Twilight at the diocese

Are the will of the people and democracy really a potential source of superficiality? Outgoing Bishop of Gozo Nikol Cauchi speaks out on the changing landscape before his eyes

The Vatican is getting ready for a conclave that will elect a pope with a hard act to follow. The charismatic leadership of John Paul II was the best of times, the worst of times. One of the inspiring leaders who battled communism and Third World poverty, his Catholic doctrine was borne out of a staunch, dogmatic Polish Catholic version of the Stalinism that oppressed his native land.
But labelling Pope Wojtyla a conservative, as one would over the thorny issues of contraception, homosexuality, liberation theology, and female ordination, is just a moniker which the roly-poly, 76-year old Bishop of Gozo Nikol Cauchi, dubs “nonsense”, a one-size-fits-all term used freely by the mass media.
In Gozo, Mgr Cauchi awaits an order from the Vatican to vacate his seat of power. He has been there since 1972 and offered his resignation, as is the custom, upon his seventy-fifth birthday. But so far, the Vatican has not yet ordered Cauchi or the Maltese archbishop, Joseph Mercieca, to let go their herding staff.
“You know, people start seeing you as superfluous, they want new blood and new ideas. It is the Vatican that has to decide. I even wrote to them to remind them that I had resigned. I enjoy it when the newspapers say the Bishop of Gozo has said his time has come – look, it’s not that I want to be lazy, because I’ll find things to do. They asked me what I would do. I say I will finish everything I have left pending.”
Cauchi speaks freely. His public relations officer, a young priest who welcomes us at the stairs leading to Cauchi’s office discreetly reminds us not to mention the issue of succession, which even President Eddie Fenech Adami recently spoke about in an interview, although nobody reminded the president whether he was the pot calling the kettle black.
Cauchi doesn’t even want to talk about the Good Friday quarrel, yet another contentious parish rivalry which led the Gozo Cathedral’s archpriest to hand in his resignation after he claimed that the Vatican’s order to have Victoria’s two band clubs lead the procession on alternating years had been breached. Cauchi did not accept the resignation, and many wonder why the bishop accepted to have St George’s parish hold a special morning procession to mark Eucharistic Year.
Although he does not speak about it, a glimmer of repentance creeps out of him. “Sometimes I consider this to be my sin,” he says about the Church’s inability to stress more on doctrine and instead see its flock revelling in the mindless parish feasts, where the strongest spirit around is cheap whisky.
The Maltese Church, no longer what it used to be thirty years ago, is seeing less churchgoers, “more hedonism”, Cauchi remarks, but at least more followers with “an open mind”.
“I think quantity has been replaced by quality,” he says about the island’s Catholics – officially 95 per cent fully-fledged followers of the Roman Catholic faith, but less than half practising.
A prolific writer on various issues, at least by Maltese ecclesiastical standards, Cauchi is an engaging personality unlike the infantilising Mercieca. As the head of the Gozitan diocese, Cauchi also speaks freely on the island’s clientelism and omertá:
“When we talk about Gozo, we are talking about any small, insular society, and that could be Ischia, Sicily or Spain… but there are two excesses: gossip and omertá. Now if you can help out because of something you know, something certain, you have a duty to speak out. But if this is a rumour or gossip, then it is not safe to speak out. I am sure the Sicilians surpass us in omertá. But again, it is not an evangelical act – if one can help somebody with words, they have to speak out. But they have to be certain about what they know.”
When he mentions hedonism, it takes me back to the survey held by his diocese on the Canon law of celibacy, which found nine per cent of Gozitan clerics were not following the law on celibacy. “Well, that was interpreted incorrectly and despite our attempts to correct the media, the misinterpretation continued nonetheless. The Canon law on the observance of celibacy comprises wrong thoughts, and that doesn’t mean that a priest would have slept with a woman. Celibacy requires keeping these thoughts at bay.”
Celibacy is considered to be one of the issues on the agenda for the next papacy. Cauchi says celibacy allows priests to go about their jobs without the pressures of having “women scolding us or telling us at what time we should arrive home.”
“If there was a guarantee that the removal of celibacy would mean everything falls into place, maybe the pope would consider reviewing the issue since this is an ecclesiastical law,” which means celibacy can be overturned if the pope so wishes.
But when we touch upon paedophilia, Cauchi is not sure that removing celibacy will stop the bad fruit in the Catholic Church. “The danger remains there notwithstanding. Is paedophilia just a characteristic of the priesthood? It even happens in families. It is a stain on humanity.”
Then again, it is also the reason why so many feel disillusioned with the Church. Although Cauchi says the pope was resolute on the matter, many feel the Vatican managed to put the lid on the spate of the paedophilia scandals committed by a tiny minority of the clergy. When we talk about whether the Vatican is losing its relevance in people’s everyday lives, the topic falls on contraception.
I ask him whether the Church has lost the argument on contraception, whether its fundamentalist zeal has failed to entice Catholics to go for conception every time they make love, or more boldly, abstain – one of the more virginal of qualities that arises out of the pope’s maudlin worship of the Madonna.
“The Church has lost nothing… If we are talking about contraception, which goes against the sixth commandment, we are not talking about a Church ‘prohibition’. Because these are prohibited by God, and the Church acts as the loudspeaker.”
Hardline doctrine on contraception has clashed against a tragic spectacle of millions of dead African Catholics and non-Catholics whose lives could have been spared from an Aids death if condoms were not denounced by the Vatican. But Cauchi turns the guns on the ‘multi-million dollar businesses’ of condom manufacturers: “…they dominate the mass media. They have given many people vain hopes. You say that many people use contraceptives – what do you expect out of all that propaganda? And as if a condom will protect someone from HIV. Prevention is better than cure. Abstinence or knowing who one’s partner is, is better protection.”
Maybe so, but abstinence has made about as much sense to the young people of the global village as the late pope’s harsh drubbing of homosexuality as an “intrinsic evil”. Maybe it’s the Church that has lost the propaganda battle. Maybe Wojtyla’s conservatism was not as effective as his own charisma.
“Don Luigi Sturzo has remarked that the conservatives of today are the progressives of yesterday, and vice-versa, because man changes his views. I compare man to a pebble, its smooth surface metamorphoses from a rough surface with the beating of the sea. There are many aspects of this pope’s pastoral action, like a diamond with many angles. I think he was ultra-progressive on certain issues, such as his critique of the US. Imagine my situation when I said that the US deserved a reprimanding in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Pope John Paul condemned the illegitimacy of the wars on Iraq. Whoever had this sort of courage?
“On other aspects he may have been conservative. But are God’s Ten Commandments a thing of the past or are they always living, perennial laws? We cannot just kick them to the side, otherwise we do not remain Catholics or religious people. So I think that, whilst the pope defended God’s laws, I think nobody can dub him either conservative or progressive. I cannot imagine a pope saying that divorce is licit, when the Gospel proclaims an opposition towards divorce, or allow unlimited birth control, euthanasia or abortion. I think we should see which acts of courage were committed by this pope, which were many, and the acts with which he defended the authenticity of the Church’s teaching and the Gospel’s message.”
Wojtyla’s dedication to preserving the authenticity of the Catholic gospel was in fact remarkable, as was his authoritarian grip on the Vatican, at times criticised for having reverted the reforms of the Vatican II – he dressed down the liberal theologians, organised a great centralisation of power, issued salvos which denounced feminism and homosexuality.
“If we had to take the gay issue and all the hue and cry (storbju) that is made, the homosexual act goes against the sixth commandment and no authority, theologian or otherwise, can say the act is good in itself, because it is bad. But the person that commits the sin has its own dignity. We do respect the sinner, but we condemn the sin.
“The ordination of women is not some capricious order of the pope’s. Christ did not even ordain his own mother. He gave that role to the apostles during the Last Supper. The Church kept this tradition. We not only abide by the Bible’s teachings, but also by the acts of the Catholic Church itself in the last 2,000 years… Anyone who is baptised is ordained as an ordinary religious, and this is what I think should be the priesthood for women. This does not discount any of their importance in the Catholic Church.”
The latest document on feminism however, in which the ultra-conservative Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which issues doctrinal teaching, pontificated on the evil of feminism – the kind which burned bras back in the 1960s – comes 40 years too late. The Vatican is a slow-moving institution, and many find themselves unable to connect their own lives to the Vatican’s snail pace.
“Look, I admit that the Church is not as fast as the mass media,” Cauchi says. “But you are a journalist, and you know that expeditiousness often results in half-baked news. The Church does not run. It takes its time, especially the pope, who has to be careful of his pronouncements. But I don’t think we have missed the bus and we are scratching our heads. We just take our time in the face of the lack of information, not to use the word ignorant – many Catholics go to mass but do not understand how the Church works. Maybe that is our fault, despite our own mass media and PROs, for not always giving out the information needed.”
Cauchi’s latest contribution to the press was a three-piece article opposing divorce. His boldness was clearly outlined in what seemed to be a subtle warning to legislators. According to him, politicians are being pressured into opening the doors to divorce. He argues with reason that divorce is not conducive to a healthier society, although his belief is contrasted with 500 separation cases every year in Malta and increased cohabitation of couples.
Gratuitously, Cauchi managed to sidle in the issues of abortion and same-sex unions as tragic eye-openers which could follow if Malta allows the so-called ‘divorce mentality’ to take a strong foothold. I ask him whether he is scaremongering by throwing in the devilish trinity in one basket, whether he really believes that abortion follows divorce.
“No it is not right. We have to distinguish between the three. Of course, it is not a logical argument to say that abortion follows after divorce. But it can follow if we become more permissive. If certain principles are forgone, the danger is created.”
In fact, the Maltese Church continuously finds itself throwing the common good in the face of its faithful. Not only, but even politicians, hail the so-called ‘common good’ as their crusade for safeguarding the Maltese islands from further moral corruption, or the consequences of increasing secularism.
“What is to be: our duty or our pleasure? Kant talked about man’s duty. You have to act as if you are setting the example for others. Today, people live by what they will personally gain and the pleasure they will obtain,” Cauchi protests.
“The common good is the creation of an environment where every human right is respected. So whilst the poor and sick do not have anyone to take care of them, we have not achieved the common good.”
So what about the right for people to remarry if they are in love; or for that reason, for people to make love without being called sinners for forgoing conception? “That is not a right. I am talking about fundamental rights – the right to life, religious freedom, liberty.”
His most bold statement however is warning people to choose between an equally contentious ‘objective natural law’ and ‘the relativist and fluctuating opinion by a dominant faction’ – read democracy.
“Some people think that if there is a law in favour or against something, then that obliges their conscience, or binds it or frees it. God’s law is known to Catholics and non-Catholics alike because it is written in their hearts. If the law enacted by parliaments is built on air, it has nothing that binds God’s law to us.”
So what about the will of the people that informs the law?
“Yes, but where ethics is considered, whether something is morally good or not, the will of the people does not figure,” Cauchi boldly states. “A referendum on whether people want tax or not will surely result in the people voting for the repeal of taxation, myself included. But nobody is going to argue that a country can work without taxation. The will of the people does not always refer to what is good in itself.”
So who is going to decide?
“It is not the majority that necessarily reflects morality or ethical correctitude. We have to see what the serious people have to say. And who are these people? In every society there are these people who are capable of reasoning and are not reckless about every issue.
“Let’s not just see what cikku l-poplu is saying. Sometimes it serves as an indication. But democracy also has its own shortcomings. It also brings about superficiality.”