Fact-Check or Framing? Why the Suppression of St. Peter’s Monastery Deserves Deeper Scrutiny

The Times of Malta reports that the Holy See has suppressed St Peter’s Monastery in Mdina following a property dispute linked to unauthorised long leases. The administrative responsibility has now passed to Dom Jeremias Schröder, OSB, Abbot Primate of the Benedictines. The report presents the matter primarily as a canonical irregularity. It has been stated that it was triggered after the absence of the authorisations required for such agreements from the local church authorities. In simple words, these leases bypassed the Curia of Archbishop Scicluna. This led the local bishop to report the matter to Rome, and Rome decided to suppress the monastery and assign the remaining nun to another monastery. 

There is no dispute that the Church’s rules on ecclesiastical property can be strict, and that Rome may well have acted within the framework of its competence. Yet if the purpose of the report was “fact-checking,” then the public deserves more than a narrow recital of the trigger event. A genuine fact-check should also probe the institutional logic of the adopted solution and its broader implications for governance, accountability, and historical continuity.

I write not merely as a commentator, but as someone who knew the Badessa personally. As a child growing up in Tarxien, she lived practically around the corner from us. Later, when I served as director of the Mediterranean Institute under Fr Peter Serracino Inglott, I witnessed first-hand the profound esteem Fr Peter had for her. He regarded her as a woman of integrity and intelligence navigating a system often structured by male ecclesiastical dominance. This historical and personal context matters because St Peter’s was not simply a property-holding entity. It was one of the rare spaces in Maltese history in which female religious authority operated with a degree of autonomy within a Church structure. Otherwise, female structures are overwhelmingly dominated by males. This domination comes through jurisdictional governance. Any public account that reduces such an institution to a dispute over leases risks obscuring what is at stake.

For this reason, one question, in particular, deserves scrutiny: why, after suppression, was the administration not entrusted to the local ecclesiastical structures, but instead transferred to a foreign Benedictine authority? The choice may be defensible in law and tradition, but it is not self-explanatory. Certainly, it was not a neutral decision. If the public is being invited to understand the decision as a straightforward correction of “property mismanagement,” then the story is incomplete. Appointing an Abbot Primate is not merely administrative; it is a governance decision with implications for how a historically female institution is managed once its canonical life ends. If this were merely a technical matter of authorisation, why was local diocesan administration bypassed? Was it intended as a gesture of neutrality? Does it signal a lack of confidence in local handling? Or does it reflect recognition of prior tensions? These are legitimate institutional questions that a fact-checking approach should not avoid.

This also raises a second question that goes to the heart of the contemporary rhetoric about women’s participation in governance. Why was the process of suppression and interim administration not entrusted to a woman religious with equivalent standing, experience, and independence? This story shows that the Catholic Church’s governance remains predominantly male at the jurisdictional level. Even though in recent years there have been deliberate efforts to expand women’s leadership in Vatican administration, this is far from granting women full autonomy within a heavily male-dominated institution.

It is therefore legitimate, in 2026, to ask what “female empowerment” means when the subject is a monastery that historically functioned as a refuge and a sphere of women’s authority. Put differently, the issue is not whether questions may be raised about compliance with canonical norms, but why the institutional remedy adopted defaulted once again to a male governance structure, even at the point of dissolving a female monastic community.

Finally, even if one accepts the stated trigger event, that is, the fact that leases lacked authorisation, the press still has a duty to ask whether the outcome is proportionate. A more pressing question is whether alternative remedies were considered and what protections exist for the site’s heritage, purpose, and spiritual identity in the future. A fact-check is not only about the immediate factual claim; it is also about whether the framing leaves out the most consequential facts the public needs to judge an exercise of power. Raising such questions is not an attack. It is an exercise in responsible public inquiry, and it is precisely what readers should expect when a story is presented under the banner of “fact-checking.”