Letters | Sunday, 07 March 2010

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Gozo’s exclusion from Benedict’s visit?

Is the laity’s contribution in the post-Vatican II era still in not taking up their suggestions but confined to subsidising even excessive and unnecessary expenses as the hiring of nearby churches in Valletta, Floriana and environs? Fancy celebrating the first Sunday in Lent dedicated to the laity, swift on the announced Papal visit programme for which presumably no Gozitan worth his salt pushed hard enough for Benedict’s first visit to the islands to not exclude one of the two dioceses.
Napoleon, another important visitor to these islands about 200 years ago, despite the somewhat primitive transport contraptions at the time and the many calls on his time from his war-torn empire, still found time to visit Gozo and sleep at the St Francis Convent in Victoria; though he was not on good terms with the church and surely was not very welcome.
Admittedly His Holiness Benedict XVI might be much frailer than Napoleon was; he cannot possibly wish for more faithful and welcoming subjects than the Gozitans, whose diocese has been described, by one smart in figure-crunching, as possibly the one which has given the Church, proportionately, the most vocations. Would it be possible with the modern transport means to enable the Pope, say to cross to Gozo by helicopter and just sleep at the Seminary in Victoria instead of at the Nunciature in Tal-Virtù, and return in the morning to Malta for the rest of the programme?

Colin Debono
Ghajnsielem

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