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Michaela Muscat
“The imposition of the interdett and the mortal sin in the sixties left a traumatic effect on the life of all of those who experienced it. A great pain that is still felt today,” says Wenzu Mintoff, the Labour politician and Dom Mintoff’s nephew. He believes that at least another two generations have to pass before the great hurts are not felt anymore.
“To show how a hurt like this lasts for long one only has to read the biography of Mabel Strickland who until her death could not find reassurance on whether her father Lord Gerald Strickland, who had also been affected by the imposition of the mortal sin in the 30s with Boffa’s labourites, had been ex-communicated from the church and had managed to save his soul.”
English anthropologist Annabel Hendry was researching her doctorate thesis in the 70s and she remembers that even after the interdett was declared over, “politics seemed to infiltrate everything, even where you chose to buy your loaf of bread. The dark side of this was that the increasing social stratification intensified both political divisions and inter and sometimes intra-family rivalries. The role of the interdett was complex, but very present.”
Wenzu Mintoff is dismayed that the aftermath of the interdett led to a lacunae of values. “The traditional values imposed by the church were not replaced by ethical and civic lay values because in other countries the transition took hundreds of years. This is one of the reasons why in this country there is a vacuum of values, libertinism and a lot of hypocrisy and double standards.”
Hendry says that back in the 70s, she felt that the frequent collective reminiscing over past struggles for those defending the government acted as a kind of group myth to amplify and justify the power of the weak (the Labour Party) and the forces of progress over the powers of reaction which had been ranged against them. Attempts to defend the pastoral role of the Church in the past would be dismissed, with the lack of effective schooling in the village until after World War II cited as an example of the Church’s role in “keeping us ignorant, so we would not know how to fight back.” There was great and genuine bitterness still there.
She remembers that life was fun in the 70s as Malta was undergoing change by the minute – tourism was taking off and the community beginning to open up and see new possibilities, although there was still a whiff of Salem floating on the air in Mellieha 1975.
“Rumours were circulating that I was a prostitute, and most probably a socialist prostitute to boot,” says anthropologist Annabel Hendry, remembering when as a doctorate student conducting her fieldwork in Malta she aroused the police’s suspicions to the extent that they inspected her premises after two male friends known to be far left of centre frequently called round to check how she was settling in.
In fact many young children and people ignored the instructions of a very fervent and active priest to stay away from the “dangerous English woman.” It is probable that her presumed political leanings and the fraternising of a single woman with men led the priest to decry her imputed lack of morals.
Labour was in power as MLP politicians were immediately elected as soon as the interdett was declared over. It was around the time that a Labour government had already started implementing every single one of the “six points” which triggered off the interdett – except for divorce which even in present times is not recognised by civil law as a right for Maltese people. Wenzu Mintoff says “the intervention of Archbishop Gerada who had a direct line with the Vatican led to a truce between Dom Mintoff and Archbishop Michael Gonzi.” Mintoff believes that once the interdett was lifted and there was a dramatic decrease of the Church’s influence, Malta started becoming more secularised.
But anthropologist Jeremy Boissevain believes that the reverberation of the interdett can still be observed today as “the anti-MLP press of the 1960s is still anti-MLP.”
When asked whether the Labourites in the 70s had let bygones be bygones, Hendry believes not. “I was impressed by how vivid the period remained in people’s memory, certainly amongst Labour supporters. Many recalled the atmosphere of fear and panic over the fate of the dockyard at the time of the interdett and it was common to remember the local and national heroes of the time, such as those who had been placed in prison for supporting the dockyard strikes. The two themes, which always recurred, were how barbaric the Church was to withhold the Easter blessing from certain households and the fate of those who ended up being buried at the mizbla.”
She says that many such conversations, often in the Labour Club, ended up in hilarity as those present joined in with ever more gruesome memories of their own experiences and with examples of the avarice and wickedness of the chaplain at that time. “But these tales communicated a fundamental and serious message, that of the unity and definition of the participants as past victims, essentially opposed to the corrupt and vicious tactics which could be used by the Church and of their collectively standing against the power it represented.”
She explains that unlike in the villages where her tutor, Boissevain, worked, Labour supporters were very much a minority group in Mellieha at the time of the interdett: “so people had to be extremely brave to defend their allegiance and were literally forced underground and subject to severe stigma.” Boissevain says that “workers in the harbour had more contact with the outside world and new ideas. Unionisation was strong there and the people supported the party. Dom Mintoff’s own background was there. But support was also very strong in the so called ‘rural’ southern villages, where many residents also worked in the harbour area and in the quarries.”
“Perhaps the church should have been advised to accept the MLP’s slogan ‘with Mintoff always, against the Church never’ on its face value,” Hendry says. To force a whole community of believers into such terrible choices of conscience was no way to gain fans so the questioning, mistrust and bitterness did generate secularisation.
But she also says that secularisation is a relative term. “Two weeks ago people were queuing up at 5.45am outside the church in Mellieha, anxious for their early festa mass... now that wouldn’t happen in England.”
Asked to comment on how Malta nowadays compares to back then, she says: “Oddly, increasing wealth and apparent prosperity apart, Malta is not so very different from the 1970s. Politics apart, there is still no place better in the world to take that first slice into a loaf of bread. And those subversive friends of mine? They are pillars of the community now! So things do change.”
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