The song at the Pope’s first Holy Communion

On Sunday, 5 January 2014, Pope Francis met informally the Gozitan choir Laudate Pueri outside his residence in the Vatican.

Among the hymns the choir serenaded him with, was the Italian version of a hymn that is wellknown in Maltese churches Nadurawk Ja Hobz tas-Sema (T’Adoriam Ostia Divina’).

The Pope stopped and said that this hymn he remembered being sung (naturally in Spanish) when as a small boy he made his first Holy Communion in Argentina some 73 years ago.

This stunned the Gozitan visitors. They explained to the Pope that this hymn had been written by a Maltese composer, Giuseppe Caruana and the words, both in Italian and in Maltese were by Malta’s national poet, Dun Karm Psaila. The hymn had been composed especially for the celebrations of the XXIV International Eucharistic Congress held in Malta in 1914.

According to Joe Zammit Ciantar, who wrote the historical angle of this booklet, one day early in 1913, Dun Karm met the maestro in Strada Reale (today’s Republic Street). The maestro asked Dun Karm for some verses for a hymn that would be sung by children during the distribution of the Eucharist in the Congress.

Dun Karm promised him some verses and the next day turned up with three stanza but they did not please neither the maestro nor Dun Karm himself.

Dun Karm asked for more time and by the next day came up with the hymn we know today (in Italian) and also suggested the music for it – a motif from a traditional Maltese traditional song which he must have heard it thousands of times sung or hummed by young women tending to the crops.

The maestro took hurried notes on a piece of paper and went away and composed the music for the hymn.

Dun Karm and the maestro tried to get the hymn printed, with no success. However, the director of the Duttrina at St Publius in Floriana printed some copies and had the score of the music copied by hand. However, the names of Dun Karm and Maestro Caruana were left out.

The hymn was an instant success during the Eucharistic Congress and the many bishops present in Malta took it back with them to their dioceses and popularized it there. With its increasing popularity, more and more copies were made, but without the names of the author and the composer.

In Malta, translations into Maltese started to be made until Dun Karm, exasperated by the low level of the translations, composed one himself and published it on Il-Habib in 1924. As the hymn gained in international popularity, Dun Karm was constrained to write to some international magazines pointing out the author’s and the composer’s name. To his chagrin, many times the composer’s name was tacked on but not the author’s.

Mr Zammit Ciantar details the different shades of interpretation and translation that Dun Karm made in translating from his Italian to his Maltese. It may also be that he was translating from a different Italian version of the original.

The music score of the hymn by Maestro Caruana has been used for another hymn composed by Dun Karm: Naghtuk qalbna, naghtuk ruhna.

The book tells us that each day at noon one can hear the hymn rung by the bells of the church of Ss Peter and Paul in Cornalba near Bergamo. One can hear it on YouTube on the link found in the book.

Furthermore, the hymn found its way into an Italian classic film. In Vittorio de Sica’s Ladri di Bicicletta (1948) at one point a man starts singing the hymn and all the congregation follows him.

As an introduction, Fr Hector Scerri, head of the Department of Fundamental and Dogmatic Theology at the University contributes a commentary on Pope Benedict XVI’s Sacramentum Caritatis.

Bishop Mario Grech provides the foreword.