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The 9th of May 2001 witnessed the second visit of HH Pope John Paul II to Malta, a small island-state in the centre of the Mediterranean, just beneath Sicily. He came from Greece and Syria as part of his Jubilee Pilgrimage in the footsteps of St Paul. He came also to beatify three Maltese saintly persons: Fr George Preca, Ignatius Falzon and Sister Adeodata Pisani. Fr Preca is the most famous and revered.
Born in February 1880 in Valletta, the capital of Malta, George Preca was ordained priest in December 1906. As a newly ordained priest of just over twenty-six years, Fr Preca had long harboured in his mind and heart a preoccupation with the fragile basis of religious teaching among the Maltese. He was also sensitive enough to foresee that the Catholic faith in Malta was heading for a shaking during the dawning 20th century. Malta was then still a British colony, and it was experiencing the birth pains of rising nationalism.
As a deacon, George used to visit the Grand Harbour area to talk to sailors of different nationalities and lead them on to a religious discussion. He was also already in contact with a small group of youths whom he met in the fields around St Cajetan Church Hamrun. Then, after his ordination, Fr Preca went through some sort of a very charismatic experience. He retired alone for about three months. After his daily morning Mass, no one would see him again. He himself said later that he would go up to the house loft and stay there meditating and praying the Bible, especially the Gospels, to which he remained devoted till death and which he was to propagate widely by means of his Society later on.
George Preca was eager to teach and catechise. In fact, later on in life he used to repeat that he was born for that very mission: to instruct God's People in the ways of truth and justice. The first group of youths, whom he had met near the Hamrun Parish Church, he formed through sheer personal initiative and pastoral care. That was his mark from the very beginning. He used to observe them, just back from work, idling away their time chattering and smoking. His pastoral sensibility moved him towards them. At first he befriended them: he even asked for a home-rolled cigarette, even though he did not smoke. In spite of his new black cassock, he sat down with them on the dusty stones in the field. A fruitful and providential friendship was thus sealed. Of the group, he eventually singled out the Servant of God Eugenio Borg (1886-1967), a dockyard pattern-maker, to give him deeper formation. Fr Preca used to spend hours with Eugene Borg meditating God's Word from a copy of the Douai Bible, especially St John's Gospel.
At that time, of course, there was no Maltese translation of the Bible which was a closed untouchable book to the large majority of the Catholic population. Prof. Mgr Peter Paul Saydon (d. 1971), a world-renowned Biblical scholar, was the first to translate the whole Bible into Maltese from the original languages - a classical translation which cost him thirty years (1929-59) of painstaking work. Mgr Saydon himself later testified that he would have stopped his work if it were not for the tangible support he got from Father Preca and from the Members of his Society who used to buy the greatest bulk of the books. Mgr Saydon appreciated the biblical grounding of Father Preca's talks and sermons. Saydon was to describe Father Preca as an eminent "evangelical preacher."
On March 7, 1907, after the loft experience mentioned above, Father Preca and his group of men began to meet regularly at a rented room in St Joseph High Road, Hamrun. He slowly and patiently formed them into instructed Christians and aroused in their hearts a strong and daring love for Jesus Christ. Then one day, Father George came among his group and, unannounced, he sent off the married ones: "From now on," he told them among protests, "all members here should be celibate."
That was how the SDC: Societas Doctrinae Christianae (Society of Christian Doctrine) - M.U.S.E.U.M. ["Magister Utinam Sequatur Evangelium Universus Mundus" translated, "Master, may the whole world follow the Gospel." ] came to be in 1907. Of course, Father Preca would never accept the title of "Founder": he attributed this to St Paul. Fr George used to repeat that Paul's words to Timothy inspired the birth of the Society: "You have heard everything that I teach in public; hand it on to reliable people so that they in turn will be able to teach others" (2 Tim 2:2).
Naturally, Father Preca did not envisage from the start the eventual development and administrative set-up of the Society. Its growth was gradual, but it was providential that the Society enjoyed the physical and active presence of its Founder for fifty-five years--from its beginning till his death in 1962. His was a daring dream indeed: entrusting a teaching ministry to the laity with a system for permanent and daily formation, ... and this at the beginning of the 20th century, more than five decades before Vatican II. Unlike priests and religious, the SDC Members do not take a solemn vow of celibacy, but a private one. They remain totally lay men and women living a normal life of work, and they do not normally live in community. Their celibacy is a visible option of dedication to Christ and his Church through the catechising apostolate.
At the beginning, the response of the Church authorities in Malta to Fr Preca's initiative was a mixed one. The first twenty years were indeed a very difficult and trying time for the young priest, and also for the members. As the Society gradually began to open its Centres in the parishes, some parish priests were all out for this new venture. Others smelled too much independence for the laity and opposed him drastically. There was a time also when Father Preca was even ordered to close down the Catechism Centres he had opened. In 1910 Fr Preca started another innovation: a female section of the Society, and this added faggots to the fire. Insults and ridicule appeared also in some newspapers. In 1916 Fr George, and mainly the first two Superiors, Eugenio Borg and Giannina Cutajar, were regularly summoned to the Bishop's Curia for an Ecclesiastical Inquiry. The future of the Society hung in the balance, till eventually Archbishop Dom Maurus Caruana was convinced of its orthodoxy and its beneficial presence in the parishes. In April 1932, seventy years ago, the Archbishop granted diocesan approval to the Society of Christian Doctrine. By that year, the Society had already twenty-four Centres for males, each centre averaging between 100 and 300 children. The same can be said about the twenty-two Centers for females.
The Society had its first social roots within an area of working class people, and in the Malta of the first three decades of the last century that was only natural. Fr Preca was after the religious instruction of the common people and their children. Most of the first Members were dockyard or manual workers. This, of course, highlighted even more his inspirational genius: he was able to translate high theological language to common folk, and then train the dedicated among them to teach it to others. He himself used to translate into Maltese parts of the New Testament and then pass them on to the Members who hand copied them and learned them fully by heart, and then repeated them to fellow workers. In fact, biblical and sound theology formed the backbone of all of Preca¡¯s initiatives and devotions, such as his intense devotion to Mary, and the spiritual practices he propagated were devoid of popular sentimentality.
The people responded marvellously to Fr Preca's appeal, and not only manual workers, but almost everybody. Fr Preca's sermons, or open-air religious talks, still known as Sajdiet in Maltese (from the Gospel image of the fish net), drew hundreds of people from all walks of life. Even some of Malta's top politicians respected him and sought his advice. Daily, he was totally at the service of the people, all the people, through hearing confessions, giving conferences, sitting for spiritual direction and comforting people.
Besides, he devoted long hours to writing mainly in order to provide the SDC Members with instructional and ascetical manuals, as well as a means to impart his spirit to his followers. He wrote without the modern comforts of electricity or word processing! His books, all significantly written in Maltese, except two in Latin, are solidly biblical and orthodox. He meditated and scrutinised the Bible so thoroughly that he wrote 600 meditative and practical Bible Sessions, covering almost the whole spectrum of the Bible books. Some of the major writings of Father Preca, out of the total of some 145 books and pamphlets, are available in English translation.
Untiringly, Fr Preca continued his apostolic mission till the ripe age of eighty-two years. He was bound to his bed only during the last six months. He died on July 26, 1962. Though he never claimed any special favours, his humility and holiness were never in doubt. People flocked to him even after death. The Cause for Canonisation, officially started in 1975, climaxed in the solemn beatification ceremony in Malta by the Pope himself on May 9, 2001.
The catechetical work in the parishes is still the main priority of the Society of Blessed Preca through its 110 Centres around Malta and Gozo. The Society has also corollaries which are very relevant to its charism: St Michael Secondary School for boys; Preca Library, a first-class Christian bookshop next to the Mother House at Blata l-Bajda, and the Veritas Printing Press which specialises in and helps religious publications.
Outside Malta, the first successful overseas centers of the Society of Christian Doctrine were those of Australia which started in the 1950s when Fr Preca himself asked for volunteer members to go to that continent which was receiving thousands of Maltese immigrants. Then in 1983, an SDC presence started in the Sudan, in El Obeid, but now there is one in Khartoum. There are two other SDC centres in Kenya: in Ruiru, near Nairobi, and in Mpeketoni, in the Diocese of Malindi.
In Europe, the SDC is in London, Brixton, in the Archdiocese of Southwark; and in Korce, Albania. In Latin America, it is in Lurin, Peru, close to Lima.
How then, in a nutshell, can the ideal of Blessed George Preca be presented? He always announced Jesus Christ, the Verbum Dei, the Incarnate Son of God, and Crucified Master--meditated, loved, and imitated in his attitudes of generous and self-emptying radicality towards God the Father and his fellow people. Father George Preca presented no other ideal. Christ the Teacher, Victim and Victor for the sake of the Father's Kingdom, is the inspiration behind Father Preca's incarnational spirituality.
This ideal still urges his dedicated lay men and women to gradually put on Christ Jesus instead of the old self. Thus they will have the spiritual stamina to oppose the world's vanity by their presence in the world without being of the world. With that Gospel motivation clear in their hearts, they try to strive ceaselessly to spread Christ's love and incarnate his salvific message in the world, according to the M.U.S.E.U.M. dynamic prayer-motto: Magister Utinam Sequatur Evangelium Universus Mundus--Divine Teacher, may the whole world follow the Gospel.