It has been a great sadness to those who love the Maltese Church to see its dirty linen being exposed so ruthlessly to public gaze. While commentators – outsiders like me – have long spoken of the need for the Maltese Church to renew itself after the debacle of the divorce referendum, those who have been at the forefront of working within the Church to save it from itself have previously held their counsel. As they should.

Loyalty to any leader or organisation is an essential quality. Loyalty should flow upwards to a leader, as well as downwards to subordinates. This does not mean that members of an organisation (including the Church) should not express their views clearly and frankly within it. But when a decision has been reached – even a decision to do nothing – it should be fully supported and public criticism should not then follow. Internal dissent properly expressed is all part of the clash of ideas that are healthy in an organisation. Public dissent that undermines the leadership, however, is destructive and self-defeating.

For reasons best known to him, one priest, who is also, like me, a commentator on the public scene, felt it incumbent, “as an act of conscience”, to state publicly what most who have been following the Maltese Church for the last few years were well aware of: that the Archbishop was not giving the Church the leadership it desperately needed.

This public act of disloyalty – albeit no doubt well-intentioned – led inevitably to a passionate response from a most respected academic close to the Church, accusing the priest and others of “crucifying” the Archbishop (for English speakers, the word “crucify” here is translated from the Maltese, meaning “dragging the Archbishop through the dirt”). Moreover, he accused the priest who had first broken the story of being driven by local politics: an old-fashioned Nationalist Party agenda which placed him at loggerheads with the Archbishop’s (correct) non-political stance on public issues.

My concern is utterly practical. It lies in my respect for the position of the Church as an important institution contributing to the fabric of Maltese life. One does not have to subscribe to all or any of the Church’s doctrines to appreciate that it plays an important role in Malta’s traditions and daily life and makes a vital contribution through its work in the parishes, old people’s homes, those suffering from disabilities, schools and the many other charitable institutions which it supports, where Malta’s welfare state is still largely absent.

The tragedy about these recent outbursts is that nobody comes out of them well – not the priest-columnist and not the Archbishop’s loyal supporter. Nor, above all, do the Maltese Church or the Archbishop himself, a good and well-loved man who is clearly not cut out to be the leader of the Church in Malta.

The Maltese Church, rather like the Vatican, is made up of a nest of vipers. As the disastrous impact of the divorce referendum showed, those in the Curia who had advised the Archbishop should have been removed years ago on grounds ofincompetence. Accountability should have demanded it. Instead, they remain in place to this day blocking, rather than fostering, progress.

Despite the return of Bishop Charles Scicluna from Rome, who was seen as the great white hope for a new approach, change has been stillborn. Having a second Bishop in Gozo doesn’t help resolve the leadership crisis. Indeed, it further complicates what is essentially a vacuum in leadership by having two bishops competing for the succession and, such is human nature, measuring their interventions accordingly.

As Archbishop Cremona has now rightly said, in his typically humble way, any decision about his future rests with Pope Francis: “I hold this position in obedience and will only leave in obedience. Since the Pope told me to stay on, I acquiesced in his wish.”

The king-maker in all this is, of course, the Apostolic Nuncio to Malta. Depending on his acumen and diligence, he will have reported the broken situation in Malta at first hand some time ago. The latest public outbreak of concern would have formed the basis of the Nuncio’s last despatch from Malta. One assumes the Vatican hierarchy has been alerted and talks with the government of Malta will now begin (they may already have begun).

Some have argued that the Church is a ‘divine’ institution and that somehow this absolves it from the human frailties that make it either effective or an abject failure in promoting its mission on earth. The Archbishop, the Auxiliary Bishop, the Bishop of Gozo and their monsignors in the Curia and elsewhere are made of flesh and blood and cannot hide behind the so-called magisterium of the Church.

The success of the Church’s divine mission on earth depends fundamentally, as has been exposed so starkly here, on the leadership, efficiency, effectiveness, organisation and humanity of those running it – mundane issues to those who see only ‘divinity’, but crucial to the Church’s success in its earthly vocation. Readers need only cast an eye at the palace revolution wrought in the Vatican since Pope Francis replaced Pope Emeritus Benedict (also a good but ineffectual holy man) with his wholesale clear-out of cardinals, crooked bankers and placemen to understand the truth of this.

The Maltese Church’s unwillingness to embrace change is now more vividly recognised because local society has changed so fast in the last 20 or 30 years and the Church has failed to adapt with it. The voices of Maltese dissent have been growing. Attendance at Sunday Mass is down from over 80 per cent 50 years ago to well under 50 per cent today, and declining it is thought at a rate of over one per cent a year.

It has emerged that reports proposing reforms of the Maltese Church and examining the plight of the parish clergy have been shelved by the Curia after they were submitted to the Archbishop last year. Inertia appears to have gripped the Church, leading to widespread unrest among the clergy – the foot-soldiers on which the Church so heavily depends.

The Maltese Church is behind the times in its style of leadership, its structures, and most of all in its outdated way of communicating its message. In the way it sanctions and even bullies and tries to control its parishioners, the Maltese Church comes across as authoritarian and lacking in compassion. If it is to speak to young people and the educated, it must adopt a more intelligent, more rational, less dogmatic tone of voice.

The heartfelt appeal from all quarters of the Maltese priesthood and the laity for the resurgence of a relevant Church – a Church that makes a difference to the everyday lives of people – has found its voice. One disloyal priest – acting on what he thought were the noblest of motives – has let the genie out of the bottle.

The Maltese Church is at a pivotal stage. Unless it regenerates its leadership, streamlines and modernises its organisation and smartens up its communications skills, it will become an institutional irrelevance – part of the pageant of festas, fireworks and colourful processions designed to satisfy the traditional pagan rites of band clubs, but with little or no deep devotional significance.