Surprisingly, none of the Labour media, neither One News, nor KullĦadd, on Sunday commemorated the 50th anniversary since the imposition by Archbishop Michael Gonzi of the interdiction on the topmost officials of the party.

It was left to an English-language paper and the GWU Sunday paper to do the commemoration.

On the one hand, one can perhaps understand that this being a tricky time in the pre-divorce referendum weeks for Labour to commemorate such an event, but then Labour was more a victim than a perpetrator and anyway, whatever happened is history and no oversight can remove its blight.

The whole country has now come round to admit that the imposition of such a moral censure was a throwback to medieval times and the Inquisition. To understand its context, one must also remember that just a year later, in October 1962, the Second Vatican Council which opened up the Catholic Church to modern times, was inaugurated. So much then was the Maltese Church out of synch with the rest of Catholicism.

Historians are still coming up with analyses why for two times in the last century, the Church in Malta found itself at loggerheads with a political party, first with Lord Gerald Strickland and later with Dom Mintoff’s Labour Party.

It is clear there was an almighty clash of personalities and wills between fiery Dom and the doughty 80-year-old archbishop.

The Church under Gonzi was against anything that smacked of progress and reform and stood sword in hand to defend what it perceived as its privileges, including the right not to pay tax, the right to speak out on non-religious issues such as integration with Britain or the like, the right to its property and its schools, banning the Church from interfering and imposing religious sanctions at election time, etc.

Imposing the interdiction, a form of excommunication, meant the persons that were affected by it could not get married in Church nor buried in hallowed ground.

Over and above this strict interpretation of the interdict measures, the Church sanctions also affected the bulk of the Labour supporters who were often also refused Church burials, their houses skipped in the annual Easter home blessing, etc – all measures that, considering how Malta was Church-dominated in those days, amounted to social ostracising in a big way.

These sanctions were successful in that they kept Dom Mintoff out of government from 1958 all the way to 1971, but also unsuccessful in that even against the harshest of campaigns in 1962, 65,000 voters still chose Labour. And bit by bit all the reforms demanded by Dom Mintoff were all introduced over the years.

These sanctions hurt people, especially the humble Labour voters who had always been Church-goers and who found themselves shut out of the place that had been a second home for them over the years. Even though time is said to heal, the wounds of the past still hurt those who were affected by them, even after all these years.

The Church in Malta has expressed contrition over this shameful episode but here we are on the eve of the divorce referendum and voices from inside the Church are again being heard threatening fire and brimstone against those who dare vote in favour of divorce. We all say the 1960s are gone and never to be repeated, but are we so sure?

There is one other issue: The Nationalist Party was in the short-term the prime beneficiary of these sanctions in that it won the 1962 and the 1966 elections (and when the sanctions and the imposition of mortal sin on whoever voted Labour were lifted in 1969, Labour immediately won) but in the long-term it has suffered and continues to suffer from these Church sanctions in that people perceive the Church to be, as in the case of the Conservative Party in Britain vis-à-vis the Anglican Church, the Nationalist Party at prayer.

But the whole truth must be told. In the book about Eddie Fenech Adami, former Speaker (and also personal physician to Dr Borg Olivier) Alfred Bonnici says he himself heard Dr Borg Olivier counsel Archbishop Gonzi against the imposition of such Church censures “because the Nationalist Party will be blamed for it.”