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Michaela Muscat speaks to Dutch anthropologist Jeremy Boissevain on his personal observations on the events of the 1960s Church interdiction.
“The interdett left a lasting scar. The young and older adults who lived through the period have never forgotten it,” Dutch anthropologist Jeremy Boissevain says.
Indeed Labour leader Alfred Sant recounts an anecdote regarding an aged woman who “never set foot in church again after being denied absolution by her priest when she was heavily pregnant and had just been told by her doctor that due to serious complications - she and her infant were on the possible brink of death”. This woman, whom Sant met during his routine house visits in ‘Lazy Corner’ Sliema, was still evidently bitter for “having to choose between God and her party,” in such a precarious moment in her life.
Proficient in several languages, the 76-year-old anthropologist who first came to Malta as a chief of mission for the American Care relief organisation CARE, still has close ties with the islands. Two of his children were born in Malta and one of them also lives here. He has been conducting research and studying Malta’s social life for over 40 years.
He also published ‘Saints and Fireworks’, which studied the relationship between religion and politics in Maltese village feasts back in the sixties. Irrespective of having spent the whole morning travelling, he is raring to go, meticulous about every single detail including names, times and places.
During one of his field trips in Qala, the anthropologist bumped into Labour MP Guze Ellul Mercer. Boissevain quotes the prophetic remarks Ellul Mercer had made when they discussed the interdett: “It can only get worse before it gets better. The Bishop is making an anticlerical party out of the Labour Party. An anticlerical party of a group of people who are and who wish to remain practising Catholics”.
As an afterthought Boissevain says that he later heard many others, including priests say the same thing. Boissevain’s accurate memories come from the notes he had made when he was doing comparative research. The excerpt continues: “On 9 April 1961 I was staying in the hotel of il-Gaggu in Qala. Also staying there was Joe Ellul Mercer, who was in Gozo for a week’s hunting. That Sunday morning, the morning the interdett was read out, he went to early mass and went to go out hunting. The telephone at the hotel’s bar kept ringing for him the whole morning. But he was out. At dinner that night we talked for hours. He spoke a lot about his life, including his loneliness after the death of his wife.”
Boissevain recalls seeing young MLP supporters swaggering into the Naxxar church with copies of the party organ Il-Helsien sticking out of their back pockets. “Kalc. Agius (Labour MP) told me that the circulation in Naxxar of the over the counter copies of Il-Helsien rose from a handful to around sixty a week, excluding the subscriptions.”
Boissevain thinks that strangely enough, it also helped promote literacy among the less educated Labour rank and file. “For the first time, they started buying il-Helsien as a badge of loyalty and defiance. Once they bought it, they began to read it. They learned more about the party, and its ideology followed.”
An ideology consisting of Mintoff’s homemade brand of socialism – which in the anthropologist’s view was “certainly light years away from communism and not a direct threat to the church,” further confirming the redundancy of Archbishop Michael Gonzi’s assumed fears. The drastic, needless and very foolish steps of the church simply escalated the confrontation. Mintoff wanted the church to stay out of politics. It did not, only to strengthen the MLP as an institution.
“By anathematising Mintoff, by equating him with the devil in such a simple minded black and white dichotomy – “jew ma’ l-Isqof, jew max-xitan (with the Bishop, or with the devil) – the church insulted the idolised leader of the party and the intelligence of his followers,” Boissevain says.
Ironically, part of Mintoff’s rhetorical techniques included peppering his speeches with religious undertones that according to Boissevain served “to warm the audience up and to show his defiance.” Mintoff’s brazen comments also showed the way for others to voice their experiences and share them with each other – he “legitimised speaking out” by giving a voice to the people.
Shortly after the start of the interdett, Boissevain says he had overheard his neighbour, a devout Catholic and a teacher, but also an ardent Labour supporter, “recounting to a number of men in a blacksmiths shop, his grim, joyless experiences as a long time MUSEUM member. Before the interdict such behaviour would have been unthinkable.”
Boissevain says the extreme measure of the interdett alienated people so much that many members of the clergy were openly in extreme difficulty “that it boomeranged. Resulting in the church losing many followers and became willing to reach an agreement with the MLP. Although one should add that throughout this saga the MLP also lost followers.”
Not all the MLP supporters were prepared to risk raising the ire of God and suffer the eternal damnation of hell. So the cleavage between the Church and the MLP grew deeper by first interdicting the leadership and especially then after forbidding people to read the papers. “The church shot itself in the foot. It deprived thousands of devout church attendees from receiving the sacraments, insulting them and of course alienating them.”
Boissevain once again illustrates his argument from his notes: “The new Kappillan of Kirkop, Dun Guzepp Theuma, had invested an enormous amount and devotion in building up the boys’ Catholic Action. In less than a year he increased membership from virtually nothing to over 50. Then, after the pledge of allegiance the Church demanded of all Church organisations, all but 12 members of the village’s Catholic Action dropped out. This upset Dun Theuma greatly.”
The interdett certainly speeded up secularisation, leading to a very steady decline in church attendance: “It did not start with the interdict. But the interdict certainly contributed to it.” It also led to a more open and much more independent frame of mind regarding the pronouncements of the church on divorce, church attendance, contraception and pre marital sex. “But this is part of the general trend of secularisation, and in this respect it is not much different, though much slower, than the secularisation among Catholics that has taken place in the Netherlands since the 1950s.”
mmuscat@mediatoday.com.mt
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