The garden of forgiveness: healing the trauma of the Interdett

The bust of Nerik Mizzi, the short-lived Nationalist prime minister who died in office three months from election in 1950, faces the St John’s Cathedral in Valletta – 250 metres off Castille Square where the statue of his successor, George Borg Olivier, stands proudly, over a 10-foot pillar. Fitting for the ‘father of Maltese Independence’.

Unlike Mizzi, exiled in 1942 without trial by the British forces to Uganda along with other suspected Italophile luminaries from the PN, Manwel Dimech – the socialist intellectual the Maltese Catholic archdiocese deemed dangerous – enjoys pride of place in Castille Square. Not a politician but exiled by Malta’s colonial governor over false accusations of being a German spy, (and having suffered excommunication from the Church) he would die in an Egyptian prison after seven miserable years spent incarcerated.

And while Dimech earned rightful recognition under the Mintoff administration in 1976 with a statue by Anton Agius, the jury is out on why Labour has failed to honour the victims of the ‘Interdett’ - that other historic shunning of 1961, which is much closer to home, the party and even its living members.

62 years after the notorious interdiction of the Labour executive, a pitched war between Church and Labour that effectively made voting Labour a “sin” during two election rounds won by the PN, no monument to the excommunicated victims yet exists.

The enduring exemplar of what the Interdett meant is Guże Ellul Mercer, the former deputy prime minister whose death in 1962 consigned him to burial in an unconsecrated grave on the margins of the Addolorata cemetery – a ‘punishment’ that was part of the interdiction package administered by Archbishop Mikiel Gonzi in his war against Dom Mintoff.

It was an old weapon used by the Church that mimicked the colonial forces’ power of exile: in 1910 it excommunicated Dimech for two years; in 1930 it announced a vote for Strickland’s Constitutional Party and Labour was a “mortal sin”; and in 1960 it interdicted the young socialists Lorry Sant and Joe Camilleri for insulting the Church in a party pamphlet.

“It is time for a goodwill gesture,” says Jason Micallef, former Labour secretary-general (2003-9) and now chairman of the Valletta Cultural Agency, who has a bone to pick with the Curia.

From the roof garden of the VCA’s Valletta Design Cluster, a community space that replaced the old abattoir, he can lay his eyes on the walled gardens of the Archbishop’s Palace right opposite it.

“It should be open to the public,” Micallef says, who is gently laying claim on it by proposing that it can be run and managed by the VCA itself. “It is one of the few urban gardens available in Valletta and it is not being used.” This, Micallef thinks, is suitable reparation for the Interdett.

The archbishop disagrees. His Valletta palace houses the ecclesiastical tribunals that hears marital annulment proceedings. Such a private forum cannot abut on a public garden.

In 2020, Micallef roped in former arts minister Jose Herrera to petition Charles Scicluna for the garden to host a public monument to the victims of the interdiction. The archbishop suggested that the government sticks to an earlier suggestion for a monument erected on the Floriana Mall.

“It certainly won’t be the Church to dictate where the State gets to erect a public monument,” Micallef hits back. “You can’t wash this wound away with the apology of 1978 or the blessing of the graves in 2021. This is no reconciliation for a nine-year martyrdom,” he says.

In 2019, Archbishop Charles Scicluna blessed the graves of Guze Ellul Mercer and the victims of the Interdiction

Psychological warfare

The clerical activism of the late 1950s and 1960s in Malta was fuelled by a junta of Catholic organisations (il-Ġunta) which had heeded the call from the Maltese archbishop to prevent Labour from “relegating the church to the sacristy”.

The short-lived Mintoff administration had resigned in April 1958 after mass dismissals at the naval dockyard. Two years earlier, the 1956 referendum for total integration with the UK had floundered due to mass abstention from the Nationalist Party and the Church’s opposition. Now Mintoff had changed gear and joined the mainstream call for full independence from Great Britain.

At the height of the Red Scare, Archbishop Mikiel Gonzi was fixated that Mintoff, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and member of the Fabian Society, was communism’s wolf in sheep’s clothing. Gonzi considered Mintoff an enemy who would drain his church of its earthly powers, whether by class conflict or central economic planning, or by his avowed plan to seek international assistance for Malta’s independence from either West... or East.

This veiled threat of godless communism was the last straw for Gonzi: in April 1961, he interdicted the Labour executive, declared voting Labour, the sale of or reading of socialist newspapers and attendance at Labour meetings, mortal sins. The Ġunta exhorted the Catholic faithful to see the forthcoming 1962 elections as a crusade against ‘Mintoffian devils’, forging a path for the Nationalist Party to win the election.

What was particularly damning in the 1961-1969 interdiction (a resolution finally came in a six-point ‘peace treaty’ between Mintoff and Archbishop delegate Emanuele Gerada) is that even though it was the Labour executive that was interdicted, it had a scatter-gun effect on ordinary people seen reading socialist newspapers and attending Labour meetings.

“The tangible results of Gonzi’s war were very immediate. Families were torn apart. Labour activists were ostracised from social organisations. Children of Labour activists and known sympathisers were bullied at school and in the villages. Priests wielded more power and Labour youths’ chances of finding jobs decreased even further, exacerbating their already miserable economic situation. This was the bleak backdrop of Independence: in the 1960s as much as 60,000 men and women had left the islands in search for work – back then comprising as much as 20% of the population,” writes historian Mark Camilleri in a piece for this newspaper back in 2021.

“And here lies a very important reason why going to hell was much worse than it sounds today. For the oppressed and hard-working Catholic-Labourite, mired in a dire economic scenario, who struggled to make ends meet, the Catholic religion could provide some hope and light at the end of the tunnel – death at least promised a good afterlife. Now, all the hard work and lifetime devotion to Church and God mattered no longer as the Labourite was bound for damnation anyway. In other words, Gonzi took away from the most vulnerable the most important religious element of Christianity: the resilient and spiritual hope that they could one day be saved. Gonzi sent these people to hell.”

Fr Anton d’Amato, the present director of the archbishop’s migrants commission (and son of former Nationalist MP Helen D’Amato), would probably agree. He researched the Interdiction for his theology licentiate in 2019, and today supports the creation of a truth-and-reconciliation committed “to understand what happened and start healing and reconciling wounds.”

“It is like an intergenerational trauma,” he told 103FM presenter Andrew Azzopardi. “It is still being passed on from one generation to the next despite the passing of decades... the greatest hurt, the one that is inherited, is the internal division created in each person,” D’Amato says, a divide made worse by the fact that devout Catholics were denied the grace of the sacraments.

Thug-of-war: Archbisop Mikiel Gonzi (left) brandished the ultimate weapon by inflicting sin and the promise of Hell for errant voters in the 1960s, in his war against Dom Mintoff

History, time and space

Micallef’s desire to see the Interdett monument inside an excised property of the Church would add a flavour of reparative justice. But Malta already struggles with imagination on the locations of monuments – and location does matter here – because the island has not yet dealt with so many “alien” memorials which no longer have a place in modern-day Malta.

Historian Charles Xuereb argues in his book Decolonising The Maltese Mind – In Search Of Identity, that Malta needs to analyse its monumental landscape, especially in Valletta and its environs, where British monuments outnumber all others, quite the anomaly in a Maltese capital.

“There are several monuments to British personnel, who lost their lives abroad with no connection with the Island’s history. These alien memorials are blocking deserved native ones. Valletta still misses a monument to its prime patriot Mikiel Anton Vassalli while it unashamedly boasts of a mausoleum for the British commissioner Alexander Ball who exiled him!”

And it is not only the omission of an Interdett monument that riles Xuereb. His list of missed monuments needs a serious discussion and proper policy, not just some accommodating solution to a quick-fix recollection of the Mintoff years. “I cannot help but agree with the suggestion to erect a monument to those politicians who in 1961 – practically forgotten even on the 50th anniversary of the event in 2021 – suffered at the hands of an outdated Catholic Church in Malta, under the Gonzi bishopric, stubbornly resisting late local secularisation. Such a monument should also include the 1930s victims of the Strickland party, also interdicted.

“Recent omitted monuments include one to the 43 illegally banished Maltese to Uganda during WWII. In this case, to further rub salt in the wound of omission, in St Julian’s there is a plaque hailing the notorious Col. Bertram Ede, who between 1930 and 1942 was secretly managing a network of prominent Maltese spies for the British government.”

Reconciliation. But how?

Jason Micallef understands that it is disappointing that his own Labour government has not yet named even a single street for the victims of the Interdett (there are at least five streets named after Ellul Mercer). But rather than taking it to his own party, Micallef feels it is the Church that must respond in kind.

“For an institution that has often lofty words about the state of the environment, donating an urban garden to the public can be a tangible gift of goodwill to recognise the damage of the Interdett,” Micallef says. He refuses the tag of it being an opportunist claim for his VCA. “I have no problem in saying that we would support its maintenance,” he says.

And has not the Maltese Church paid its dues with the 1991 concordat for its lands? “No,” Micallef says. “The Church paid its dues, with the government then financing its teachers’ salaries in its schools.”

In the Church document on ecclesial renewal ‘One Church, One Journey’, Archbishop Charles Scicluna lists specific processes the Archdiocese has committed itself to implement in these next four years. Page 67 carries the section: ‘Wounds in our personal and collective memory’.

“Unless one comes to a peaceful resolution with one’s suffering, the effects of unresolved trauma can become contagious, passed on in families and tightly knit communities whose memories become distorted through unresolved grief... This does not mean forgetting past events; it means re-examining them with a new attitude...”

There is no mention of the Interdict. The uncaptioned photo underneath is that of Archbishop Scicluna blessing the grave of Guze Ellul Mercer in 2019. “In Malta, the wounds of clericalism have taken on distinct forms that are particularly harmful because of our proximity to one another, our turbulent political history these past hundred years... It is paramount that we acknowledge our frailties, that we name how we have inflicted wounds on each other in the past and, as Christians, seek to engage in a long process of mutual listening, seeking reparation, and, ultimately, praying for the power of the Spirit to be able to forgive one another.”

Micallef thinks the Maltese Church’s apologies and blessings will never be enough to heal a historical wound such as the Interdett. “With all due respect, the Church must say ‘sorry’ with a deed,” Micallef says, his eyes on the prize across the road from St Christopher Street.