THE BISHOP WHO WOULD NOT HIDE. THE GOVERNMENT THAT STILL WON’T REFORM.
By Mario Attard
When a 2008 court record showed that Fr Michael Said had brokered a €7,000 payment that led a Nadur family to withdraw a rape complaint, social media and parts of the press turned on the Bishop of Gozo, Mgr Anton Teuma. The charge was institutional silence. The record is the opposite.
Teuma did not preside in 2008; Cardinal Mario Grech has said the matter never reached him. As soon as the judgment became public, the diocese assembled the file, took professional advice, and opened two investigations, one by the Gozo Safeguarding Commission and a second, independent process by non-Gozitans, that Teuma himself requested, under Vos Estis Lux Mundi, Pope Francis’s 2019 norms (made permanent in 2023) on reporting abuse and obstruction. Both inquiries found that Said’s intervention was unwise and improperly influenced the family. Both found no canonical grounds for disciplinary penalties. Teuma published that conclusion. That is investigation, not concealment.
Compare this with the state’s handling of the Yorgen Fenech case. There the Attorney General and police worked amid leaks of confidential briefings, undeclared conflicts, missing phones and laptops of politically connected figures, and years of delay before a jury acquitted Fenech of commissioning Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder. The 2021 public inquiry(i.e., the government’s own commission) found the state had created an atmosphere of impunity and failed to protect her. Most of that commission’s safeguards remain unimplemented: unexplained wealth orders, criminalisation of abuse of office and of obstruction of justice, and effective rules against public officials hindering investigators. Four years on, civil-society tallies still show almost nothing of substance enacted.
Nor will Valletta trust an independent board from Gozo to examine a case made in Malta, by Maltese institutions, on Maltese soil. The authorities are too sure of themselves, and perhaps too entangled in the Caruana Galizia affair, to invite Gozitan scrutiny of their own investigation. A bishop on a small island commissioned a second, independent look by non-Gozitans at a priest in his diocese. The government will not apply the same humility to a murder that exposed the core of the corrupt Maltese state.
In the Yorgen Fenech proceedings, the question left hanging after the jury’s acquittal is not whether Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered but who ordered it, the commissioners of the killing still at large. The state’s answer is the opposite of the one the case’s magistrate demanded. Instead of pursuing the other names that surfaced at trial and following lines of inquiry toward alleged masterminds who have never been charged, the Attorney General is preparing an appeal to put Fenech back in the dock. That move would keep public attention fixed on a man a jury has already cleared, while leaving the political figures fingered in open court insulated from a full criminal investigation.
A bishop cannot repeal 2008 criminal law, which then made most private-place rape cases collapse the moment the complaint was withdrawn. He can open the file, apply today’s canons, bring in outsiders, and publish the result. Finding improper influence without a punishable delict is not a cover-up. It is the opposite of a cover-up. Street outrage wants a pre-cooked hanging. Teuma chose evidence.
After Fenech, the contrast is an indictment. Gozo investigated itself and asked strangers to look over its shoulder. Malta will not. It will not because Valletta is not a government investigating a crime. It is a swollen, muddy nest of rats, still harbouring the political masterminds of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder, and still too compromised to let a third partynearby.