1971

The peace signed between the Malta Labour Party and the Church in 1969 paved the way for the return of Dom Mintoff as the country’s Prime Minister after 13 years in the political wilderness. In an exclusive interview with MaltaToday, former Labour MP and Speaker of the House, Daniel Micallef, sheds new light on the role of Toni Pellegrini’s Christian Workers Party in the divide and rule strategies adopted by the British. JAMES DEBONO explores the intricate cob webs linking Church, small parties and the colonial authorities before the air was cleared by the winds of change coming from Rome.

The 1971 general election was the first free election in Malta since 1961, back when the Church’s Diocesan Commission issued a circular read out in all churches, declaring it a sin to read Labour newspapers and attend MLP meetings.
This was the start of a decade of moral anguish for Catholic Labourites who had to wrestle with their conscience to choose whether to follow the church or Dom Mintoff, depicted as a dangerous communist. This was the impression given to Daniel Micallef, a promising young doctor from Rabat when Capuchin priest Felicjan Bilocca knocked on his door a few months before the 1962 election asking him to contest with the Christian Workers Party (CWP).
The CWP was an attempt to thwart Mintoff’s ambitions with the creation of a rival Labour Party, loyal to both Queen and Church. Its role in the British strategy to weaken both the Labour Party and Borg Olivier’s Nationalist party is investigated in Sergio Grech’s account on the life of the Capuchin friar Felicjan Bilocca. The new Church-sponsored party was led by the maverick Toni Pelligrini, who first started off as Mintoff’s stalwart, then left him for an entire decade only to return back to the Labour fold to lead Xandir Malta in its darkest years.
Hailing from a humble Stricklandian family which had turned Labourite after the Second World War, Daniel Micallef the young doctor was an ideal candidate for Pelligrini’s new party.
“Patri Felicjan told me that he was an envoy of Archbishop Gonzi. He also told me that they had reliable information that Mintoff was a Communist who wanted to destroy the Church and to put Malta behind the iron curtain.”
Micallef was at first hesitant as he was not interested in politics at that time. But Patri Felicjan persisted. “He put a great burden on me by urging me to contribute so that Malta does not turn communist.”
Micallef had already turned down a request by Herbert Ganado’s Partit Demokratiku Nazzjonalista. Patri Felicjan Bilocca insisted that Micallef should not contest with Ganado, but with the new Labour party set up with the aim of taking on Mintoff head-on. “This was the demand I received from the Bishop. I accepted and I got elected in the 1962 election.”
By scouting for candidates for the CWP, Bilocca was resurrecting the Catholic Labour Party, formed in the 1921 by Archbishop Michael Gonzi himself as the nascent MLP in the senate at the start of the 20th century.
As Mintoff himself told Henry Frendo in an interview with newspaper il-Hajja, the Labour Party was born “singing the tantum ergo”. The remark had been edited out of the text of the interview after pressures from Mintoff’s secretary, but is recorded by Frendo himself in his biography of former President Censu Tabone.
But by the 1926 election, the MLP, infiltrated by socialist intellectuals like Guze Orlando, took a decidedly secularist turn allying itself with Gerald Strickland’s Constitutional Party. By 1961 the MLP had already clashed twice with the Church, first as the junior partner of Gerald Strickland’s Constitutional Party when Strickland was excommunicated before the 1926 election, and then again when Gonzi opposed Mintoff’s integration plans.
The bogeymen in the integration debate in 1958 had been the fear of Protestantism. Author Frans Sammut notes that Mgr Gonzi then claimed that Malta’s integration would have meant subjection to Protestantism. “What he really meant was that the Maltese archdiocese would be subjected to the jurisdiction of the Catholic Cardinal of Westminster, thereby robbing him (Gonzi) of his ‘direct line’ with the Holy See.”
In 1961 the bogeyman was communism. What is sure is that Gonzi did not like any of Mintoff’s six points, his manifesto for secularisation, even though the first five points stood out as hallmarks of the liberal enlightenment, rather than communism. By calling for separation between church and state, civil marriages, and an end to draconian censorship, Mintoff was merely reaffirming principles shared by all European democrats.
Only one of these points, stating that violence could be legitimate in certain circumstances, departed from mainstream liberalism, conjuring fears of a Cuban-style revolution. The 1958 riots, following Mintoff’s resignation as Prime Minister, could have contributed to Gonzi’s growing antipathy towards Mintoff. Certainly, Gonzi did not like Mintoff’s association with the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) which included Third World liberation movements, some of whose leaders flirted with the communist bloc.
But Daniel Micallef believes that there was more to it. He believes that Archbishop Gonzi had been deceived into believing that Mintoff was a dangerous communist. According to Micallef, CWP leader Toni Pellegrini, a former general secretary of the MLP, was instrumental in convincing Mgr Gonzi that Mintoff was a communist.
He also contends that the CWP was a pawn in British hands in their efforts to weaken Malta’s first post-independence government. Their ultimate aim was a minority government, weakened by the pressures of small church-backed parties. They came very close to achieving this aim in the 1962 election, when Nationalist leader George Borg Olivier was only saved by the defection of a deputy from Herbert Ganado’s Partit Demokratiku Nazzjonalista, securing him a majority in parliament.
Micallef recalls that he had once asked Toni Pelligrini whether the British were financing the CWP. Pelligrini neither confirmed nor denied that the British were behind the small, but very organised party. In the 1962 election, the CWP – one of the three pro-Church parties opposing independence – achieved a spectacular result, electing four MPs, and earning the CWP and the other two small parties elected to parliament representation in negotiations on Malta’s new constitution.
As the second most voted CWP candidate, Daniel Micallef was chosen to accompany party leader Toni Pellegrini in Malta’s delegation to London during negotiations on the independence constitution in Marlborough House. It was on this occasion that Micallef started doubting Pellegrini’s intentions. “On the third week of the conference I was alone having a drink in the lobby. Suddenly someone pulled me from my shoulders. It was Prime Minister George Borg Olivier. He told me: “Madonna x’ghamilt b’idejja Daniel” (what have I done with my own hands, Daniel?).
Borg Olivier told Micallef that had he known what was going to happen, he would not have even started the process leading to independence. In retrospect, Micallef thinks that Borg Olivier was expressing his frustration on the way the British were treating him. The fact that the delegation also included the leaders of the small anti-independence parties served to strengthen the hand of the British, and weaken that of Borg Olivier.
Three days later Micallef was in the same lobby. This time it was the CWP leader who came to Daniel Micallef with a big smile on his face telling him, “They are going to give them independence…”
Micallef was surprised by Pelligrini’s jovial mood. “Our party was against independence, as we favoured co-citizenship. I was also under the impression that the British were supporting our party. When I saw him so happy that the British had granted us independence, I was shocked.”
Upon seeing Duncan Sandys, the chairman of the conference descending the stairs, Daniel Micallef rushed to him calling him “a bloody liar”.
Micallef recalls how Pelligrini pushed him aside telling him to stop whispering: “Don’t worry, he screwed Borg Olivier.”
Micallef thinks that the CWP leader was happy because the British had imposed their own terms on Borg Olivier. “I felt that my party had betrayed the country. From then on I felt estranged from the party. It was no longer my place.”
Micallef also contends that Mgr Gonzi had also exercised pressure on Borg Olivier to accept the conditions imposed by the British. “Borg Olivier used to receive daily phone calls from Archbishop Gonzi urging him to accept the terms imposed by the British.”
Micallef says that he learned this from a reliable source, a friend of the then chancellor of Gonzi’s curia. “Borg Olivier was really defending Malta’s rights. But he had to succumb to the pressures coming from various quarters.” Micallef now thinks that Borg Olivier was a real patriot.
After coming back to Malta, Micallef soon fell under the spell of Mintoff’s speeches in parliament. While attending a Commonwealth conference in New Zealand in 1965, he came to realise that Britain was adopting the same divide and rule tactics it used in many of its former colonies to thwart real liberation. “I came to realise that Mintoff was fighting for the liberation of Malta. I realised that he was not the malign person I was told he was.”
Once, as he was passing near the Tapestry Chamber in parliament, Micallef gently tapped Mintoff on his tummy. “Today I fully understand what you really mean and honestly desire for Malta,” Micallef told him.
As Micallef walked on to have a coffee in the parliament bar, Mintoff followed him. “What are you doing now Daniel?” asked Mintoff.
“I just told him to leave me alone,” Micallef says. He did not cross the floor to join the Labour ranks. He simply resigned from parliament.
“I felt a great burden on my conscience, that I had helped someone who had betrayed my country. That is why I resigned.”
Five minutes after his resignation was announced on cable radio, Micallef received a phone call from Pellegrini asking him why he had resigned. Daniel replied: “Put your hand on your heart and you will know why.”
Daniel cut the line and never spoke to Pellegrini again. Micallef’s suspicions on the CWP’s role in the 1960s were confirmed in 1972, when a priest presented him with a letter sent by Archbishop Gonzi sent to Cardinal Tardini on 7 March 1961. The document was recently published in Sergio Grech’s book on the life of Felicjan Bilocca, after being hoarded by Micallef for 33 years.
Only Mintoff knew about the existence of this letter. In his letter Gonzi insisted that the Vatican was wrong in believing that his clash with Mintoff was a personal one. He told the Vatican that he was convinced that Mintoff was really a communist who wanted Malta behind the iron curtain.
Micallef cites this as proof that Gonzi sincerely believed that Mintoff was a communist. In retrospect, he thinks that the CWP leader, who had previously occupied the role of general secretary of the MLP, had convinced Gonzi that this was the case. “The CWP was a pawn in the hands of the British. The Church was deceived in believing Mintoff was a communist by the leader of the CWP who was merely serving British interests.”
Irrespective of what role Pelligrini and the British had in sowing the seeds of division which marked the interdett, by 1969 Gonzi had to swallow his pride and accept to make peace with Mintoff. Micallef believes that without pressure from the Vatican, this would not have happened.
“The interdett was like capital punishment. You cannot simply decide to transfer people from hell to heaven without the intervention of the Vatican. Without pressure from the Vatican the church would not have changed its position.”
In his book Censu Tabone – The Man and his Century, historian Henry Frendo also insists that the Vatican had a direct role. “On becoming pope, Paul VI took a personal interest in the Malta question and had some reservations as to the illiberal nature of at least certain aspects or attitudes on the Church’s part in the Mintoff-Gonzi dispute and indeed in the Independence negotiations so far as human rights and the church were concerned.”
Paul VI clipped Gonzi’s wings by appointing Mgr Emmanuel Gerada as Auxiliary Bishop with a right to the succession. Gerada’s brief was to stop the conflict with the MLP and gain Mintoff’s trust. He even went as far as swimming with Mintoff in Saint Peter’s pool.
According to journalist Charles Mizzi, in an account published on di-ve.com, another person who visited Mintoff in L-Gharix was the same Patri Felicjan Billoca who had persuaded Daniel Micallef to contest with the CWP. But Patri Felicjan also wrote in his diary that he despised Bishop Gerada’s role in the peace plan and admits that like Archbishop Gonzi, he never trusted him. At the height of all the turmoil and the political religious battles, Felicjan Bilocca visited Archbishop Michael Gonzi quite frequently and tried to convince him to lift the interdiction on the Labour Party officials and party members.
According to Mizzi it was Bilocca’s constant and powerful intervention, rather than Gerada’s intervention with Gonzi, which outmaneuvered the hawks at the Curia. Author Frans Sammut contends that the Gonzi-Mintoff struggle was a personal as well as ideological contest. He also sees a sharp contrast between Mintoff’s admiration for Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus, and his dislike of Gonzi.
“Why should Mintoff tolerate Makarios’s political pretensions but not Gonzi’s? Well, very probably because Makarios ruled over distant Cyprus while Gonzi wanted to rule over Malta which happened to be the same place Mintoff too wanted to rule over himself.”
Sammut contends that Gonzi could never countenance Mintoff’s “six points” on which he based his notions regarding the separation between church and state. “Gonzi still belonged to the old school whose luminaries were Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X, and Pius XII who was still around when Gonzi was having his initial skirmishes with Mintoff.”
But by then, the winds of change of Vatican Council II were blowing. Sammut notes that that charter 76 of the Constitution of Vatican Council II made it clear that the Church ‘does not place her hopes in privileges offered by the civil authorities but, on the contrary, renounces certain rights legitimately acquired, where it could be considered that their use could place in doubt the sincerity of her testimony’.”
According to Sammut this was in marked contrast with Gonzi’s claim for the privilegium fora. “John XXIII, whom Mintoff always referred to as the ‘saintly pope’, was in sharp contrast with his predecessor Pius XII, definitely left-leaning. So were his close collaborators not least among whom, Cardinal Montini (Paul VI) who would come to the throne on his demise.”
So why did the Vatican intervene so late in the day, six years after the imposition of moral sanctions on the MLP?
According to Sammut, the Vatican would not come out strongly against the local Curia unless these challenge, defy or question religious dogma. “So, Sir Michael Gonzi’s antics were allowed – tolerated would perhaps be a better word – by the Holy See, while covert negotiations between Mintoff’s envoys like Fr Gundisalvus Grech were underway. Other prelates like Mgr Gerada were greatly involved in a long series of meeting which eventually led to the ‘peace’ of 1969.”
By making peace with the Church, Mintoff managed to surmount his last obstacle.
“Mintoff had only one obstacle in his way to electoral victory. With this hurdle out of the day, his ‘march to victory’ became unstoppable.”
Even in 1966, right in the middle of the Catholic interdiction, the MLP increased its vote share by 11,000 votes. It had also increased its presence in parliament by 6 seats – three at the cost of Pelligrini’s party.
Despite getting 6% of the vote, Pelligrini’s party failed to elect a single MP. This signalled an end to the last attempt at creating a parallel labour movement to Mintoff’s anti-colonial brand of socialism.
Yet the Good Friday peace did not heal the wounds in the young nation’s soul. The wrath of Labour supporters against the Church establishment re-erupted periodically, especially during the Church school question in the 1980s when the Curia itself was ransacked by Dockyard workers.

LOOKING BACK AT 1971
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