I. The Maltese Church

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the period with which this article is concerned, Malta was governed by four bishops, the last of them being the Neapolitan Monsignor Vincenzo Labini who served for twenty-seven years (1780–1807). Following the bishops, the most important members of the secular clergy were the canons of the cathedral and the collegiate churches. They were the sons of the elites, constantly fighting among themselves for precedence and quarreling with the bishop over their privileges.Footnote ⁶ With the exception of the Dominicans, who held the parish of Porto Salvo at Valletta, none of the eight religious orders governed any parish.Footnote ⁷ The faithful were thus largely in the hands of the secular clergy. When the knights of the Order of Saint John arrived in Malta in 1530, the diocese counted some 20,000 souls divided into eleven parishes. By 1782, the number of parishes had grown to thirty-four, seven of which were on the island of Gozo. The faithful were served by a preponderant “clerical army” of 1,091 priests, who made up 1.3 percent of a population of 86,296, or about five clergymen for every 400 individuals. However, the number of souls differed enormously from one parish to another. At Saint Philip's Żebbuġ there were fifty-four priests—or one priest for eighty-one parishioners—while at Saint Paul's Safi the parish priest had three clergy at his service for a population of 166 souls (one priest for every forty parishioners).Footnote ⁸ These priests, especially those among them who opposed the conciliar fathers’ wish to impose their reformative language, are the focus of this article.

Why a section of the clergy preferred to follow their own moral code is not difficult to explain. It is doubtful, for instance, that their vocation was sincere. Furthermore, the clergy, with their low educational and social standing—and especially with their disproportionate numbers compared to the needs of the faithful—lived in much the same way as their parishioners.Footnote ⁹ This clerical proletariat was essentially comprised of “peasant-priests” who engaged in daily battles for survival with the parishioners.Footnote ¹⁰ Moreover, the laity were deeply involved in Church affairs. They evinced a high degree of commitment to their church, funding most of the liturgical services themselves. Such lay initiatives in religion deprived the religious profession of its prestige and lessened the distance between clergy and laity, often souring relations between the two.Footnote ¹¹ The attempt to establish a clear distinction between clergy and faithful, or what Giovanni Greco calls “Tridentine sacerdotalisation,” had failed.Footnote ¹²

II. Clerical Offenses

Between 1750 and 1798, 167 pleadings were made against members of the clergy (see table 1). However, we cannot take these statistics at face value because those causes that actually entered the criminal justice system may only be the tip of the iceberg. There were several reasons why some crimes went unreported and escaped the record keepers. The mere threat of court action might have been enough to cause potential defendants to settle, and since people lived in close daily contact with each other, they may not have wanted to stir up trouble in the community. By sorting out their problems at an informal, personal level, no trace of these disputes was left in the historical record. Commonplace complaints and offensives were more likely to be settled out of court, unlike the more intense, high-stakes cases that appear in the archive. While the 1794 murder of Don Bernardo Busuttil—a priest from the parish of Saint Mary's Żebbuġ on the island of Gozo whose body was thrown into a ravine to be eaten by dogs—testifies to the terrible hostility lurking just beneath the surface between clergy and laymen, this was an exceptional case.Footnote ¹³

Table 1. Pleadings against the Clergy, 1750–1798

Sources: Archiepiscopal Archives, Malta (AAM), Dicta 24–30A; AAM, Informationes 5–6; AAM, Supplicationes 16–19; and Curia Episcopalis Melitensis, Acta Originalia 673, 676–677, 683, 687, 689–694, 696, 698, 701–706, 805.

To be sure, there were those who “didn't esteem [the clerical] collar,” such as a layman who warned a priest not to delude himself into thinking “that the tonsure enables [the clergy] to devour the people.”Footnote ¹⁴ Such litigants had few qualms with taking legal action against a priest, but most parishioners lacked the willpower it took to report one. This reluctance to go to court arose not only because clergy were anointed people but also because people may have feared reprisal: “I was about to hit him,” said Benedetto Gelfo of Valletta in 1759, “but I then remembered his clerical character and drew back.”Footnote ¹⁵ Although priests were not much different from the other peasants in the parish, they did have connections and could, for instance, threaten their opponents with exile from Malta.Footnote ¹⁶ There was yet another factor that reduced the total number of priests brought to official notice, and therefore their deeds were often not heard in court: people regarded the courts as a last resort and avoided them if they could. Anyone who reported a crime engaged in an expensive operation and victims would often decide it was not worth the time or money to bring their opponent to justice.

The number of pleadings themselves say nothing about how priests became involved in these disturbances, nor do they specify their transgressions. Clergy were indicted on various offences: for appearing in the lay court without the bishop's permission, for insulting their superiors, or for inciting the people against their parish priest.Footnote ¹⁷ Others were accused of performing manual work or going about dressed as laymen.Footnote ¹⁸ Still others were brought to court for inflicting property damage, injury, or even death. For instance, on June 26, 1756, a prosecutor reported the following unfortunate incident to the judge:

These were isolated instances, and the suits launched against the clergy can be grouped into three broad categories: physical abuse, verbal abuse, and sexual incontinence. Such were the main crimes for which clergy members were disciplined by the court. Priests were supposed to be separate from the laity by what Luciano Allegra calls a cultural “abyss.”Footnote ²⁰ Clergy were to be celibate and shun violent behavior, vulgar language, fighting, gambling, and sowing discord among the people. They were also expected to avoid intoxication and bad company in the wine bars and taverns. Due to such proscriptions, their gender identity was blurred and they were viewed as not wholly masculine. However, their “emasculinity” (Robert Swanson's term) did not prevent them from undeniably being men.Footnote ²¹ Violence offered them a means of affirming their identity publicly and impressing any bystanders. Like other men defending their honor, the clergy would not allow themselves to be verbally insulted or physically jostled without responding. In a world where everyone was quick to draw knives, violence seemed a normal way of settling conflict.Footnote ²²

Causes dealing with clergy accused of physical violence dominate the court's records with 78 cases (46.7 percent). In most instances, punching, kicking, slapping, or biting was noted, but aggressors sometimes used any object they happened to grab hold of as a weapon (such as keys, the straps of a bridle, stones, sticks, a cabbage, pieces of wood or iron, a butt end or a spade handle). Some priests had no problem with trying to throw their opponent down a well, lay their hands on a colleague, or even manhandle their own relatives, including their sister or mother.Footnote ²³ Some cases were particularly vicious, leading to serious injuries or homicide. One plaintiff was treated at the hospital “where [he] remained for four days” after having been stabbed with a dagger.Footnote ²⁴ Physical abuse, which dogged the steps of priests, could begin simply with an insult, a regular part of litigation throughout the period given that it is documented in 49 cases (29.3 percent). As Gerd Schwerhoff remarks of such conflicts: “When the adversaries face each other, certain menacing gestures mark the frontier between verbal and physical violence.”Footnote ²⁵ This could even include touching the adversary's nose, as in the case of Don Giorgio Attard from the parish of Saint George's Qormi (1770), but quarrels usually started with offensive words.Footnote ²⁶ Slanderers had a rich store of vulgarities at their disposal and few kind words for each other, which made the diocesan court a popular venue for the defamed to protect their reputation and be, so they claimed, “restored to our pristine reputation, with which we have always lived.”Footnote ²⁷ The court heard cases that involved priests shouting insults at their male opponents, using words such as “knaves,” “cowards,” “thieves,” “scoundrels,” “debtors,” or “swindlers.”Footnote ²⁸ Women, who were more likely to be the victims of sexual defamation, were accorded a broad range of sexually-based epithets such as “whores,” “flirts,” “sluts,” and “prostitutes.” In 1767, one deponent remembered hearing Don Michele Gatt of Saint Philip's call a woman named Maddalena a “stinking broom.”Footnote ²⁹ But defamation did not necessarily consist of verbal abuse alone since an offender could, for example, dirty the door of his enemy's house with human excrement.Footnote ³⁰ In another case that reached the court in 1755, an indictment recited that Don Giacomo Pullicino and his brother of Saint Mary's Mosta nailed two horns on the door of their opponent's house, implying that the occupier was a cuckold.Footnote ³¹

It may come as a surprise that, contrary to evidence found elsewhere, charges of sexual incontinence—the accusation that a priest could not suppress his sexuality—were not a relatively significant part of litigation.Footnote ³² Examination of the records turned up only 25 instances (15.0 percent), which means that the Maltese ecclesiastical court could not be called, as it was in England, a “bawdy court.”Footnote ³³ This comparative lack of sexual cases means either that sexual deviance was an infrequent occurrence or, more likely, that there was a general tolerance toward the sex life of the clergy.Footnote ³⁴ So long as the people were satisfied with the minimal pastoral activity and the clergy ministered adequately to their needs—mass on holy days and the celebration of marriages, baptisms, and funerals—they did not report licentious priests. The case of Don Fortunato Vella, parish priest of Senglea, is indicative of this attitude: he spent seven years in the dungeons of the inquisition for his carnal sins but still returned to his cure in 1747.Footnote ³⁵ Louis Châtellier makes a similar remark regarding Strasbourg: “Having served their sentence, scandalous priests return without exception to their parishes where they live as if nothing had happened.”Footnote ³⁶

III. Arrest

A case began in court in one of two ways. The first, ex officio (inquisition) cases, were brought in the name of the court itself.Footnote ³⁷ These cases were the prime duty of the tribunal's prosecutor, the legitimate defender of the rights of the Church, who could even break into an offender's house to catch him in the act (in flagrante delicto).Footnote ³⁸ One such prosecutor, Don Antonio Mizzi, reported to the court on December 22, 1752:

The second and most common form were “instance” or litigation cases, so called because they were promoted “at the instance” of one party who sought redress against the other. 155 (92.8 percent) of the cases examined were litigation cases. As in England, the court's proceedings depended on how far the people “were willing to assist the courts in an active and positive fashion.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Of the 167 priests reported to the ecclesiastical court, only 54—a little less than one-third (32.3 percent)—were taken into custody and sent to trial. The reasons for the relative paucity of detentions were various. A complainant could be satisfied with the court ordering the offender to, for example, give the wronged party back his credit, pay reparations for killing his dog, or not shoot at his pigeons under pain of a fine of 10 uncie.Footnote ⁴¹ In a defamation action from 1767, the plaintiff only asked that his antagonist belie himself publicly or in writing.Footnote ⁴² Initial citations could also be sufficient in bringing one of the parties to heel and accept, for instance, that a perito (expert) should estimate the cost of building a dividing wall between two fields.Footnote ⁴³

Priests were taken into detention only after the court had carefully weighed all the evidence and had found enough incriminating information.Footnote ⁴⁴ Poorly supported charges were discarded and unsubstantiated testimony rejected. The judge eschewed hasty accusations, throwing out cases where only one witness could be found or no evidence was available to adequately prosecute the accused.Footnote ⁴⁵ The canonist Panormitanus (Nicholas de Tudeschis, 1386–1445) had argued that a judge should rule on the basis of the evidence, and such precedent made the search for empirical evidence or material proof (corpo di delitto) at the scene of the crime an integral part of criminal procedures.Footnote ⁴⁶ Therefore, the best way to ascertain whether one Don Angelo Zahra really had used a marzucca [sic] to beat Salvatore Spiteri was to search his house. Don Angelo claimed that he kept no “offensive weapons,” but in 1767 the prosecutor found both the incriminating instrument at his residence as well as a pointed tool and a stick.Footnote ⁴⁷

Certain conclusive proofs were needed to determine if a clergyman violated a woman. As two midwives reported in a case from 1756:

It was only after the court collected all the evidence (processo informativo) that the judge decided to take action and the suspect enjoined to appear in court. This order was served personally by the captain and his alarii.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, as a priest was not to be humiliated, he was not necessarily taken straight to the ecclesiastical prisons at Vittoriosa; he could instead be put under house arrest or sent to an oratory to await trial.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the case of Don Alberto Abela of Saint Catherine's Żejtun, who knew that the tribunal was gathering information against him for having assaulted two brothers of the Confraternity of the Rosary, the priest voluntarily appeared before the vicar-general in 1755. He must have realized that cooperation with the prosecution could help his case.Footnote ⁵¹

Conversely, some defendants were rendered contumacious for their failure to respond to court citations, which demonstrates that the efforts of the captain to round up suspects were not always successful. Some accused avoided arrest by escaping through windows or seeking sanctuary in a church.Footnote ⁵² In 1783, the aggressive priest Don Arcangelo Cumbo of Tarxien threatened the court's officials with a hoe when they tried to apprehend him.Footnote ⁵³ A particularly interesting case comes from 1756 when Don Salvatore Hellul, a morally dubious priest from Qrendi, pelted the alarii with stones from the top of his house when they demanded entry. Failing to get his permission to enter, they knocked down the door and went up a spiral staircase where they found an armed Don Salvatore wearing only a shirt and underpants. He tried to shoot at them but, fortunately for the alarii, the gun did not fire. It was only then that he surrendered, put on his clothes, and was taken to prison on his donkey.Footnote ⁵⁴

IV. Cross-Examination

The arrests of Don Arcangelo and Don Salvatore were exceptional cases, for most priests made their way peacefully to Vittoriosa to await trial. They did not appear before the bishop who, despite serving as the diocesan court's head and principal judge invested with all jurisdiction, did not preside in person over its sessions.Footnote ⁵⁵ Most ordinaries were often encumbered with business elsewhere, and some lacked the specialized legal knowledge required to properly preside. Still others, as was the case of Bishop Bartolomeo Rull (1757–1769), were incapacitated by ill health.Footnote ⁵⁶ Instead, the vicar-general acted as deputy president in the bishop's absence.Footnote ⁵⁷ However, the vicar-general delegated some of his judicial functions to the provicar of the island of Gozo and the archdeacon of the cathedral at Mdina.Footnote ⁵⁸ With some rare exceptions, church judges were experienced lawyers—skilled, able, and dedicated men who, like Reverend Canon Don Adriano Gurgion, held doctorates in both canon and civil law (in utroque iure).Footnote ⁵⁹ They were assisted by the assessor and the prosecutor (promotor fiscalis), who, together with the court's chancellor, were responsible for diocesan justice and administration.Footnote ⁶⁰ The notary held an important office since only he had the skills required to draw up the innumerable technical instruments for navigating the complicated path of the law's process.Footnote ⁶¹

There was no time frame that determined when the judge had to begin interrogating the accused. Interrogations could occur two or four days after incarceration, if not the same day.Footnote ⁶² Don Federico Busuttil of Cospicua, however, was arrested on July 8, 1794, and did not make his appearance in court until seven days later on July 15.Footnote ⁶³ Captivity would, perhaps, make the defendants search their conscience and change their attitude. As Don Pantaleone Dalli of Saint Mary's Gudja stated, “During that time I always turned over in my mind the cause of my imprisonment.” The details of this incident are found in a petition he addressed to the judge: he was accused of incest for having fathered a child with his brother's fiancée. On April 4, 1794, a month after his arrest, he appeared voluntarily before the ecclesiastical judge, admitted his crime and demanded that the tribunal “solve this matter of so much importance.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Following a decree of the Roman council of 1725 that one should not incriminate oneself in criminal matters, the litigants did not speak under oath (unlike those who testified in the tribunal of the Roman Inquisition).Footnote ⁶⁵ Having given their own personal details, they were asked whether they knew the cause of their detention. Most pretended that they did not know and declared they were innocent, but they could declare with sincerity, for example, that “my mother told me it was for my supposed scandalous relations with Clara and Anna Maria.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Questions followed one another naturally, though leading questions were prohibited. Cross-examination sometimes extended till the late evening (ora esset tarda) before continuing on some other day, with an interim of even two weeks.Footnote ⁶⁷

Such persistent questioning was only one way to wear down the defendants’ resistance. To make them admit their guilt, witnesses’ reports were read out to them and, in some rare cases, defendants could be made to confront their opponents.Footnote ⁶⁸ “This priest,” declared a clergyman of Valletta in 1777, “is Don Francesco but I don't know his surname.”Footnote ⁶⁹ These attempts were often successful, which made some priests capitulate. This is what Deacon Giovanni Battista Cassar of Senglea admitted in 1794: “I confess that I made a mistake and beg for pardon.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Likewise, Don Giovanni Paolo Borg of St Helen's confessed in 1779: “although I've denied that I had commerce with Anna, here present, the truth is that I twice made use of her body, the second time being last January.”Footnote ⁷¹

Though verbally pressured, priests were given a fair trial and there are no recorded instances of torture. Priests had several substantial prerogatives in court: they could compel the attendance of witnesses on their behalf, and those who could not afford a defense counsel were assisted by the procuratore dei poveri (legal aid).Footnote ⁷² These lawyers did not appear personally in court but did provide sought-after written advice before or after the trial. They were especially helpful in exposing weaknesses in the evidence, basing their strategies on legal texts by renowned canon lawyers like Sebastiano Guazzini (1559–circa 1615) and Prospero Farinacci (1554–1618). A good example of such defense is the six-folio report dated 1756 by Don Ludovico Barbaro, a talented and exemplary priest of good reputation having been a consultor at the Inquisition. His client, Don Federico Busuttil, had never previously been reprimanded for his licentious life, as canon law demanded, nor were the threats his client addressed to the parish priest injurious. He did carry firearms for his own defense, and if he played cards, it was only for a pastime.Footnote ⁷³ Other extenuating circumstances produced by the lawyers included the defendant having been drunk or provoked.Footnote ⁷⁴ Another important question lawyers needed to address was whether the offence had been done with malice, premeditatedly, or in sudden anger.Footnote ⁷⁵ Additionally, a good lawyer would quickly realize the contradictions of a plaintiff's statement and might even bring him, rather than the defendant, under suspicion.Footnote ⁷⁶

Lawyers challenged the witnesses’ authenticity, making their statements appear false or suspect. They could claim that the witnesses were the friends or relatives of the denouncer, or that they testified only on the basis of hearsay (de auditu) and not because they themselves had, for instance, really seen (de visu) a priest enter the house of a woman.Footnote ⁷⁷ The testimonies of boys were ignored since they were under age and assumed to be impressionable, potentially repeating whatever the accused told them to say.Footnote ⁷⁸ Lawyers also called into question the character or competence of the deponents, claiming that those who had informed against their client were well known knaves of the worst moral quality, being thieves or rapists, impostors or quarrelers.Footnote ⁷⁹ One instance of this belittlement can be seen following the serious charge brought by deponent Giuseppe Azzopardo of Nadur against a parish priest. The witness claimed that his son, who had died on July 7, 1786 at the age of seventeen, had been beaten to death by the priest, yet only one of the testimonies confirmed this assertion. For Don Saverio Cassar, the provicar of Gozo, this was a false charge since the lad died a year after the incident. For his part, the physician who treated the boy, Doctor Giuseppe Stivala, dubbed the accuser a first-class liar. The judge thus excluded the case for these reasons.Footnote ⁸⁰

V. Out-of-Court Settlement

Having made his defense and (usually) pleading not guilty, the priest on trial left “the matter to the good justice of [the] grand court,” and waited for his sentence.Footnote ⁸¹ Even so, it seems that a judicial sentence was not always the most suitable instrument with which to settle disputes involving the clergy.Footnote ⁸² Rather, as Marco Cavarzere has observed in the Brugnato and Luni-Sarzana dioceses of eastern Liguria, such sentences were “an obstacle or an extrema ratio to which recourse was made only when all the other ways had been exhausted.”Footnote ⁸³ Ottavia Niccoli concurs, referring to the tribunal of the Torrone at Bologna when she claims that “the proceedings seldom end with a sentence.” Niccoli demonstrates that as many as 45 percent of the cases within a ten-year period (1633–1642) were resolved by the litigants outside court.Footnote ⁸⁴ Renata Ago has also come to a similar conclusion: the number of sentences passed by the Roman tribunal of the auditor camerae in the seventeenth century were for only 30 percent of all cases.Footnote ⁸⁵ Stuart Carroll makes the same point for France while Ronald A. Marchant, Richard M. Wunderli, R. B. Outhwaite, and especially R. H. Helmholz do the same for England.Footnote ⁸⁶

This is no less true for Malta. The absence of a verdict could mean poor recordkeeping but, while such negligence is possible, the popes’ concern for the archives—especially the archivist Pope Benedict XIII Orsini (1724–1730) who insisted on the erection of ecclesiastical archives in order to improve administrative efficiency and transmit “faith and truth”—makes this unlikely.Footnote ⁸⁷ There must have been a much more worthwhile reason for this apparent lack of sentences, such as purposeful omission due to lack of action on the part of the court.

The principal aim of the ecclesiastical judge was not to enforce repression, but rather to facilitate a means for litigants to bring their suits to a speedy out-of-court settlement. Seven such examples were found in the research undertaken.Footnote ⁸⁸ One of these instances, which Renata Ago would call una giustizia personalizzata (or “personalized justice,” a recognized alternative to “official justice”), concerned the 1759 case between Giuseppe Micallef and Don Francesco Abela from the island of Gozo. The priest had hit his opponent in the face and chest with a hammer, causing him to bleed from his nose and lip, but ten days later the plaintiff appeared in court and withdrew the case.Footnote ⁸⁹

Unlike other places, litigants in Malta did not notarize their agreement or give a sign of peace such as a kiss, a handshake, or having lunch together.Footnote ⁹⁰ Instead of a physical sign of friendship, the court's clerk inserted the notation cessit et cedit in the dossier to serve as a record if ever one was needed. Rarely do the records hint at who actually brought the litigants to a solution given that there was no formal mechanism for dispute settlement, although it could have been the court itself. In 1753, the court's public prosecutor tried to sponsor one such extrajudicial, though ultimately unsuccessful compromise between Pasquale Giuve and two priests, Don Giuseppe Muscat and Don Francesco Borg.Footnote ⁹¹ However, the mediators were often from outside the court, with reconciliation resulting from Christian obligation and community or kinship pressure rather than legal means. It must be presumed, therefore, that relatives reconciled Angelo Attard with his brother Don Giorgio in 1770, yet the mediator could also have been the parish priest.Footnote ⁹²

Disputes settled privately were made “for the love of God” (per amorem Dei), an expression which relates to the Christian command to love one's neighbor.Footnote ⁹³ This Christian brotherhood was one item of the statutes of the confraternities, whose members were not permitted to file legal suits against each other.Footnote ⁹⁴ Compromise, though it was not necessarily an altogether altruistic act because legal proceedings, could be renounced in return for a cash indemnity or, in cases of rape, for a dowry.Footnote ⁹⁵

VI. Judgment and Punishment

As table 2 shows, only one of the clergy whose case made it all the way through to a verdict was declared innocent and thus acquitted, the judge declaring: “He is guilty in no way.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Fifteen priests received a conditional sentence, or what Cardinal De Luca called a “conditional absolution.”Footnote ⁹⁷ They were required to present themselves (de se praesentando) to the ecclesiastical court whenever summoned and were to keep distant from their former opponents or lovers (de non tractando seu conversando).Footnote ⁹⁸ Don Constanzo Madiona, a cloth and cotton merchant from the island of Gozo, was found not guilty of usury but, since several deponents confirmed that he had cheated them, he was prohibited from lending and selling cotton.Footnote ⁹⁹

Table 2. Sentences by the Ecclesiastical Court, 1750–1798

Sources: Archiepiscopal Archives, Malta (AAM), Dicta 24–28A; AAM, Informationes 5–6; AAM, Supplicationes 16–19; and Curia Episcopalis Melitensis, Acta Originalia 673, 677, 683, 689–692, 694, 698, 705, 706.

Nevertheless, if church tribunals were at pains to deal with delinquent priests, they keenly defended their image and honor. As has been said for Italy, proceedings against recalcitrant clergy generally ended only in “the pulling of their ears.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The ideal solution for their crimes was to satisfy the court with a financial payment (12 cases), which settled the matter and prevented the priest from enduring public humiliation. Take the case of Don Valerio Borg of Cospicua, who was charged in 1757 with having had scandalous relations with one Fortunata. He paid 12 uncie for the proceedings against him to be dropped so as “to keep the good reputation which he enjoyed as a priest.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Another solution, which shows that causes ideally were to be resolved with little fuss so as not to compromise the clergy in the eyes of the locals, was to transfer a problematic priest to another parish.Footnote ¹⁰² This was the case of Don Salvatore Sammut, who, in 1796, was made to leave his parish of the annunciation Balzan and go to stay with his sister at Saint George's Qormi so that he could not consort with Maria, his lover.Footnote ¹⁰³

The diocesan court's indulgence followed the advice of Trent that “benevolence toward those to be corrected often effects more than severity, exhortation more than threat and charity more than force.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ These accommodating procedures opposed the repressive reforms that Saint Carlo Borromeo (1538–1584) inflexibly laid down for his diocese of Milan.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ They also went against Cardinal De Luca's warnings. In 1674, De Luca argued that the number of clergy was small in ages past, their positions limited according to the needs of the Church. They would have joined the “clerical army” to serve God and lead a more spiritual and perfect life. Crimes were rarely heard of and the judge proceeded with mercy and prudence, as a loving father treats his children, so as not to damage the Church's reputation or scandalize the people with public punishment. “But nowadays,” De Luca continued in Il Vescovo Pratico, “and particularly in Italy where the number of clergy almost equals that of laymen, [most] embrace the clerical state to enjoy an easy life and commit crimes. . . . The bishop should proceed against them with more rigor than the lay magistrate because a crime committed by the clergy is greater than one perpetrated by laymen.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This policy of repression failed, however, and there prevailed instead a broad tolerance toward criminal clergy, with the judges preferring a noiseless, quiet type of judicial administration. Repentance, reformation, and amendment were the watchwords of the Church judges, with redemption valued over punishment. In the authoritative words of Giovanni Romeo, Church authorities preferred “the oil of mercy to the wine of discipline.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Not even imprisonment was intended to tarnish the priests’ reputation unnecessarily. Ecclesiastical prisons were generally “provisional” rather than “punitive” places, for most priests were detained only briefly before being transferred to stay with the Capuchins at Calcara, the Jesuits at Floriana, or the Oratorians at Vittoriosa or Senglea.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In these places, convicted clergy undertook penance for their soul's health and were restored to a healthy relationship with God and their neighbors. In other instances, they were discharged from prison after a short period, the time they had spent in detention serving as their punishment. Various examples of this kind of negotiable justice can be cited, and priests based their demand to be set free on several factors.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Don Giovanni Paolo explained to the court in 1779 that detention not only meant the loss of liberty but also the loss of a stable source of livelihood. As the family's breadwinner, his detention put his mother and brother under significant privation, for it cost him more than 8 tarì a day to support them.Footnote ¹¹⁰ A priest could plead, with some exaggeration, the danger of “losing his health” if he stayed any longer in prison because he suffered from a “malign fever” or “strong hypochondria.”Footnote ¹¹¹ The admission by three priests from Rabat in 1755 that they deserved a greater punishment than imprisonment for addressing offensive words to the cathedral's maestro di cappella (choir master) opened the door to a merciful pardon.Footnote ¹¹² Don Saverio Said of Saint Philip's claimed in 1757 that he had been sent to prison for nothing more than a minor offence: punching Angelo Bonnici in the face in the sacristy of the chapel of Our Lady of Sorrows. Detention aside, he argued that he had already atoned for the crime by his suspension a divinis—where he was prohibited from saying mass and administering the sacraments—which, “as everyone knows, is a terrible punishment.”Footnote ¹¹³

Furthermore, there was always the possibility of countermanding the diocesan court, even though the Council of Trent—wishing to reinforce the bishop's powers and repeating the thirty-fifth constitution of the fourth Lateran council (1215)—decreed that appeals could be made only after a definitive sentence by the initiating court or after two years.Footnote ¹¹⁴ These appeals demonstrate how the bishop's jurisdiction could be circumscribed.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The religious orders, for instance, judged their own members and ran their own prisons.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In addition, crimes like witchcraft and apostasy fell within the remit of the inquisitor.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The diocesan court proceeded only in the first ruling, for both Palermo's metropolitan court and the sacra congregazione de’ vescovi e regolari—the sacred congregation of bishops and regulars set up in 1573 by Gregory XIII—had the power to review its sentences.Footnote ¹¹⁸ It was for this reason that Cardinal De Luca advised ordinaries not to be unnecessarily harsh in their sentences, lest they be overruled.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Nevertheless, as has been observed for northern Italy, there were very few appellants from Malta.Footnote ¹²⁰ Maltese priests considered appeals to be “no little dishonor to the nation,” not to mention timely and costly ventures.Footnote ¹²¹ Additionally, the government under Advocate General Giovanni Nicolò Muscat (1735–1803) was firmly opposed to any recourse to foreign courts since it went against one of the most important freedoms of the Maltese: the sovereignty over litigation within their own country. Instead, priests hoped “to merit the compassion of the court within a short time.”Footnote ¹²² All the same, those defendants who lost their case were allowed time to file an appeal against their conviction, and whoever chose this road could count on the annulment or mitigation of the sentence.Footnote ¹²³ Don Celestino Borg of Vittoriosa, for one, walked out a free man in 1796.Footnote ¹²⁴

The office of bishop worked to maintain a balance between mercy and justice, and a judicial model that limited the abuses of the clergy without damaging the Church was developed. Priests were not to be dishonored or suffer public and disgraceful punishments. No instances of shaming, such as those so popular with the spiritual courts in Elizabethan England, are found in the Act books studied.Footnote ¹²⁵ Nor were priests sent to row on the galleys or paraded through the parish. Following the directives of Trent, they were not publicly absolved in cases of excommunication.Footnote ¹²⁶ Take the case of Don Saverio Sammut and his brother Don Giuseppe from Saint Mary's Attard, who had beaten the deacon Giuseppe Sant. Cardinal Francesco Carafa (1722–1818), the prefect of the sacred congregation of bishops and regulars, enjoined the bishop on May 6, 1777 to absolve the brothers “privately.”Footnote ¹²⁷ No irreparable harm was to be made to their honor. However, this was not the procedure accorded to laymen like Vincenzo Mifsud, who, in 1781, had beaten Don Stefano of Saint Bartholomew's Gargur with his fists. He was reintegrated into the community only through a public ceremony of repentance (in forma pubblica)—conducted by the parish priest on a Sunday before high mass—where he begged for pardon.Footnote ¹²⁸

The Church attempted to hide all traces of transgressions committed by its wayward clergy. In order to protect priests from bad publicity, the Church administered a lenient type of justice, with its judges favoring, whenever possible, a secretive handling of the cases. Giovanni Romeo, citing Paolo Salodi's Praxis compendiosa de visitatione (Milan, 1593), asserts that clerical scandals were not to reach the faithful, who were to remain ignorant of any corruption and vices so as not to stoke anticlericalism or frustration with the priests.Footnote ¹²⁹ Likewise, Michele Mancino has detailed the impunity guaranteed to delinquent priests and clerics in Italy.Footnote ¹³⁰ Helmut Puff, having analyzed debauched priests in Europe north of the Alps in the medieval era, claims that “there is very little evidence that the regulations of canon law were enforced against clerical sodomites on a regular basis.”Footnote ¹³¹ The same may be said of the Maltese clergy. According to records, 12.6 percent of them were recidivists, which suggests many knew that they would receive preferential treatment by the clerical judge. The aforementioned Don Celestino Borg was one such example of a multiple offender: he was reported three times between 1778 and 1794, once for physical assault and twice for sexual incontinence, having fathered a son to one Aloisia.Footnote ¹³²

It must not be presumed, however, that priests who had greatly offended the standards of the community and the universal Church were left unpunished.Footnote ¹³³ The most miscreant individuals became objects of local scorn: their deplorable reputation and disordered lives were widely known, and their behaviors damaged the reputation of other clergy while undermining the authority of the Church. The diocesan court was indeed able to mete out satisfactory punishments for them, as can be seen in the case of Don Filippo Borg of Saint George's. In 1781, he beat a boy suffering from epilepsy to death with a piece of wood during a quarrel over a wall dividing their fields. The judge condemned him to exile from Malta for five years and ordered him to pay the victim's relatives 70 scudi to cover costs and expenses. He was also suspended a divinis and, although he asked in 1782 to be pardoned of this ecclesiastical censure, his petition was refused.Footnote ¹³⁴

VII. Conclusion

Several important questions remain at the end of this article. Could this unchristian behavior by the clergy be interpreted as a sign that the reforms enunciated at Trent had failed? Can the disordered life of priests and the poisonous relations that sometimes existed between the clergy and laity be interpreted as the reforms being all for naught, or that no real renewal had been made that could undo the inertia of Mediterranean backwardness? Did the fervor of the Council's projects slide miserably into a delusive stalemate, meaning that many good intentions came to nothing?

Data from Malta suggests that such a judgment is unfair. The number of indictments against the clergy was small, and even if the charges were a routine part of the business of the diocesan court, they were never a large part. There is no evidence that a lack of discipline was a significant issue or problem in Malta. The tribunal heard only a few cases each year—an average of three—which, needless to say, makes this piece a one-sided account of human failings. Since court records are by nature depositaries of information about wrongdoing, widespread misconduct cannot be construed from these collections of individual misdemeanors. For instance, tiny parishes like Saint Paul's Safi, Saint Mary's Dingli, or Saint Leonard's Kirkop did not register any crimes at all, while others went for years without a single recorded crime. It should not be said, therefore, that the diocesan court obtained no results in its attempts to control the clergy.

As Danilo Zardin admirably argues, to represent the period after Trent as a failure would mean ignoring the fundamental innovations that transformed Catholic religious conscience and shaped the modern world. The result was a new type of dynamic Catholicism with its devotions, piety, religious practice, mysticism, literature, music, and sacred art.Footnote ¹³⁵ Hubert Jedin proposes in Riforma Cattolica o Controriforma? that the Council brought the Church out of the Middle Ages and ushered in a new, transitional period in Catholic history; if it had been only a fleeting episode, its effects would not have lasted for centuries.Footnote ¹³⁶ To quote John O'Malley: “The Council of Trent without a doubt had a direct and long-term impact on modern Catholicism that in its pervasiveness transcended the immediate influence of any single person or any other happening in the period.”Footnote ¹³⁷