Fifty years ago this week the politico-religious dispute that bedevilled Malta in the 1960s reached its lowest point. The bishops of Malta and Gozo inflicted the interdict upon the executive committee of the Malta Labour Party. That action confirmed a deep division that had taken place in the country over the previous months.

I was one of the interdicted, a young man whose incipient political experience and opinion pieces related mostly to criticism of the British government’s suspension of the Constitution and imposition of direct colonial rule on the island. With the distance of history I still find it difficult to comprehend how the political scene could be turned upside down like that.

After Dom Mintoff’s government resigned in the spring of 1958, Labour’s running battle was not with the Nationalist Party, nor the Church – just with the British government. In that struggle for survival, as he was to term it, Labour leader Mintoff would often say that the MLP would accept help from all quarters, provided it was without strings.

Archbishop Gonzi interpreted that to mean that the MLP was veering towards communism and would accept aid from the Soviet Union. With the distance of time, aided by knowledge of a conversation His Grace had with Daniel Micallef at the time, which Daniel eventually recounted to me in detail, I now understand that Archbishop Gonzi was genuine in his fear. He became obsessed by it.

He was also wrong. I had been militating in the MLP from 1957 and became a member of its executive in 1959. Never was a word breathed to suggest that, in our confrontation with the British government, we would go the communist way, directly or indirectly. Archbishop Gonzi, for various reasons, including his mistrust of Mr Mintoff and the personal antipathy between those two Cottonera giants, was convinced otherwise. He even declared that he had information that the MLP had received $60,000 from AAPSO, an Afro-Asian organisation he termed to be a fellow traveller of Communism.

Who knows who fed him that lie? Whoever it was, he succeeded in raising the politico-religious temperature to boiling point. It boiled over when the MLP executive issued a statement of policy in the early spring of 1961. I had contributed only minutely to the discussion of it, but I knew every word in it because I had typed the final draft. It contained no reference to Communism. But it did contain the phrase that the party, in its fight for self-determination for Malta, would accept help from all quarters, provided it was without strings attached.

To Archbishop Gonzi that was it. He wrote to the executive committee demanding withdrawal of the statement of policy. The executive committee wrote back saying it would refer the matter to the party general conference, which was to meet in two days’ time.

The Archbishop did not wait for that. He interdicted the MLP executive on the eve of the conference. The conference met in Floriana and approved the statement of policy. As we left the conference some of us were manhandled by the police.

The saddest of sad Malta wars was on. It was a sin to read the Labour papers. In the general election that followed in 10 months’ time, in February 1962 the bishops decreed it a sin to vote Labour. In between, Archbishop Gonzi had wallowed in politics to prod a number of small parties into being, including one splinter from the MLP – Pellegrini’s, and another from the PN – Ganado’s.

Ugly years followed. Malta was at odds with itself. Families were riven down the middle. Death, natural or, like my uncle’s, by terrible accident elicited the Curia’s insult of burial in unconsecrated ground, the cruellest cut of all. A few of us were condemned to marriage in the sacristy, as if our beloved had married non-believers. Blood was not shed. Yet hatred was sown and took root. That can be worse than spilling of blood.

Eventually the MLP and the Vatican entered into direct discussions. Leading to balmy politico-religious peace in the spring of 1969.

A lump rises in my throat as I write this, as it did when I heard the good news 42 years back. Then it was a lump of joy. Today it is a lump of apprehension – can it happen again? Did we learn enough from the tragedy of the Sixties? Has the Malta Church learned to truly keep out of politics? Has the Labour Party learned to measure its language in heated controversy?

Have we as a people, God forbid, forgotten to remember what we went through in the devastating years of the 1960s?