The recent debate ignited by the late Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini’s last message regarding the declining prominence of the Church with its flock has generated a positive response from all quarters.

The recent conference organised by The Times on this subject was evidence of this response. My observation at this conference remained unanswered, primarily because a particular intervention lasted a good 25 minutes, thereby taking up much of the time available to us ‘plebs’.

I had read a report of the speech by Archbishop Paul Cremona upon his return from the Synod of Bishops held in the Vatican, which included the following:

“Many of our faithful still live in nostalgia of and compare the present situation with the model of the Church that was present 30 to 40 years ago. Since the Church has not remained in a privileged position as it was then, they live in an atmosphere of shock, when the Church, or its pastors, are challenged. Often they stand in fear of speaking openly before this, many times, hostile culture.”

The Archbishop went on to propose a new model of the Church “…which corresponds most to today’s reality… a church which is more charismatic than institutional… a church close to the people who are protagonists of pastoral action and not objects of the pastoral plans worked out at the centre… in the new model, the people are not just counted, they count”.

The heading of the editorial in your daily newspaper at the time read: “Out with the Old, in with the New”. I now ask: who and where are the Old and where are the New? Have the hopes and vision of Archbishop Cremona started to materialise or have they been shackled by the stubborn status quo of some of those around him?

Our beloved Archbishop is a lifetime apostle of Vatican 2 and a devotee of the Blessed Pope John XXIII – so much so that Pope John Paul II donated the stole of John XXIII to him as a gift on his becoming our spiritual mentor.

I find it defeatist, to say the least, that certain opinions in the press, both local and foreign, are claiming that the present difficult state of the Catholic Church may be due to certain decisions taken at Vatican 2, the same Council that aimed to “open the windows of the Vatican and let in some fresh air”, as John XXIII himself put it. This seems to have been forgotten over the past 50 years and “the Old”, as your editorial rightly put it, seem to have taken over the reins once again.

One hopes that the forthcoming synod will not take us back to pre-Vatican 2, when more emphasis on pomp and rituals and less on the message of Christ in its humanity was the order of the day

Anthony Girard

SLIEMA