Some things I will not take with me to my grave.

Last Sunday, Charles Buttigieg who has recently retired from his job as the Church’s PRO, wrote a rather cryptic article in The Sunday Times about somebody who was about to spin a story to one paper and keep the others in the dark.

I confess I do not know what he was going on about, but at face value it would seem he is quite right.

However, now that we are in reminiscential mode, there is an episode Charles and myself witnessed at least 30 years ago. I would like to jog his memory.

At that time, in 1975 or so, Charles was editor of Il-Hajja, the Church-financed daily paper in Maltese. I was deputy editor.

It was our duty, back then, to submit to Archbishop Gonzi anything and everything that related to Church-State relations. This included editorials, articles, letters.

It was our custom to go together to Archbishop Gonzi, either at the Archbishop’s Palace in Valletta, or Mdina or elsewhere. Most times we would be welcomed in the ground floor office he had, with a desk always full of papers. Sometimes, when he was sick, we would be taken up to his bedroom in the private and elegant apartment upstairs, where we would on occasion find the archbishop in bed, wearing the kind of headwear, as shown in some Scrooge films.

It was at one of these meetings, it must have been in 1974, that he dismissed my editorial suggestion of a referendum to approve the 1974 Constitution.

By 1975, the internal situation in the Church was complicated. In 1968, the Pope had appointed bishops Gerada and Cauchi to replace the old guard. Bishop Cauchi had immediately taken over from Bishop Giuseppe Pace in Gozo. But Archbishop Gonzi proved to be a doughty fighter. In time, the clergy, not just the parish priests who may be considered the Church’s old guard, but also the up and coming new post-conciliar clergy, turned against Bishop Gerada who had been instrumental in re-establishing contact with the Labour Party after the 1962 ‘mortal sin’ election.

The issue was the reform of the Church’s finances and the common perception was that Archbishop Gonzi was for reform, and Bishop Gerada was against.

There were long internal battles going on inside the Church and we seminarians, Mario Vassallo in primis through The Bulletin, were inveigled. There was also, I remember, a full page article about the issue in the London Sunday Times, even though it must have seemed to many an obscure internal fight inside a Church steeped in tradition.

The upshot of this was that in time Bishop Gerada was promoted to Nuncio (and went to San Salvador where he had a hand in appointing Oscar Romero archbishop, which led to him becoming a martyr of the Liberation Theology Church against the ruling junta).

After some years, I believe in 1974, an obscure Monsignor Joseph Mercieca who worked in a Vatican office, was appointed as the new assistant bishop to Archbishop Gonzi. I remember Fr Dionysius Mintoff gleefully telling me that on the day Mgr Mercieca was appointed, no less than five priests, all with expectations of becoming the appointed one, had traffic accidents of some sort or another.

But I digress. Charles and I meanwhile continued to go regularly to the Archbishop’s Palace to meet Gonzi.

One day, it must have been around May 1975, we were summoned to the palace. This was in itself rather strange, since we normally went when we had any query or writings to submit.

We found Archbishop Gonzi in a state of some agitation. It seemed he did not know how to begin. Then all of a sudden, he came up with a slip of paper, such as the slips of paper we knew he normally used. On it were typed words to this effect: “Mgr Nikol Cauchi, who we understand will be the next archbishop of Malta...”

Stunned, we kept looking at the paper. Normally the archbishop’s voice was one of command, one that brooked no disobedience. This time, it was hesitant, as if he sensed our reaction. “Perhaps you could somehow insert it in one of your writings and people could then believe it because you are saying it,” he suggested tentatively.

“But Excellency,” Charles replied, “When we publish that people will immediately surmise it is coming from here...”

Without a further word, the archbishop rose and left the room. He went to a sort of anteroom he had on the other side, a room that was normally left in the dark. We heard some rustling there and for the first time we realized there was someone else in that room, overhearing everything.

There must have been some silent confabulation, for then we heard a voice, a voice we knew, telling the hard-of-hearing archbishop “Take that paper from their hands.”

This is what the archbishop did and we left, silent and stunned.

The next day, Charles referred to that meeting. “We must go to Gozo,” he said.

This we did the next Saturday, 31 May 1975. We waited for Bishop Cauchi at the Seminary since he was attending the inauguration and blessing of the Gozo General Hospital (the Maudling affair one).

When he arrived, we were ushered into his presence. Charles spoke: “We want you to know, Excellency, that there are people who want to harm you. But we are not part of that.”

That was it. The bishop must have mumbled something incomprehensible, or I do not recollect what he told us. Certainly, with just that sibylline sentence, he would not have understood what we had witnessed.

That was it. Charles and I never spoke about that episode. I have always wondered what he made of the whole thing. For the time being, I will not reveal the identity of the person who was in the next room, the person who was intimately involved in the whole plot to name Bishop Cauchi as the next archbishop of Malta, maybe hoping for consequences one can only imagine if one has a Machiavellian mind

Certainly, the whole sordid episode coloured much of my subsequent life. I have always wondered how Charles squared what he knew with his close relationship and service to that person, but that is, I think, for him to square with his conscience. Or whether he ever revealed to Bishop Cauchi what lay behind the cryptic message we had given him on that May morning.