Today Dun Gorg Preca will be canonised by the Pope in the Vatican and the top levels of Maltese society, from the President to the Leader of the Opposition, will be in St Peter’s Square, as well as a crowd of some 5,000 jubilant Maltese, and by most Maltese watching the ceremony on their TVs.

The occasion is well worth celebrating, especially for the members of the society set up by Dun Gorg who see today sweet (and divine) justice coming their way after so many years of being looked down on, socially and not just socially. In the decades since the society was set up, its members have taught innumerable children and they themselves have come up the social scale from the Dockyard workers they began as.

And yet, for us Hamrun children aged 50 and over, one cannot help but compare the image we carry in our memories of the old, frail Dun Gorg with the man as portrayed in the current hagiography.

For us Hamrun children of the 1950s, Dun Gorg was already a saint. We were taken to his house in High Street for him to bless us when we sat for the Lyceum exams and we sometimes chanced on one of his, then, rare, conferences in which his frail, thin voice could barely be heard.

San Dun Gorg is, of course, the first real Maltese saint, and he is somewhat of an exception since it is only some 45 years since he died. The change that some of us see from the way we remember him and the way he is being portrayed may happen in the case of other saints, but there usually is a longer time span.

The Dun Gorg we remember was famous, in his day and how we remember him, as a thaumaturge, a wonder worker. When my grandmother died, he told my aunt, who was one of his devotees, that her mother was in heaven. The people of Hamrun well remember him sitting for long hours in the confessional in St Gaetan church, even during the air raids of World War II. He was the voice of sympathy and encouragement but many people wanted him to tell them what is usually unknown to people: things about their future, about dead people, and the like. This aspect is now almost hidden from view.

As is also hidden the figure of the woman who devotedly served him for long years both in Hamrun and his last year in Sta Venera in her own house. Charles Mizzi has written a very readable description of her (originally in It-Torca, and this week on Di-ve) and this is definitely the Nelly we knew (and were afraid of, she was so strict and forbidding) but she has been completely airwashed out of the picture and she was not even invited to the beatification ceremony which took place in Malta.

A third aspect, which comes from our childhood, was the very Old Testament concept of a God who is to be feared that Dun Gorg inserted in almost all of his conferences. The current postulator, Mgr Charles Scicluna, as I know, disputes this but at least one of his predecessors saw in it the basis for his belief that Dun Gorg would never become a saint.

Well he is now, but what are we to make of the famous “Three Days of Darkness” episode in the 1960s (when all Malta believed there would be three days of total darkness, and we all stocked up on candles), which was popularly ascribed to Dun Gorg, although this could well have been a political spin?

Looked at from this angle, it is easy to see the points of convergence between a Dun Gorg, who, while truly being in the forefront of giving more roles to the laity, still enforced upon them clerical celibacy, a liturgy based on Latin, and a scholastic approach to theology, and the present Pope.

How San Dun Gorg, or someone for him, managed to rewrite what people in Hamrun and elsewhere still remember can be termed San Dun Gorg’s other miracle.