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6 6 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 27 APRIL 2025 ANALYSIS control from tech billionaires and 'hu- manising' virtual spaces. Borg insists that the church must be part of efforts to establish regulatory structures, ensure digital dignity, and provide media education. But this must also come with the realisation that the church has lost its gatekeeping power to control the media narrative, particu- larly on child abuse scandals. Engaging with a messy world – Nadia Delicata Pope Francis's mysticism in action was not an escape from the world, but a radical entry into its "messiness," Na- dia Delicata, a theologian and the Mal- tese Church's episcopal delegate for evangelisation, tells me. In this sense, Pope Francis identified three of the most complex issues root- ed in an increasingly complex world that, in her opinion, the church has no choice but to continue to "discern" about. The first realisation is that the church is universal, in which the European Church is a minority and an outsid- er. While the Roman Curia might be tempted to be caught up in its own pol- itics, she warns that "when one looks inward and not outward, one loses touch with reality – and therefore with the people." The antidote to this is the process of synodality, which is all about "coming to terms with the reality of immense diversity in the Church itself: of its many voices and theologies, and how these can be in harmony instead of inconsistent." The second realisation, she adds, is that the whole edifice of western "patri- archal" and male-dominated culture is now in crisis, and therefore the church cannot cling to a hierarchy modelled on the authority of the pater familias who rules over his children with the support of his wife. "In this period of immense flux, even the church needs to find its footing," she says. While rejecting the polari- ties fuelling "infamous culture wars," she calls on the church to reflect on its historical depiction of the woman as virgin and mother – and even as "vir- ginal mother." The church also needs to continue reflecting on two thorny issues: "Female power" in the church and "female sexuality" even beyond child-bearing years, since today we live much longer than previous gener- ations. "The pastoral issue of remarried di- vorcees and how the church will situate the intimate relationships of LGBTIQ Catholics will require more 'discern- ment' in this wider context," she adds. The third issue – one that has faced the church from the beginning – is how to deal with the sinfulness of its mem- bers, which contradicts the Church's claim of being a symbol of 'holiness.' "Today the sins are the scourges of abuse – sexual, emotional, spiritual, and most perniciously, the abuse of power, especially that stemming from clericalism," Delicata says. This was recognised by Pope Francis in his apostolic letter Estis Lux Mun- di, which came with the acknowledge- ment "that these serious sins must be exposed in order to be fully repented." While recognising the difficulties facing the church, Delicata remains convinced of the urgency and rele- vance of the Catholic message. "Through the immense power har- nessed in a digital culture, the whole planet is up for grabs, and we seem to have no restraint in experimenting because we are in total denial of the horrific consequences," she says. As Pope Francis warned, she adds, "the dominant technocratic paradigm" is reducing all of reality – from the land to every human – to an "object"; a mere "tool"; something to narcissistically use for personal edification, "essentially annihilating the inherent dignity of everything and everyone." The narrative beyond the doctrine – Mario Gerada One of the great paradoxes of Pope Francis's papacy was that the paradig- matic shift in the way the church ad- dressed humanity was not reflected in substantial doctrinal change. I raise this thorny issue with Mario Gerada, co-founder of Drachma, an LGBTIQ Christian organisation, but whose interest in the church goes be- yond this particular issue. One of Pope Francis's great contri- butions, which Gerada believes will be hard to reverse irrespective of who is elected as the next Pope, was his pas- toral approach. "Of course, many complex doctrinal issues remain unresolved, but in terms of the pastoral element, there was an enormous change – including that of seeing LGBTQ people as first and fore- most human persons," he tells me. In fact, Gerada believes his most radi- cal shift was placing the human person at the heart of church discussions. This changed the tone of engagement, fram- ing difficult topics within a discourse of human dignity. Francis lived "the joy of being human in relation to others," embracing the poor and marginalised, the Creator, and the whole of creation, Gerada says. Left to right: Fr Joe Borg, Nadia Delicata, Mario Gerada, and Fr Daniel Cardona