Christian spirituality: Settlers or nomads?

Christian spirituality: Settlers or nomads? A Maltese crossroads beneath the festa fireworks

At 5:45 a.m. on any given Sunday, the narrow streets of Birgu echo with two very different rhythms. From St Dominic’s Priory comes the measured chant of Lauds, unchanged since the Knights. Fifty metres away, backpackers fresh off the Gozo ferry huddle around a portable speaker, streaming Hillsong United while they wait for the first café to open. Same faith, same sunrise, yet one group is rooted in stone and history, the other ready to board the 6:30 boat back to Sicily. The question drifts across Grand Harbour like incense: in Malta, are we spiritual settlers or nomads?

The settler instinct runs deep here. Walk into the parish museum of Qormi and you’ll find silver processional statues heavier than the fishermen who once carried them. Each festa is a 400-year-old GPS pin: “We were here, we are still here.” Fr Joe Borg, who oversees the Qormi St George archives, jokes that Maltese Catholics have “altar DNA.” “My grandmother’s lace runner is on that altar,” he says, pointing to a photo from 1957. “My mother’s too. My daughter’s will be next. That is continuity you can touch.”

But the ground is shifting. Caritas Malta reports that weekly Mass attendance has slipped below 40 % for the first time since records began, while “pop-up” prayer breakfasts in coworking spaces like Valletta’s The Hub are booked solid. Sr Carmen Zahra, a diocesan youth chaplain, sees the change in the confession queue. “Twenty years ago they came asking forgiveness for sins against the Sixth Commandment. Now they ask how to forgive themselves for leaving the island,” she says. “The diaspora is our new exodus.”

Maltese nomads don’t always leave physically; many roam digitally. Justin Camilleri, 28, streams his Sunday service from a Berlin flat to 300 followers back home. “I was suffocating in the village competition—who has the loudest petard, the tallest statue. Online I found a faith that travels lighter.” Yet even Justin admits that when the festa band marches past his parents’ house in Żejtun, he wells up. “The brass hits you right in the mitochondria,” he laughs.

The tension plays out in architecture too. In 2022, the Gozo Curia quietly sold a half-built seminary to a tech firm for co-living lofts. The deal funded a mobile medical clinic for migrants—roaming missionaries replacing stone cloisters. Critics called it betrayal; others hailed it as the Church finally embracing its inner pilgrim. Archbishop Charles Scicluna diplomatically calls it “hospitality on wheels.”

Economics nudge the narrative. A 2023 Deloitte study shows that young Maltese couples now spend more on Ryanair flights to Taizé or World Youth Day than on festa donations. Priests notice the empty pews but also the WhatsApp groups buzzing with photos from Medjugorje. The same euros once locked in lace and pyro are now fuelling spiritual Ryanair pilgrimages.

Yet settlers and nomads often meet in the middle. Take the “Walking Rosary” launched last Lent: participants start at the Upper Barrakka Gardens, pray a decade on each ferry crossing to Sliema, and finish with pastizzi at Balluta. It’s ancient devotion with an Oyster card. Organiser Claire Falzon says half the walkers were returnees who’d “sworn off church after the divorce referendum.” They came for the views, stayed for the Ave Marias.

So which will Malta choose? Neither. The island’s genius has always been hybridity: Phoenician galleys morph into Carnival floats; Arabic balconies cradle statues of St Paul. Perhaps the future is a caravan that parks under bastions—faith that can pack up at dawn yet still wants to hear the village band strike up Marċ ta’ Filgħaxija. As the festa fireworks fade over Floriana tonight, listen carefully: the explosions echo off limestone walls that have heard both crusader hymns and Spotify lo-fi. In Malta, we are settlers who learned to carry home in our pockets, nomads who still send postcards to the parish priest.