We were children

There has been a lot of ink pumped into newsprint, and a vast amount of time and space filled by the electronic media over the Archbishop’s decision, on All Souls’ Day, to go to the Addolorata Cemetery where he was reported to have sought forgiveness for

With his noble gesture – a consolidation of the Maltese Church’s strategy to bury the ugly past originally put into motion with a public apology by the late Archbishop Ġużeppi Mercieca – Mgr Scicluna has touched a very sore nerve within Maltese society, particularly among those who lived through the turbulent years of the politico-religious dispute of the very early Sixties.

He also laid a wreath on the grave of Ġużé Ellul Mercer, Deputy Prime Minister and deputy leader of the Labour Party during the 1950s, who had died when he was collectively ‘interdicted’ by the Church and so laid to rest in that very grim space.

Reactions to Archbishop Scicluna’s blessing of the ‘Miżbla’ graves and his appeal for forgiveness were varied among those who lived through that social abomination. Many were ready to forgive but not necessarily forget, still willing to praise the gesture. Others, however, thought of it as a messa in scena, play-acting, confirming that there is still a thin layer of anger pulsating within the aching, sagging veins of surviving victims who are today well into their 80s and 90s.

Which brings me to my generation – the children of those brave men and women, mothers and fathers, who did not relent in the face of threatened eternal fire, social emargination and the denial of sacraments and rituals they had been strictly brought up to observe and follow blindly. Most of us at the time hardly knew what all the fuss was about, but we still ended up being used as cannon fodder by the then Church authorities against our very parents.

Our experience of the whole real-life drama was as indelible as anybody else’s. How can someone forget how, as an adolescent, he or she was refused absolution at confession within earshot of school friends and street pals who conglomerated inside the parish church every Saturday afternoon? All one did to deserve this humiliation was obeying daddy by going out to get the “condemned” newspaper for him. When you think about it today, it sounds such a ridiculous occurrence involving naïve children but, of course, hindsight is an uneven yardstick.

Many of us children watched, almost nonchalantly, as neighbours’ stillborn babies were taken – minus the officiating priest – for burial in the “rubbish dump”, uncles and aunties got married in some hidden corner of the village church where a sympathetic priest did all the apologetic business, and the village parish priest openly skipped going into those “tainted” households in the street during the traditional Easter blessing of homes. It is also true that many of those households simply chose to keep their front doors closed.

My own ingrained memory from the period, at the height of a long campaign for the 1962 general election – often referred to as “the mortal sin election” – is of my paternal grandmother resisting her children, including my father, and refusing to go out and vote. She had just been to confession where she had been warned that if she opted to vote Labour, she was bound to go straight to hell. Again, I was oblivious to the dramatics of the whole issue, but it is not easy to forget the sight of a weeping granny, a war widow (see further down), surrounded by the furiously protesting members of her own family.

The same scene was occurring all over these Islands, as brother and sister took on brother and sister, parents were alienated from their offspring and genuine priests and other members of the clergy secretly despaired. We were children exposed to all this repugnance and no one in his right mind could possibly think we could grow unscathed by it.

However, it may also have given us the privilege to accept that every chapter in life needs to come to an end in order for a new one to begin, as Archbishop Scicluna rightly acknowledged. Those of us who have persisted in staying away from the Church did not necessarily do so out of an empty need for revenge. The irony is that most of us who did were, later in life, often admonished by our own mothers who, after all, had been the main victims and had better reason to opt out but chose not to.

We were children. Today we are parents and grandparents. To erase our ugly memories we have brought up a generation of free-thinking individuals who do not need to be threatened with anything but love, who have minds of their own and who have different axes to grind, as Greta Thunberg keeps telling the whole world.

In Canada, a war of words took place the previous week when a popular broadcaster called out immigrants who did not wear a poppy in memory of WWI and WWII veterans. He was rightly fired from his job, but some will disagree.

As we know only too well, red poppy badges are considered a must-have accessory around Remembrance Day – 11th November, across the so-called British Commonwealth (the history of many ex-colonies has a lot to say about stolen wealth that became British), but with time the habit has lost most of its allure. Very few people here bother to wear a poppy nowadays, but that does not in any way mean they disrespect the millions who paid with their lives for the way of life we enjoy today.

Those of us who refuse to wear a poppy associate it with a massive scam that has been going on for decades. The charity that has run it for all these many years spends most of the intake on wages and bonuses for the bosses and not on the veterans, their families and other engagements connected to both World Wars.

Again, my paternal grandmother comes in. She lost her husband, the grandpa I never knew, during the Second World War when the ship he was on hit a German mine inside Grand Harbour. Left with six boys and an only daughter, it cannot have been easy for her to continue raising them and giving them a future, which she still – incredibly – did, but no thanks to the poppy fund. When, as a curious adult, I once asked what compensation she received for the tragic loss of the family’s breadwinner, it turned out that nanna used to receive the astronomical annual amount of the equivalent of five pounds Sterling!

Sorry – indeed let us celebrate the memory of those who lost their lives for us to have a better future, but medals, poppies and parades have only a symbolic meaning. Adequate sustenance money to those whose lives needed to go on regardless should have come – and have continued to come – from the very sources that instigated, as they still do, war and destruction.