At long last, a Maltese Saint

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News • 14 January 2007


At long last, a Maltese Saint

For 400,000 Catholics who have resisted divorce, topless bathing, and even the Duchess of Malfi, a Maltese saint is at best an egalitarian measure, argues MATTHEW VELLA.

Traffic rams through the heart of Hamrun’s grey and sullen main road. Right outside the St Cajetan parish church, a man smokes a cigarette at the door of the games parlour where tinted glass hides the punters slotting their coins inside from passers-by. In this very den of gaming slovenliness, the unlikeliest setting for a pious congregation, lived Dun Gorg Preca, the first Maltese person on the road to possible sainthood.
Preca’s devout, most of them members of his Society of Christian Doctrine, today are rejoicing because their spiritual leader has been attributed with the miraculous healing of a newborn with critical kidney difficulties. The miracle, confirmed by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints on Tuesday, is claimed to have happened in 2001 when the child’s family prayed for Preca’s intercession and placed a glove that was used during the priest’s exhumation on the child. A few days later, the baby started to show signs of recovery against all doctors’ expectations that it would survive the critical illness. Without even the planned surgery, the baby today is five years old.
Preca’s sainthood will undoubtedly be triumphant news for the devout Maltese, even though their Catholic devotion co-exists with an equally pious tendency to blaspheme, swindle, evade tax, eavesdrop, and be as debauched enough as to gladly ask God for forgiveness.
Now over 40 years since his death, without enjoying a fast-track visa to sainthood (the cause started in 1975), Preca is about to return back a saint, having performed the medically inexplicable twice. But what does he bring back to the Maltese after leaving them in the thick of the excommunication of socialists in the 60s?

An unlikely ‘radical’?
His biographies describe him as an inconspicuous person, whose sickly childhood in the drab 19th century proved to be nothing spectacular. Armed with an early call to the priesthood, he survived a diseased lung to be ordained in 1906 and live on to the age of 82 having built up a following of thousands of Maltese Catholics.
The irony would have it that, despite his sickly disposition, Preca often used cigarettes as a ruse to befriend sailors at the Grand Harbour to discuss with them spiritual matters. He is said to have humbled a man into pardon when, while boarding the junket to Valletta, the man shoved his foot in front of Preca’s face in a sign of anticlerical opposition. Preca is said to have bent down and kissed his shoe.
Despite having faced off what short-lived anticlericalism could have survived on such a devout island, for many Preca was still a radical element whose teaching was a part of a popular drive to spread doctrine to the working classes and devolving it from ecclesiastical ceremony.
Still in his student days, he began writing a rule in Latin he intended to send to Pope Pius X for the setting up of a society of permanent deacons who would be able to help the Bishops in the people’s Christian formation. He later befriended Eugenio Borg, a young dockyard worker who would later be the first superior of his Society for Christian Doctrine, and who together with other youths in Hamrun, gathered informally in what were the embryonic meetings of the Society, popularly known as MUSEUM (Magister, Utinam Sequatur Evangelium Universus Mundu – Lord, may the whole world follow the Gospel).
Preca’s mission for the laity never enjoyed the support of Church officials. Coming to the attention of the Vicar General, Mgr Salvatore Grech, the novel idea of taking God’s word to the streets challenged the obscurantism of the Church’s officialdom. Popularising Church doctrine, as Preca’s mission seemed to imply, became the source of rumours among those who resented the priest’s bid to ‘take the Bible to the streets’.
But Preca regretted the dubious devotion and superstition of Maltese Catholics, especially the working class, at a time when education was not compulsory. His bid to have the laity spread God’s word attracted suspicion, and educating the working class (his initial following came from the Drydocks), was, for want of a better word, revolutionary. He penned 140 books and pamphlets in Maltese at a time when English and Italian became two ideological poles for the Maltese. His open-air talks were dubbed “sajdiet” – fishing expeditions.
Soon enough, accused of insanity, he was ordered to shut down his operation. The Society’s centres mushroomed from one parish to the other, and its independence was viewed with suspicion. Adding a women’s branch proved controversial. Preca and his two superiors, Eugenio Borg and Giannina Cutajar, were regularly summoned to the Bishop’s Curia for an ecclesiastical inquiry. Twenty-five years later, in 1932, Bishop Dom Maurus Caruana approved Preca’s Society, convinced of its orthodoxy.

Give us it!
Despite Pope Benedict’s plan for a lock-out at John Paul’s factory of saints, sainthood for the Maltese priest will no doubt be exhilarating for the tens of thousands of faithful who battle the age’s cheerlessness with faith, devotion, and the religious superstition which science has not yet managed to quell. Miracles offer meaning when the medically unexplainable happens, reinforcing people’s faith in the pantheon of greats, hoping their intercession might one day grace them in their moment of need. For it is certainly an undemocratic world, this dimension of healing saints – they tend to respond only to the special few, where science has no more answers, and only to pull some clamorous supernatural feat.
And the Maltese are surely deserving of a saint. How could an island of 400,000 Catholics who resisted divorce, abortion, topless bathing, the Duchess of Malfi from kicking the crucifix, and refused Christian burials to socialists not be awarded a saint? John Paul II proclaimed 482 saints in his lifetime, more than in the previous five centuries of pontiffs. In one day in October 2000, he canonised 120 saints from China, a Sudanese slave, the first Basque saint, and even an American heiress. At minimum, making Dun Gorg Preca a saint is an egalitarian measure.
Then again, if Preca’s unattainable spiritual perfection is the supernatural equivalent of our celebrities, surely this man did not need to heal damaged retinas and kidneys to achieve greatness. In a small island where unschooled fools who can’t even speak the language become TV celebrities, a Maltese saint adds glitz to Catholic devotion.




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