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The notorious ‘interdett’ is part of a tragic episode in Maltese history when the island was split between the competing aspirations of the Malta Labour Party and the Catholic Church for the future of the island beyond colonialism.
In January 1961, the diocesan commission issued a circular which was read in all churches condemning the MLP’s affiliation with the Socialist International and the Afro-Asian Peoples Solidarity Organisation. In a bid to wield its power over the god fearing masses, it declared a sin the reading of Labour newspapers and the attendance of MLP meetings.
The events of the sixties would re-carve Maltese society as Gonzi’s ‘holy soldiers’ battled Mintoff’s ‘evil’ 51,000 ‘soldiers of steel’ (suldati ta’ l-azzar), the total number of people who had voted in favour of Labour’s proposal for integration of the Maltese islands with the United Kingdom.
Malta always lagged behind the times. The church still played an important social role in society. An unemployed son would be recommended to the village contractor by the parish priest. The priest was the village ‘psychologist’.
In a decade where progressive cultural revolutions were taking place across all western societies, the regressive actions taken by the Maltese church remain a historical irony. Whilst Pope John XXIII opened up the Vatican to a new spring with the Vatican Council II, moving away from biblical literalism and absorbing the liberal influences of the times, Gonzi wanted to sustain his archbishopric as a feudal prince who had free reign over Malta.
And as the pope declared it no longer a mortal sin to vote for the communists, it was Mgr Gonzi who was declaring it a mortal sin for socialist material to be read and propagated.
The church’s decree fragmented society to such an extent, that a parallel society was created. Alternatives to mainstream activities were organised. Labourites had their own carnival of flowers, their own snooker tournaments, and their own Labourite brigade as opposed to the scouts.
Both Gonzi and Mintoff can be described as men of vision but whilst Archbishop Gonzi wanted to keep the status quo, Mintoff envisaged a country unshackled by archaic values.
Whilst Mintoff wanted to shake up a rigid society so as to catch up with the times, Gonzi was simply enraged by tourists sunbathing in bikinis – even the usually accommodating Nationalist government fended off his lordship’s requests to get the police to clamp down on bikini-clad tourists, for fear of compromising Malta’s reputation as a tourist destination.
In the parallel, Labour society however, Labourite girls felt protected to freely put on their bikinis during beach parties, an acceptable practice in the world of the ‘other’ political party.
MaltaToday will be analysing the difficult relations between the Malta Labour Party and the Church during the tumultuous sixties in a five-part series that starts today. The series will feature interviews with leading politicians at the time and personal accounts of people who lived and suffered the brunt of the Church’s controversial decision to impose the interdict, and those who witnessed the feud from the other side of the political divide.
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