Montebello: Church heading towards extinction, laymen ‘unite and take over’

The Catholic Church in Malta is on the road to extinction and has found itself at an “extraordinary time, without precedent”, says Dominican monk Mark Montebello on the challenges facing Paul Cremona in the wake of open criticism of his leadership.

What’s new, says Montebello, 50 - a historian of Maltese philosophical enquiry and biographer of Manwel Dimech - is that the challenge is coming from within unlike formerly identifiable ‘threats’ like communism, modernity, or secularism.

“This internal challenge is how this church can relate itself positively, and evangelically, with today’s Maltese and Gozitan society,” Montebello wrote in his blog.

“The local church is showing itself to be obstinately incapable of being a ‘sign of hope’ in today’s society, to give happiness and hope to society. In other words, it’s neither positive nor evangelical.”

Montebello, a prisoners’ rights activist whose outspokenness in 2010 was punished by the Curia with a sojourn of reflection in Saltillo, Mexico with his order’s superior Fr Carlos Aspiroz Costa, has reiterated his radical view that the church is heading towards extinction.

“It’s something that began in the 1950s, and despite the Vatican Council II’s renewal (that never took root), it’s still going on today… the signs are that it’s a race to the bottom. The truth is: the church in our islands is destroying itself.”

Montebello levels his criticism at the institutional level, denouncing the “excessive clericalism” first identified by Pope Francis in his Evangeli Gaudium.

“This means that pastoral and ecclesiastical organization, the language, and the symbolism employed by the Church are tied to and formed by the clergy… the Pope insists that with excessive clericalism being one of the main problem of churches like ours, he implies that it is laymen, not the clergy, who hold the key to the solution to this challenge.”

Montebello says laymen should form their own action communities and read the Bible in a way that is not ‘clericalised’.

“Laymen must change from passive receivers to active donors, from ‘consumers’ to ‘producers’, from objects of duty to subjects of rights… in this change they is the fundamental message that Malta and Gozo needs in the neo-liberal society of today, that turns everyone into ‘consumers’.”

In response, Montebello says a change in mentality that is not dominated by priests and a new meaning of ‘church’ are in order. “For the Catholic Church to offer joy and hope to the Maltese and Gozitans ensnared by the inhumanity of neoliberalism, it needs to let the Spirit of God to blow through it and change.”