The altar of St Lazarus is the only altar in Malta and Gozo dedicated to this Biblical figure. The painting, by Italian artist Giuseppe d’Arena in 1689, shows Jesus resurrecting his friend Lazarus. Beneath the altar lie the relics of St Clement, a Roman martyr whose remains were unearthed during the eighteenth-century discovery of the catacombs of St Callixtus in Rome. The oldest confraternity in this church, with St Lazarus as patron saint, was erected around 1620 as a charitable sodality.
The vault painting in this transept shows St George subjected to the ordeal of fire. This martyrdom is, again, symbolic not only of the suffering that George was subjected to but also of Christian martyrdom as such. In fact, hagiography scholars see in the epic of St George a personification of Christian martyrdom. Just as King David, in the Old Testament, personifies the victory of Israel over the Philistines and to him is attributed all the successful exploits of his military lieutenants, so did St George come to be adorned with the various ordeals of other lesser-known martyrs.
Traditional Catholic and Orthodox doctrine includes belief in the intercession of the saints. This doctrine is more or less foreign to Christians of Protestant persuasion. According to Catholic belief, the saints, whose fidelity to God has been proven and who have thereby received power before the throne of God, moved by their love for us, do join us in our petitions before God and intercede for us.
Strong in this belief, when a terrible disease, in 1676, hit the island of Malta and threatened also Gozo, the people of our island joined in one body of prayer for deliverance and made sure that they roped St George in with them. It turned out that the pestilence kept away and the Gozitans attributed their deliverance to the saint and in thanksgiving built the church in its present form. This is what the apse in this transept represents, and you can see the knight Francesco de Cordova, who was the Governor of Gozo at the time, holding up a small model of this church to St George.
A small niche to the right of the altar in this transept holds the lovely papier-mâché statue of Our Lady of Lourdes appearing to Bernadette, made in France by Galard et Fils in 1879, only twenty years after the Marian apparitions in the small Pyrenees village.