Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1183404
OPINION 26 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 10 NOVEMBER 2019 Why I think the Archbishop's gesture matters... An investment of €9 million Opera onal Programme I - European Structural and Investment Funds 2014-2020 "Fostering a compe ve and sustainable economy to meet our challenges" Project part-financed by the European Regional and Development Fund Co-financing rate: 80% European Union; 20% Na onal Funds MINISTRY FOR THE ECONOMY, INVESTMENT AND SMALL BUSINESSES …WHETHER it was 'a PR exercise' or not. But first things first. It might seem strange that someone like myself, who was born 10 years after the famous 'excom- munication edict' of the 1960s, would feel in any way person- ally affected by this whole ugly business. But I do. I myself find it hard to explain this; but from an early age I noticed that there was something very, very wrong with the environment in which I was brought up. For instance: when I was around 13, like most other Church school pupils I pro- tested against the attempted nationalisation of my school – the whole 'Jew b'xejn, jew xejn' episode, for those who remem- ber it – back in 1984. And I thought I was awfully clever, too, to come up with the slogan 'SOS: Save Our Schools'… until I joined the crowd, and saw that at least 15 other placards all said the same thing… I was not, however, anywhere near clever enough to fully un- derstand the historical signifi- cance of what was happening all around me. I didn't realise that this issue – which seemed to fill the entire horizon, from my own childish perspective back then – was in reality just an aftershock of great epochal battles fought long, long before my time. Among the many things I didn't know was that Dom Mintoff, together with the entire executive of the Labour Party, was excommunicated by Archbishop Gonzi in 1960; or that it was once a mortal sin to vote Labour... or even to read a newspaper owned by the Labour Party. Having been brought up a generation later, the implica- tions of 'being denied absolu- tion' – in an age when Hell re- ally was a question of fire and brimstone, and all that – were entirely beyond me. The sheer gravity of the injus- tice suffered by those people was something that went clean over my head. Still less did I have any idea that the 'Interdett' of 1961 was itself just a repeat performance of the excommunication of Lord Gerald Strickland in the 1930s… which in turn was probably an echo of something else further back in history, and so on, ad infinitum. This was all stuff I learnt about later in life. So, when a bunch of hood- lums ransacked the law courts, and later the Archbishop's Curia, in 1984… I couldn't understand what all the anger was about. Why would they smash a statue of Our Lady, for instance? What blame could that 'woman' possibly have had, for the current political situation in Malta? It just didn't make sense to me at all (bear in mind I was 13 years old. A lot of other things didn't make sense to me, either). Even now that I understand things a little better, I still find it hard to comprehend why so much hatred and bitterness still orbits around political discussion in Malta today, even long after the cause of the ini- tial rift has (or seems to have) faded into history. But my gut feeling tells me it has something to do with our collective failure to ever exorcise the ghosts of our na- tion's troubled past. Just as those former Labour stalwarts had been buried in unconse- crated ground, in a state of 'conjectural damnation', the spectre of Malta's unfinished business is still condemned to forever stalk the local political landscape. Like Cathy's restless spirit in Wuthering Heights, past griev- ances will continue to toss and turn in their "unquiet slum- bers", until they are finally lain to rest "in that quiet earth". This is why I instinctively felt that what Archbishop Scicluna tried to do last week was something of an epochal, historical nature. And for the same reason, I feel it doesn't even really matter whether Scicluna's gesture was a token of sincere regret, or just a PR stunt to (as I saw it described somewhere) 'score political brownie-points', or to redeem the wounded reputation of the Catholic Church in general. Not all 'public relations exer- cises' are intrinsically evil; even if contrived or downright dis- honest, words or actions can still have a positive outcome in the long run. To my eyes, then, this was a Raphael Vassallo