An Order of Malta Church Shake
Who knew that 2017 could be the Year of Malta? And yet, in less than a month’s time, the little island—122 square miles in size and populated by fewer than 450,000—located some 50 miles south of Italy has been involved in two of the biggest stories of the year. First there was the pastoral letter signed January 8th by the Archbishop of Malta, Charles J. Scicluna, and the Bishop of Gozo, Mario Grech, titled “Criteria for the Application of Chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia”. The gist of that letter, which was published on pages 7 and 8 of the January 14th edition of L’Osservatore Romano, is that divorced-and-remarried Catholics who are in “complex situations” an