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History and Catholicism
Malta’s intense Catholicism developed as a result of a militaristic history and the historical status of the Catholic chursh as a state within a state
More than any other time of the year, Christmas-time in Malta reinforces the impression that this is a country that is more Catholic than any other. Christmas décor is everywhere, and secular fixtures such as Christmas trees are juxtaposed with strong Catholic motifs and icons – the favourite among households is an icon of baby Jesus in a straw crib that, in Gozo especially, is swaddled with blinking coloured lights and mounted behind the front window in a collective demonstration of Catholic piety. Meanwhile, many other Catholic symbols are ubiquitous all year round – the large baroque churches standing as the centrepiece of every town, the multitude of niches in street corners or on house facades, and much more besides. Malta indeed has more churches per capita (about 357) than anywhere else on earth; and over seventy percent of the populace attend mass at least every Sunday. The first impression of the visitor is indeed correct: Malta is the most intensely Catholic country on earth, and Malta’s Catholicism takes exuberant and pompous overtones – an orgy of raucous street celebrations that serve to reaffirm people’s common identity as pious children of God.
The Maltese consider themselves as something of a people chosen by God – it was St Paul, the national narrative goes, who converted the Maltese en masse in 60AD. It’s a narrative that is coated in unconscionable romance, but if we have to find one point in history when Malta’s Catholicism raised its tempo, it would have to be 1530 when the Knights of St John (now called the Knights of Malta) arrived to take possession of the islands. As religious warriors the Knights of Malta were naturally fundamentalist: crusaders who volunteered their life to the intertwined goals of spreading Christianity and destroying Islam. They came to Malta after the Ottomans beat them out of Rhodes, and thus put Malta on the frontline of the then Muslim-Catholic war for supremacy. Immediately, the Knights felt the need to radicalise the Maltese and draw them into the long war of the Crusades. To start with, they encouraged the Maltese to engage in piracy on galleys from Islamic countries (a state-sanctioned practice in which the state took ten percent of the bounty as tax), and, in tacit conjunction with the clergy, they engaged in intense propaganda designed to sow hatred of anything Islamic in the collective Maltese psyche. Muslims were depicted as brutal savages, and in many folk legends fanned by Knights and the clergy, the Maltese were always saved from Islamic violence by divine acts of God.
There are hundreds of legends that serve as anti-Islamic travesties – let’s take just two of them to illustrate their level of virulence. In one, Malta’s most famous legend, Muslim corsairs kidnapped a young man who had been working in the fields, and his mother went to pray in a chapel dedicated to Saint Dimitri for her son’s return. The saint then miraculously morphed out of the painting that depicted him, galloping across the sea on his horse, and bringing back the son. In another, the story goes that Muslim corsairs frequently landed at a small cove to get freshwater from a spring, and Dragut, the ship’s captain, once asked one of his slaves to go get him some grapes growing in a field upslope. But the slave was surprised by the farmer as he was picking up bundles of grapes, and in the resultant haste and confusion the slave tore out an entire branch and ran back to the galley. Dragut was enraged because the Koran forbids the cutting of entire branches of vines, and he tied the slave to a boulder and burned him alive. The latter legend, particularly, served as a parable about the irrationality of the Koran (that branches of vines can’t be cut), and the uncompromising brutality of Dragut – and Dragut wasn’t a fictional character: in real life he was the Ottoman general who led a raid on Malta in 1555 and then a full-scale invasion in 1565, so the Knights concocted many legends partly designed to demonise Dragut.
But things shifted for the Knights in the eighteenth century, and the Maltese became increasingly hostile towards their arrogant and patronising form of rule – and the very same radical Catholicism the Knights had fomented was then used against them. The Catholic Church at the time had extra-legal powers, effectively being a state within a state, and as the Knights increasingly discriminated against the Maltese (for ex, no Maltese was considered noble enough to join the organisation), the church cleverly used this disillusionment to gain more power still. The church encouraged people to place their property under its jurisdiction, and in so doing the people were automatically exempt from military service, tax payments, and the civil courts. This situation led to a protracted power struggle between the Knights and church authorities that, at times, led to open violence (once, for example, some Knights tried to assassinate the Inquisitor, and in 1775 a group of priests launched an uprising designed to topple the Knights’ – the uprising failed to materialise into a national movement, and the Knights subdued and beheaded the ringleader priests).
By this time the threat from the Ottoman Empire had receded and the Knights – who were European aristocrats dedicated to the defence and advancement of Catholicism by military means – relapsed to their princely upbringing, becoming increasingly debauch, vain, and chivalrous, something that put them at odds with Maltese clergy. It was a pique that led to the further entrenchment of Maltese Catholicism: it was during this time that many of the street festivities that pack the Maltese Catholic calendar today developed – like the summer town feasts, Good Friday re-enactments, Carnival, and so on. And just as the Knights filled Valletta with big flamboyant churches – the Knights’ former conventual church (now St John’s Co-Cathedral) is indeed the most opulent Christian church in the world – the church mobilised the populace to match the Knights exuberance in the towns, something that led to the eighteenth-century systematic reconstruction of the town churches into the massive baroque edifices that dominate every townscape today.
These historical developments created such a strong attachment with Catholicism that even today, despite mass tourism and the encroachment of European secular values, the Maltese’ Catholic faith remains undiminished. In reality the state today is quasi-secular – not wholly secular as the constitution still recognises Catholicism as Malta’s only religion – and there are many people in the media who wish the church to become irrelevant as a social and political force (as in much of Europe). But secularisation in Malta remains a weak force. Sure, there is now more muttering from the young educated middle class about the backwardness in the way the church thinks, and these people might lament, particularly, the church’s stand on personal freedoms such as contraceptives and divorce (Malta and the Philippines are the only two Catholic countries where divorce remains illegal), but they are still firm believers – among Catholic countries Malta has the least number of atheists or agnostics. And they still go to church and receive the holy communion, even if irregularly (true secularists would not define themselves by what they don’t like about the church’s teachings, but would simply ignore the church’s teachings altogether). The reality is that Malta’s Catholicism is still getting stronger in some ways: the big street Catholic celebrations keep getting bigger, and donations for the summer town feasts, in which the parish saint is commemorated annually in massive street festivities, continue to increase year after year.
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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