Malta’s Money Mirage: When the Gospel Spoils the GDP Party

**From the Gospel: Money… not funny at all**
*By a Hot Malta Correspondent*

It’s Sunday morning in Birkirkara. The church bells have just finished echoing across the rooftops, and families spill out of the Baroque parish church onto the sun-bleached square. Nonna kisses the priest’s hand; teenagers scroll TikTok while sipping Kinnie; someone’s uncle complains about the new €6 pastizzi at the kiosk. And yet, beneath the incense and small-talk, a 2,000-year-old warning is still ringing: “You cannot serve God and money.”

That line—found in Matthew 6:24—has never felt so Maltese. We are, after all, the country that minted a blockchain island slogan, auctioned passports to billionaires and watched skyline cranes morph into our unofficial national bird. In the space of a decade, Malta’s GDP doubled, rental prices quadrupled and suddenly everyone knew someone who knew someone flipping St Julian’s apartments for six-figure margins. The Gospel’s caution about wealth becoming a master, not a tool, sounds less like ancient Jerusalem and more like a direct WhatsApp voice-note to the islands.

Father Joe Borg, who moonlights as a columnist and radio host, puts it bluntly: “We used to gossip about who’s getting divorced; now we whisper about who’s laundering whose cash.” He laughs, but it’s the weary kind. “The labourer who could once raise a family on one wage is now driving Uber at 2 a.m. to pay the landlord… who might be a Russian shell company. Tell me money hasn’t become a jealous god.”

Walk through Valletta on any given Friday and you’ll see the tension stitched into the capital’s fabric: €15 cocktails served metres away where old men still play dominos for €1 coffee; boutique hotels installing rooftop infinity pools while 90-year-old widows ration electricity. The Malta Developers Association recently boasted that construction contributes 11 % to GDP—yet NGOs counter that vacant properties outnumber homeless families 8:1. Somewhere in the middle, scripture sits like an awkward guest at a lobster brunch.

Still, grassroots pushback is brewing. In Gżira, parish priest Fr David Cefai opened the doors of his church hall to families evicted when foreign buyers turned tenement blocks into Airbnb goldmines. “We store their belongings where we once kept the Christmas cribs,” he shrugs. “The Gospel doesn’t let you look away.” The initiative, replicated in Sliema and Żejtun, now pairs lawyers with tenants facing capricious rent hikes—an echo of the Jubilee laws in Leviticus that commanded property to revert to original owners every 50 years. Not bad for a tiny island that sometimes forgets it wrote the oldest legal code in stone.

Meanwhile, youth group Żgħażagħ Azzjoni Kattolika stages “prayer protests” outside Planning Authority hearings, kneeling in neon safety vests while reciting the Beatitudes. Their TikToks—arresting shots of cassocks versus cranes—rack up tens of thousands of views. “We’re not anti-business,” insists 22-year-old organiser Martina Vella, a University of Malta finance graduate. “We’re pro-dignity. When profit trumps people, the economy becomes a golden calf—and calves crash.”

Even the political class senses the shift. Finance Minister Clyde Caruana told parliament last month that “GDP growth which pushes mothers to work three jobs is theological failure, not economic success”—a line that drew gasps, then applause, from both sides of the aisle. Whether policy follows rhetoric remains to be seen; a proposed 10 % windfall tax on speculative land sales is already watering itself down in committee.

Back in Birkirkara, the Sunday crowd disperses. A street sweeper pockets a crumpled €5 note, nods gratefully to the altar boys packing away brass candlesticks. Somewhere above, the church’s newly restored dome glitters—paid for by a anonymous donor whose name is engraved on a marble plaque. We may never know if that fortune was earned ethically, but the plaque’s placement is instructive: at eye-level only to the pigeons.

Perhaps that’s Malta’s modern parable: we can gild our heavens, yet still struggle to keep our feet on holy ground. Until the day rent is affordable again and no one prays the rosary over an eviction notice, the Gospel’s punchline remains painfully unfunny. And if we stop laughing, maybe—just maybe—we’ll start changing.