn’t have the imagination to think outside this box, or to see why this is wrong. Archbishop Cremona must see it as his duty to explain to his flock that, just as the Church has its duties and obligations, so does the State. He must spell it out to them in the kindest possible way that the State cannot allow non-Catholics to impose their rules on Catholics, that the State has the right and the duty to legislate for divorce, for example, while Catholics have the right to make use of this legislation but the duty not to do so. If he doesn’t do this, he will have failed not just his flock, but the entire country, because a country cannot be run according to religious laws, as Islam has shown as clearly. Leadership does not consist only in smiling and cracking jokes. In this, the public personas of both the head of the church and the head of the government coincide, but how does that help the country in any way? Leaders are not there to entertain us. For that, we have celebrities.