Please allow me to express the disappointment as felt by the members of the Carmelite Society and Queen Victoria Band of Żurrieq as well as that felt by the many devotees of Our Lady and the great number of supporters of the feast held annually in her honour in the same village in the month of July.

The cause of all this disappointment is the cancellation for no apparent reason, by the local ecclesiastical authorities of the thanksgiving Mass, which was to be celebrated a week after the feast that is on 31 July.

This thanksgiving Mass was agreed upon by the authorities as far back as last February when it was suggested in the annual general meeting of The Confraternity of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

The fact that no justification was given for the cancellation leads us to believe that this was due to outside lay pressure on the local Church administration. If this is not the case then we demand to know why the Mass was summarily cancelled.

This negative attitude of the Church authorities towards the Carmelite Community of Żurrieq may have far more reaching consequences than those the Church authorities could have imagined.

Suffice to say that a number of people who had formerly felt themselves excluded from the Church had been persuaded to turn up only to be served with a bad example in local pique, this time by the Church authorities themselves, who should have known better.

We always tried, with the cooperation of the Confraternity to infuse more spirituality into the feast. I regret to say however, that our efforts have not been appreciated and certainly not reciprocated.

In conclusion, I repeat we will be expecting the Church authorities to come forward with an explanation.

Alan Mamo

Żurrieq