“This poses a challenge because people donate to those organisations they can empathise with,” he said.

On Monday, the Church published its financial report showing a deficit of €1.7 million for 2010, more than double the deficit registered a year before.

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When times change, change with them

Source/Credit: October 13, 200

The Maltese outpost of the Catholic Church is in financial trouble. I will resist the urge to make wisecracks about Joseph Muscat, the mittilkless and electricity bills, and move on.

But may I just say what a relief it is to hear somebody own up to personal economic woes without blaming it on the government, or demanding that the government does something about it right now?

The irony is that this is one situation where it is clear that the government can and should do something about it, and that the state is very much to blame for those woes. The Church has been crippled because the welfare state, in Malta, has great big gaps which continue to be plugged by religious orders.

In the same way that another social service – this time, social housing – was and is still being provided largely at the expense of private landlords and landowners, through a mix of requisitioned property and rent laws which protect tenants paying risible rent, so the state freeloads off religious orders in the provision of care to abandoned children, the disabled, battered wives and old people. Oh yes, and schooling, too, because there are thousands of children in Catholic schools whose parents are paying nothing at all.

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