Heirs demand return of stately home from Church

Additional reporting by Chris Mangion

The heirs of the former owners of Villa Manduca and its adjacent estates in Marsaskala have taken the Maltese archdiocese to court in a bid to regain their property, after the church authorities allegedly left the house in ruins and failed to keep their obligations outlined in a 1997 donation contract.

The extensive villa and its estate, which includes a chapel with works of art and other silverware, were donated to former Archbishop Joseph Mercieca to be used as a retirement home for clerics or for pastoral purposes.

But the property was never used, and adding insult to injury, the Church applied for a MEPA permit to demolish nine buildings of the estate on St Anne Street, Marsaskala, and instead erect a seven-storey complex.

In court, the testimony of Archbishop Emeritus Joseph Mercieca makes for some surreal reading: according to the 82-year-old cleric, he has scant recollection of the generous donation itself in which he had taken an active part in securing.

The lawyer doing the questioning is one of the heirs himself, Francis Lanfranco, who in 1997 had served as the legal counsel for the noble Agatha Formosa Gauci and her twin sister, Carmelina Debattista. According to their wishes, they wanted the archdiocese to have the property in return for the celebration of memorial masses and an annual veneration for the Holy Virgin of the Rosary, whose cult they had a profound devotion for.

Apart from being donated the properties, the ecclesiastical authorities also took patronage of the chapel's painting of the Holy Virgin of the Rosary, as well as other items of gold and precious stones, silverware and holy vestments used for venerations.

Lanfranco himself presided over the 1997 agreement with Mercieca and the late auxiliary bishop Annetto Depasquale.

Specifically, while the two sisters were still alive and then residing in a home for the elderly in Mosta, they still retained the right to use the chapel for the celebration of the feast of the Holy Virgin of the Rosary.

But far from using Villa Manduca as a residential home for priests or a seminarians' residence, the stately home was left in ruins by the ecclesiastical authorities.

Lanfranco himself claims that it was merely a week after the donation agreement had been signed, that he personally saw the titular painting of the Virgin moved inside the Archbishop's palace in Mdina. Even the silverware and other precious items had been moved to the Cathedral Museum in Mdina for safekeeping purposes.

Three years later in 2000, Formosa Gauci and Lanfranco, now the heir to the deceased Carmelina Debattista, complained about the state of disuse of Villa Manduca - apparently the premises had been solely used for the filming of the television soap opera 'Ghada Jisbah Ukoll'.

Formosa Gauci passed away in 2007, and with the appointment of a new archbishop, the heirs of Villa Manduca proceeded with court action to regain their property. In January 2009, the archdiocese accepted to return Villa Manduca and the chapel to the heirs, and instead retain the adjacent estate of nine properties.

A draft contract for the rescission also included a clause not to erect any structure over the properties that would bock the view of Villa Manduca or the chapel. But before the contract could be signed, the heirs learnt on 3 July 2010 from the newspaper listings of MEPA permits that the archdiocese had applied for their demolition and erection of a seven-storey building.