Somebody has got it in for the Order of Malta, the 900-year-old Catholic order which maintains hospitals and runs charitable activities all over the world.
In Italy, a stream of very similar articles has been appearing, beginning with an attack last October in the left-wing newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, by a journalist writing as Thomas Mackinson.
In recent weeks there has been an accelerating series of articles under different names, all of them repeating the same criticisms.
People in the Order’s ambit are beginning to wonder who is putting them up to it and why.
The articles accuse the Order of betraying a reform intended by Pope Francis, who wanted to bring it more into line with the life of a full religious order.
The criticisms highlight the role of the professed knights – those who take the traditional religious vows – and assert that these need to be made to live in community so as to be true religious.
What the articles do not explain, however, and indeed seriously misrepresent, is how the Order came to be in its present position.
The background is the crisis precipitated among the knights by Pope Francis in January 2017, when he forced the Grand Master, the Englishman Matthew Festing, to resign.
The result was effectively putting the Order into the hands of its German branch, under the Grand Chancellor (effectively prime minister of the Order) Albrecht von Boeselager.
The German-backed faction consolidated their control in the five-yearly elections to the Order’s government held in 2019. Of the 18 names back by this camp, all but one were elected.
Publicly, what had happened was that Fra’ Matthew Festing tried to dismiss von Boeselager because, as the minister responsible for the Order’s works, he had permitted the German organisation Malteser International to distribute condoms in third world countries; but Pope Francis decided that dismissal was too severe a punishment, and Festing went instead.
In reality, von Boeselager’s dismissal had imperilled the resolution of a multi-million-euro legacy dispute in which the Vatican also had an interest.
Thus the man who tried to uphold Catholic moral teaching was sacked, and the man who had violated it was put in effective control.
Pope Francis cloaked this paradox by saying that he wanted to reform the Order of Malta, bringing it to a more spiritual ethos, implying that Fra’ Matthew stood in the way.
Only, what Pope Francis had done achieved exactly the opposite. Fra Matthew Festing had been at the head of those who wanted to make the Order more religious and more Catholic.
He raised the number of professed knights to nearly seventy – the highest number for over a century – and in his 12 years as Grand Master he introduced reforms designed to strengthen the religious life.
By contrast, the German branch had produced no professed knights for 30 years and was trying to reduce the role of the professed in the Order, emphasising instead its secular works.
After working with the Germans for five years, the Vatican gradually realised that it had backed the wrong horse.
In September 2022 Pope Francis summarily dismissed the entire government of the Order, von Boeselager and all, and appointed a new one, largely composed of those who had worked with Fra Matthew.
There was even a veiled apology to Fra Matthew following his death, delivered by Cardinal Tomasi in his funeral sermon.
It now seems that the Vatican has become disenchanted with the men it put in three years ago and wants to change them again. To be exact, the dissatisfied man is Cardinal Ghirlanda, who was installed by Pope Francis as Patronus of the Order.
In the past, the holders of that office were simply the Vatican’s diplomatic representatives (because the Vatican recognises the Order as a sovereign entity, as do 114 other countries), but Pope Francis’s high-handed intervention, added to Ghirlanda’s own autocratic leanings, has made him the man who calls the shots.
There are those who suspect that he has ‘inspired’ the latest spate of articles as a way of preparing for another Vatican coup de main against the Order.
So what is the trouble? The trouble is that from first to last the Vatican has had no idea what it was doing in intervening in the Order of Malta.
Ostensibly the aim was to recall the Order to its proper vocation, against the secularising tendencies brought by the fact that nowadays most of its 13,000 members worldwide are non-religious knights and dames.
The Vatican wanted to re-affirm the primacy of the professed, who historically were the main force of the Order, and who remain the element that makes it a full religious order.
The declared objective is to make their vocation as genuinely religious as possible – which is what Fra Matthew had been trying to do.
Unfortunately, the Vatican has gone about this in a state of ignorance of what the Order of Malta is supposed to be.
The recent articles all repeat that the professed knights ought to live in community ‘like any other religious order’.
This betrays the common misconception that the term ‘religious order’ is synonymous with monastic order.
The Knights of Malta (‘The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem’, to give them their official title) are not monks; they fall into two categories of religious order, the military and the hospitaller, neither of which has ever been bound to monastic life.
Historically, the function of the Knights of St John was to fight the infidel and to serve in the great hospital at the Order’s successive headquarters, in Jerusalem and later Malta.
The hospitaller orders of the Church, of which there are several, likewise have no vocation to live in community, because it would impede their proper deployment as doctors, nurses, and servants of the sick.
Cardinal Ghirlanda is a Jesuit of absolutist views, and it does not enter his head that there are religious orders different from the ones he is used to.
Neither he nor the other Vatican appointees have studied the proper canonical nature of military or hospitaller orders. Nor have they addressed the strategic question of what the Order of Malta (and therefore its professed knights) is supposed to be doing.
The Knights of St John were founded to care for pilgrims in the Holy Land.
Today, the Order runs a maternity hospital in Bethlehem, and it is a very good one; but a maternity hospital is only a fraction of the work that the Knights of Malta could and should be doing in the Holy Land.
The plight of that region, and especially of the Christians there, is the kind of challenge that a military order should exist to grapple with, and the tragedy of Gaza has made it all the more topical.
But the professed knights cannot devote themselves to a work like that if they are turned into a community of imitation monks somewhere in Italy.
Unfortunately, Albrecht von Boeselager, ever since he became Hospitaller in 1989, consciously opposed any attempt to revive the Order’s original vocation, and therefore blocked development of its service in the Holy Land.
Instead, the Order’s works have grown as an unfocused jumble of ventures all over the world, and the defects have been as much moral as organisational.
Fra’ Matthew, being a well-instructed Catholic, was appalled at the hospitaller works’ ignorance of Catholic moral teaching, and in 2016 he was trying to create an ethics commission under Cardinal Eijk to give them proper guidelines.
That venture was killed by his dismissal as Grand Master.
As a result, whereas nine years ago the problem was merely condom distribution, there are now reports, with which the accusers are making great play, of the Order’s hospitals carrying out abortions.
This points to the fact that the main malady ailing the Order of Malta today is the chaos caused by nearly a decade of half-baked Vatican interventions.
The number of professed knights has fallen to half what it was, and no wonder – who would commit himself to a vocation which even the Vatican does not understand correctly?
There is little chance of any improvement unless the Holy See relaxes its narrow, clericalist approach to the Order and permits a return to the strategic path that was cut off in 2017.