Malta’s Knights of St Lazarus Go Digital: €25 ‘Netizen’ Membership Opens to Global Volunteers

Knights, nurses, and now…netizens?
The International Academy of St Lazarus—an 800-year-old order that once ran Malta’s leper hospital outside Mdina—has thrown open its velvet-lined doors to “corresponding members” for the first time in its long history, inviting islanders (and anyone with a Maltese connection) to join without buying a title, wearing a cape, or even leaving the sofa.

The call, launched quietly on the feast of St Publius last weekend, is a radical departure for a chivalric body better known for ceremonial investitures in the Auberge de Provence and black-tie charity balls at the Phoenicia. Instead of dubbing new knights, the Academy wants researchers, artists, genealogists, nurses, and tech-savvy volunteers who can “contribute skills, not silver”, helping digitise archives, crowd-translate 17th-century hospital ledgers, or simply promote the order’s modern leprosy-relief work from a laptop in Gżira.

“We realised the Maltese diaspora on TikTok has more global reach than all our grand masters combined,” admitted Professor Marisa Xerri, a geneticist at the University of Malta and the Academy’s first female chancellor. “Why not harness that?”

From leprosarium to laptop
The Order of St Lazarus arrived in Malta with the Knights of St John in 1530 and administered the island’s lazzaretto until Napoleon booted them out in 1798. Re-established here in 1960, the modern Academy still funds leprosy clinics in India, Madagascar, and the Philippines, financed largely by European aristocrats who cherish Maltese nobility titles. But membership has remained stubbornly elite: you either inherited a post or were personally invited after hefty philanthropic gestures.

That exclusivity clashed with Malta’s egalitarian vibe, says Fr Joe Borg, parish priest of Rabat whose church sits on the old hospital site. “Every feast day, tourists ask where the knights of St Lazarus went. I point to the plague cemetery and joke they’re all underneath. Truth is, locals felt the order had become a foreign gentlemen’s club.”

The corresponding-member scheme aims to reverse that perception. For €25 a year—less than a family ticket to the Malta Experience—applicants receive digital access to the order’s archives, a quarterly online lecture series, and a snazzy PDF certificate they can print at home. In return, the Academy asks for 12 hours of voluntary “knowledge service” within 12 months: indexing a baptismal register, subtituling a YouTube documentary, or running a school webinar about leprosy stigma.

Local impact, global reach
Already, 117 Maltese residents have signed up, including 19-year-old Sliema gamer Davide Azzopardi who streams Assassin’s Creed while raising funds for leprosy vaccines. “I get to put ‘Knight of St Lazarus (Digital Division)’ in my bio,” he laughs. “My followers think it’s a game achievement, but real kids in Myanmar get their shots.”

Tourism Minister Clayton Bartolo welcomed the initiative as “a creative retention tool” for heritage-savvy visitors who might otherwise “tick Valletta off the list and fly home”. The Malta Tourism Authority is discussing a micro-volunteering package: holidaymakers spend one morning transcribing 18th-century patient records, earn a digital badge, and receive discounts at Lazarus-themed sites—Mdina’s hidden hospital crypt, the Lazzaretto on Manoel Island, and the new Leprosy Interpretation Centre planned for Birkirkara.

Not everyone is applauding. Traditional nobility watchdog “Malta Patricians” called the move “tokenism that cheapens centuries of philanthropy”. But at the Rabat charity shop run by the order, volunteer Claire Zammit says footfall has doubled since the announcement. “People wander in asking if they can join online,” she grins, wrapping a second-hand Prada coat for a student. “I tell them yes—and point to the donation jar for extra karma.”

Conclusion
Whether you’re a history buff in Naxxar, a coder in California with Maltese roots, or simply someone who loves the idea of turning medieval chivalry into 21st-century clicks, the Academy’s digital crusade offers a rare chance to wear the white Maltese cross without ironing a tabard. In a country where every stone tells a story, the next chapter is being crowd-written—one volunteer, one pixel, one vaccine dose at a time. Sir Lancelot never had Wi-Fi, but St Lazarus just levelled up.