The Parish Community in Eighteenth-Century Malta

Abstract

Making use of a wealth of primary sources, author provides numerous insights into role of Maltese community in life of eighteenth-century Church across liturgical year, exploring social, cultural, and gender differences that separated different sectors of society in residents' religious behavior. The author emphasizes democratic responsibility of wardens in administering parish, participation and patronage of lay parishioners, and all-important cult of Mary and saints. As parish church was considered centerpiece of community, residents contributed materially to its erection, embellishment, and upkeep. Historians working in Great Britain and North America have offered detailed insights into English parish life. The faithful, we have been told, considered parish church as their own to point that they paid incumbent for his liturgical services with their personal funds.1 However, history of parish is a subject that has attracted interest across Europe. Marc R. Forster demonstrated this openness of parochial organization to ordinary people in Southwest Germany.2 Henry Kamen confirmed such popular control of local church in Catalonia,3 while among French historians, Alain Lottin has shown that at LiUe, parish offered people a platform for exercise of an unusual degree of responsibility and political power.4 This essay analyzes Maltese experience in eighteenth century, using fine run of 117 volumes of churchwardens' reports (conti) at bishop's archives. 1. When Knights Hospitallers came to Malta in 1530, they took firm control of governing of islands. The consiglio popolare, or local self-government, remained in existence only in name.5 A handful of inhabitants did succeed in reaching positions of authority within government-the judiciary was recruited invariably from Maltese lawyers, for example6-but majority of people had no place in it. Yet, if central government seemed remote and unapproachable, Maltese parish was central to lives of people and emphatically belonged to them. However, parish was not a socially homogeneous entity. On contrary, it was a heavily stratified society, as was evidenced by precedence taken by procedures of processions and disputes that arose on such public occasions.7 As an attentive author has put it, there always lurked the destabilizing fault lines of continuous social tensions.8 The community consisted of men and women from every social class, and these social and sexual distinctions were reflected in parish church itself. The parishioners, as recorded in Thomas More's Utopia,9 were seated in different places: nave was reserved for women while men sat in transepts.10 The sexes were differentiated not only in their seating11 but also at their deaths. At Citta Pinto, three peals (mote) were sounded for men but only two for women.12 Since death was an occasion for stressing one's status in community, at Zabbar, major bell distinguished a person of first order from another of an inferior condition.13 If most of people were buried in common graves, privileged few had their own burial sites if not their chapels.14 The church fostered social distinctions in other ways and mirrored formal social structure of community. Attendance at church was a social occasion, so that those who did not have proper apparel15 heard morrow Mass purposely said at dawn for their convenience.16 Others, like Veronica ta' l-Ghawdxija (the Gozitan woman's daughter), went to a filial instead of parochial church for want of decent clothing.17 Preaching also was tinged with status consciousness. The elite heard sermons in Italian in mornings, but rest of population were catechized in Maltese in afternoons.18 Confraternities further serve to underline a graded society. …