Guest Post: The Curia and state intervention

Guest Post: The Archbishop and the Curia have professed that in future vacant high rises could prompt state intervention to save developers. To me this is an exact description of the sorry state that the Curia finds itself in.

When the Santa Theresa church in Birkirkara, the one that looks like a flying saucer was built, the Curia explained that this masterpiece of art and modern technology was built to accommodate the growing numbers of attendance at Church services.

Described as a rotunda that holds a corrugated roof in reinforced concrete to resemble a flower, construction was begun in 1965 according to the design of Giorgio Pacini of Rome, under a Nationalist government; the same one that demolished the neo-classical doorway to Valletta and replaced it with a Lego doorway, which a subsequent Nationalist government replaced with a slit.

The exact opposite of what the Curia had professed happened and now we have a situation where a number of churches and the art within them, are in a state of deterioration. This of course is due to the fact thst dwindling numbers of churchgoers mean less donations.

What the Archbishop and the Curia so aptly fail to mention is that government is helping to restore churches and their art. Can they come forward and declare whether they are against state aid in matters that affect them directly?

As a believer it hurts me to see the decline in faith among the Maltese, a decline which I can only attribute to Archbishop Gonzi’s meddling in politics back in the 50’s and 60’s. His lack of foresight has resulted in the Maltese church’s woes with less and less people attending for church services year after year.

And yet the present Archbishop and the Curia just cannot find it in their hearts to shut up on matters of the state and concentrate on matters of the soul. If I were them I would concentrate on changing tact to stop the dwindling number of my congregation and set my sights on getting back the lost sheep