The Tridentine reform in the Diocese of Malta

Abstract

Before we embarked on this work we have never realized how such the Tridentine disciplinary decrees have meant for the Islands of Malta and Soto. There are many thing In our daily life which we are apt to take for granted. A look into the past can open our eyes and help us to understand the why and how of many things. Our work, treating as it does of the application into practice of the decrees of a General Council, may be said to belong to, if we may use the term, "applied" Theology. It is rather a historic-canonical work. The religious beliefs and moral convictions of the Maltese lived into practise. Theology as lived in the everyday life of the parish priest or of the simple Maltese or Gozitan peasantry or townsfolk. It is Theology in its pastoral, moral and practical fields. In a group of Islands as in the Maltese Archipelago, where daily life and Religion and Religion are so tightly interwoven together, Scaling with the religious life of the people, is dealing with the social, cultural and domestic way of life of these people. so our work would help us to reconstruct in our minds the daily life of our forefathers, as lived during the last decodes of the Sixteenth and the first half of the Seventeenth Centuries.