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MALTA
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21.04.2001 |
"Yet speak I must for the times are very evil, yet no one speaks against them. Is not this so? Do not we "look one upon another" yet perform nothing? Do we not all confess the peril into which the Church is come, yet sit still each in his own retirement, as if mountains and seas cut off brother from brother? Therefore suffer me, while I try to draw you forth from those pleasant retreats, which it has been our blessedness hitherto to enjoy, to contemplate the condition and prospects of our Holy Mother in a practical way; so that one and all may unlearn that idle habit which has grown upon us, of owning the state of things to be bad, yet doing nothing to remedy it."
This is how on 9 September 1833, the then anonymous members of the Oxford Movement opened their first
'Tract for the Times" in a sincere appeal to fellow presbyters to labor for a renewal in the Anglican Church. Proceeds the Tract, Consider a moment. Is it fair; is it dutiful, to suffer our Bishops to stand the brunt of the battle without doing our part to support them?
On 7 September, two days before the publication of this first Tract at Oxford University, Nazju Falzon, a Maltese cleric just past his twentieth birthday, graduated Doctor of Canon and Civil Law from the University of Malta. Thoughts not dissimilar to the above must have convinced him that notwithstanding the bright legal career that awaited him, it would be wiser to embark on the nobler mission of the evangelization of fellow countrymen and the conversion of unbelievers.
Nazju Falzon was born in Valletta on 1 July 1813. Malta was then under the British who had taken informal possession of Malta on 5 September 1800 and hence ruled the island as a protectorate. On 16 July 1813, just over a fortnight after Nazju's birth, the Prince's Regent Commission signed in London what can be termed as the first Constitution given to Malta by Great Britain. That day the British had finally decided to stay for good - the Protectorate was transformed into an English Sovereignty; the Maltese were recognized subjects of the British Crown. Malta and Gozo became a Crown Colony ruled by a Governor.
When the British took possession of Malta the great majority of the inhabitants were Roman Catholics. So no wonder that in their very first proclamation, they solemnly promised that all rights, privileges, and immunities in Church and State were to be preserved. In the 1813 Constitution, they reiterated that the free exercise of religious worship to all persons who inhabit and frequent the island is to be secured. The principle of religious liberty had been established as a necessary feature of the Imperial system and had in fact been applied to other colonies.
The authorities nonetheless went out of their way to respect the liberty of the Maltese Church and even, to some extent, protected her from proselytism. However it was a matter of time before the British, urged especially by political pragmatism, commenced to conform the religious establishment of Malta with that of Catholic European powers. Several rights and privileges that were by then considered anachronistic were one after another evened out In 1838, notwithstanding vociferous protests, they also introduced the liberty of the press, though a law of libel slightly narrowed such freedom.
Nazju grew up in a city that slowly but surely was taken over by the British. The British Army and the Navy had by then recognized the strategic position of Malta half way to their Middle East possessions and on the route to the Indian Empire. The island was transformed into a fortress colony to be able to meet any contingency that might arise from time to time in these possessions. The large number of uniformed personnel that in their hundreds frequented the wine shops of Strait Street in Valletta, where Nazju lived with his family, must have certainly filled the young boy's imagination with stories of military valour and heroic achievements of the people whose path he crossed every day. To them he would later dedicate a sizeable part of his life.
The local church though in no way comparable to the apocalyptic situation of the British church as presented in the first Tract, certainly needed energetic people to revive it in the post Revolutionary era as to quite an extent it was still the church of the past Absolute age. One field which direly needed a reform was education. In Malta this was entirely imparted according to religious principles and was for a long time exclusively in the hands of the Catholic clergy. Though some institutions had been functioning in the island for centuries, the educational establishment was on the whole still in its very infancy. The number of illiterate surpassed the ninety per cent mark. illiteracy not only in speaking, writing and reading, but also in their very religious beliefs.
The religious knowledge of the people was very shallow. It was a teaching based on the memorisation of a set number of beliefs and very little more. A catechism in Maltese was very little diffused and Bible books began appearing in Maltese only in the year 1822, and the initiative was of the London Missionary Society, an Anglican group.
Nazju must have been direly concerned with this state of affairs in Catholic education. In a country that was becoming host to so many people of different beliefs, ignorance in one's religious beliefs posed a danger to one's faith. Instead of owning the state of things to be bad, yet doing nothing to remedy it, he set himself the task to diffuse religious knowledge to as many young and not so young as he could. This very important mission began taking most of his afternoons soon after his graduation. He passed several hours teaching catechism to young girls in St. Barbara's Church, and to young boys in the Church of Our Lady of Victories. He even extended his teaching mission to Birkirkara where he passed the summer. At home, he also taught catechism to the young children of the British Catholic families that resided in Malta.
The British Roman Catholics, mostly Irish or of Irish descent, first attracted his attention around the time of his graduation. He was always on the look out for such families and continually exhorted them to give testimony of their faith in their second home. Before long, he began training the most faithful amongst them how to attract people of differing beliefs to Roman Catholicism. These training sessions were initially held at his house, but when the number increased such meetings began to take place at the Jesuits' Church, which was also the University Church in Valletta. They were essentially prayer meetings in which the believers strengthened their faith and those who were not were urged to convert. Those who expressed their wish and intention to embrace Roman Catholicism were with patience prepared for baptism by Nazju himself. This very important mission reached its peak between 1854 and 1856 during the Crimean crisis when thousands upon thousands of troops passed through Malta and eventually many sick and wounded were brought back to the island to recover their health.
Nazju got his strength for this tiring mission from his trust in God's help. At home, where the family had a chapel, and in church, during the morning and in the evening, before and after the meetings, he always found time to kneel in meditation in front of the Blessed Sacrament. It was a time when Jansenistic influences that hindered people from receiving Holy Communion frequently were being overcome by Liguorian concepts. His trust in the union with Jesus at communion knew no bounds.
Like all true Maltese Christians he was also imbued with a deeply rooted devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. During his time the devotion had been rekindled through a succession of occurrences in Malta and elsewhere. In 1848, Pope Pius IX, after a petition by the bishop, declared Our Lady in her Assumption as the special patron of Malta and Gozo, while in 1854 these islands rejoiced with the world when the same pope defined as a dogma of faith the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady.
Nazju was also a devotee of Saint Joseph and a holy picture of him held a most prominent place in his study or counselling room. At the time, his name was popular at baptism but otherwise devotion to him was very little diffused. However, in 1826, it received an impetus from Pope Leo XII and hence it proceeded from strength to strength until in 1871 he was declared Patron of the Universal Church. A cursory look at the local pastoral visits carried out at the time bear clear witness to this increased devotion. Nazju can be considered as one of its principal promoters. Saint Joseph is invoked at the point of death and Nazju in fact died with a picture of his dear saint in his hands. He left this world for his well earned reward in the other on ~ July 1865, his fifty second birthday.
This is the tiny world in which Nazju lived, a world that springs alive in the mission that he fulfilled as a true Christian.
On his graduation, still a very young man, Nazju had taken it upon himself to contemplate the condition and prospects of our Holy Mother in a practical way and he passed the rest of his life striving hard to leave a better Church than the one he found.
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