Malta’s Cana Movement elects new president: meet the Gozitan lawyer steering the island’s marriage mentors into the TikTok age

New dawn for Cana Movement as Dr. Andrew Consiglio elected president

The Cana Movement, Malta’s best-known marriage-preparation and family-support NGO, has chosen a new leader. Dr. Andrew Consiglio, a 42-year-old lawyer and canon lawyer who has spent the last decade coordinating the organisation’s pastoral and legal teams, was confirmed as president on Saturday evening during an extraordinary general assembly held at the Archbishop’s Curia in Floriana.

Outgoing president Mgr Victor Grech, who steered the movement for 23 years through Malta’s rapid social transformation—from EU accession and the introduction of divorce to the 2017 gender-based violence reckoning—received a standing ovation that lasted several minutes. Grech, 78, will remain on the board as honorary president, but told members it was “time to let a new generation read the signs of the times.”

Local context: a quiet powerhouse in Maltese society

Founded in 1954 by a group of young couples who met in Valletta’s Jesuit church, Cana has become a quiet powerhouse in Maltese society. Every year roughly 1,800 engaged pairs—about 70 % of all Catholic marriages on the island—sit through its pre-Cana seminars in parish halls from Żebbuġ to Gozo. The movement also runs the national 24-hour “Kanaġi” helpline, a parent-support drop-in in Birkirkara, and, since 2019, a government-subsidised shelter for women fleeing domestic violence.

Yet its influence stretches beyond statistics. In a country where 83 % of babies are still baptised within their first year and village festas shape the social calendar, Cana has acted as the Church’s frontline negotiator between tradition and a society that legalised same-sex marriage in 2017. Its volunteer pool—1,200 couples, psychologists, lawyers and youth workers—makes it larger than any political party sectional committee on the island.

The new captain: who is Andrew Consiglio?

A Gozitan who read law at the University of Malta and later took a doctorate in canon law at the Pontifical Lateran University, Consiglio speaks the Mediterranean vernacular of courtroom Latin and village dialect. Colleagues describe him as “a listener who can quote St Paul and TikTok in the same sentence.” In 2014 he drafted the Church’s annulment-form streamlining that cut waiting times from five years to twelve months, a reform that rippled into civil courts and halved backlogs for separated couples.

In his maiden speech he pledged to keep Cana “radically close to couples where they actually live: in rental flats with mould on the walls, in single-parent garages converted into homes, on Instagram DMs at 2 a.m.” He announced three immediate priorities: a pilot project offering psychological first-aid to separated fathers; a digital platform that will match retired professionals with young parents for free babysitting; and a campaign to push parliament for two extra days of paternity leave, an issue that Labour and Nationalist MEPs have both flirted with but never delivered.

Cultural significance: more than a changing of the guard

The hand-over carries symbolic weight. Maltese millennials are marrying later (average age 31, up from 25 in 1995) yet still expect the Church’s blessing. The pandemic saw a 22 % spike in calls to Cana’s helpline, many from couples who had never set foot inside a rectory. “We realised the sacrament is no longer the entry point,” Consiglio told Hot Malta. “The relationship crisis is the entry point. If we start there, faith can follow.”

Community impact: what happens next?

Expect turf wars. Government agency Foundation for Social Welfare Services already funds 70 % of Cana’s shelter costs; Consiglio wants 100 %, arguing that prevention is cheaper than police interventions. Women’s rights NGOs welcome the continuity but warn they will “watch like hawks” to ensure state cash does not fund “retrograde counselling.”

Meanwhile, parish priests hope the new president will reverse a worrying trend: only 52 % of civil marriages now opt for a church blessing, down from 72 % in 2005. Consiglio’s answer? “Let’s stop counting bums on pews and start counting relationships saved.”

The real test will come next June, when Malta’s divorce referendum decade is marked by a conference on co-parenting apps. If Consiglio can persuade conservative donors and progressive policymakers to share a Zoom screen, the small-island miracle of Cana may yet write another chapter.