The poor middle-aged bride Maria Carmela Borg must have agonised forever and ever over what clothes to wear on her nuptial day (October 1, 1856), and when she finally opted for faux English finery (picked from her second-hand slop shop?) she had no doubt she would be making a big hit with the neighbours. She sure did, even if for all the wrong reasons.
The intricate legal complexities of mixed marriages bedevilled the Maltese political, religious and legal scene- Giovanni Bonello
Her friends might have been jealous – they had not worn an English bonnet in all their lives and quite likely never would – but the exotic choice only ended in exposing Borg to strident ridicule and contempt – almost to a lynching, had it not been for massive police intervention.
This rejection of British fashion by Maltese working class women persisted at least till the 1920s, perhaps later. For a woman to be seen in public wearing a hat instead of the traditional faldetta was considered a defiance of common decency – a ksuħata. No self-respecting Maltese woman of the working classes would do it:
“The simplest kind of girl never owns a hat. The faldetta, you see, is sufficient head-covering except for the most progressive. ‘Why, she wears a hat, that Stella’ said my house-maid, giving the final touch of modernity to her description of an up-to-date friend of whom she sincerely disapproved.”
This wedding-gone-wrong was hardly a solitary, isolated incident of religious bigotry, intolerance and misguided patriotic outrage – these often went hand in hand then.
History records many others. Like the funeral of a Maltese character known as the Abbé Segond, who had reneged on his Catholic baptism and converted to the Methodist creed in the early British period – the cortege caused an ugly popular commotion that ended with his coffin being outraged and in considerable violence. Let Governor Hastings say it in diplomatic language:
“Through the management of that mischievous missionary Mr (John) Keeling, a funeral (of this Maltese Methodist) was prepared that was to pass through the principal streets of Valletta. The populace thought this a studied triumph over their religion, obstructed the passage of the corpse and attempted to tear the coffin from the hearse.
“This happened so near to the Main Guard that the captain commanding detailed a small party to prevent the outrage being carried further, and the procession moved on to the burying ground. However, the soldiers of the 85th Regiment were assaulted with stones and one of them was considerably hurt.
“The speedy arrival of a strong detachment of the Malta Fencibles put an end to the assault of the troops, who would otherwise have been obliged to fire in their own defence.” A minor riot to protest against what the man in the street saw as a hurtful betrayal of Malteseness.
During British rule, the intricate legal complexities of mixed marriages bedevilled the Maltese political, religious and legal scene at least up to the end of the 19th century. This dispute turned into one of the more intractable hot potatoes the civil and religious authorities had to deal with.
By definition a mixed marriage referred to a marital union between a Maltese Catholic and a non-Catholic, mostly foreign but exceptionally also Maltese. By what rites were these marriages to be celebrated? Should Maltese law recognise as valid mixed marriages not concluded according to Catholic rites?
It is ironic to realise that, to a certain extent, the colonial authorities had compounded the Catholic marriage issue by enacting a piece of legislation they must later have sorely regretted.
Wanting to stamp out the current abuse of clandestine marriages (usually shotgun weddings or those opposed by the family of the spouses, celebrated secretly, overlooking the formalities of the publication of banns and other requisites imposed by the Council of Trent), in 1831 Governor Fredrick Cavendish Ponsonby issued a thunderous Proclamation: anyone in Malta contracting, or attempting to contract marriage without complying with all the requirements of canon law would be guilty of a criminal offence punishable with imprisonment from one to two years, and with a fine of 1,000 scudi. A crippling, intimidating penalty.
Problems already tortuous were further entangled by the fact that many in Malta claimed that the only marriages valid at law were those celebrated according to Catholic rites – and that consequently even marriages between two non-Catholics were not to be recognised as valid. But we will not venture there. Let us try to navigate as safely as possible the minefield of mixed marriages between a Maltese Catholic and a non-Catholic.
The Church in Malta, quite obviously, hung on to its privileged position of ‘owning’ marriage in the islands. But in truth, the Maltese political class too generally favoured the Church’s stand: not so much on religious grounds, as on purely political ones.
Insofar as Catholic marriage interfaced closely with traditional Maltese culture and was deemed to be one of the determining ingredients of Maltese national identity, it had to be upheld and defended at all costs against any form of imperialist encroachment.
The national politicians were well aware that their only strength in standing up to the might of colonial dominance lay in their identifying with some powerful non-British cultural force – in the Maltese case, with an ancient, proud Latin, Roman Catholic, European sense of being. Protected by that bastion of home-grown tradition and culture, they felt better able to resist the imposed Anglicisation of Malta.
Up to 1975, when Parliament enacted the Marriage Act, matrimony in Malta was regulated not by Maltese law, but by canon law – or rather, canon law formed part and parcel of the laws of Malta as far as marriage was concerned.
At that time the state acknowledged that in marriage, the contract and the sacrament were inextricably linked and wanted its marriage discipline to be governed by the joint sacramental and contractual constituents, both as to ability to marry, validity, form, substance and effects.
Before the British connection, this canon law monopoly had raised few if any legal or political problems at all – Malta was then ‘governed’ by three Church forces: the Grand Master, the Bishop and the Inquisitor. It was only with the massive presence of British forces in Malta, mostly Anglican or those professing other Protestant denominations, that things changed drastically.
The inherent contradictions between the old Catholic tradition and the new Protestant supremacy acquired sharper relief – and why it had to be Catholic law that should regulate the mixed marriage of a Protestant began being questioned.
Many Maltese (almost all of them women) were asked in marriage by British Protestant suitors. The draconian law then left no room for doubt: unless the couple married before a Catholic priest, their marriage was deemed null and void.
The British authorities and residents were not amused. What, in a British Crown Colony, British laws were disregarded and the hated popish superstition held sway – even over Protestant Englishmen?
All in all, the Maltese judiciary did not budge, with the courts enforcing Catholic canon law on British Protestants, and for long a position of hostile stalemate prevailed – another cause of political friction.
It had to be a massive diplomatic drive, spearheaded by a former British Governor of Malta, Sir John Lintorn Simmons, that finally led to the Simmons-Rampolla agreement between Britain and the Vatican in 1890: the only UK-Vatican ‘concordat’ in history.
By virtue of this exchange, the poisoned mixed-marriage questions (and several other contentious issues) were more or less laid to rest. The UK agreed that canon law should apply under pain of nullity to any marriage celebrated in Malta in which one or both parties were Roman Catholics.
This agreement, which also regulated other outstanding differences about the appointment of bishops and the teaching of English to seminarians, was met with unbounded discontent both by intransigent Catholics in Malta and by equally intransigent Protestants in the UK.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Edward Benson, did not hide Protestant indignation at those British concessions that “fix the yoke of the canon law and the decrees of the Council of Trent together on marriage for the first time”.
Quite coincidentally, the Archbishop’s youngest son, Robert Hugh Benson, later became a leading Roman Catholic priest and a highly successful novelist too – still popular in my Lyceum days. I have an impression, but could not confirm it, that Fr Benson might have been one of the speakers at the International Eucharistic Congress held in Malta in 1913.
Following the agreement, in 1890 Pope Leo XIII formally decreed that marriages celebrated in Malta in which one or both parties were Roman Catholic would be invalid if not celebrated according to the rites of the Council of Trent. That meant that a marriage of a Maltese Catholic and a British Protestant in a Protestant church or in a civil registry was, in Malta, to be discarded as a piece of illegal junk.
On his part, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Benson wanted the issue referred to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Not too surprisingly, the Protestant Lords found for the validity of any marriage in Malta, mixed or even between Catholics, celebrated by a non-Catholic minister.
The loophole saw many bogus Maltese nouveau-Catholics (mostly men) slithering out of the marriage bonds- Giovanni Bonello
Despite the formal Simmons-Rampolla agreement just concluded, in 1892 the Westminster Parliament passed the Foreign Marriage Act which reopened all the old issues of the legality of mixed marriages, by declaring valid the marriage of any person of British nationality abroad if the marriage would have been validly contracted according to British law. The Simmons-Rampolla concordat – more scraps of paper.
And an insolent act of defiance against the spiritual authority of the Holy Father in Rome! Four years later, with the Privy Council judgment under his belt, Governor Fremantle informed the Bishop of Malta Pietro Pace that legislation would soon be introduced locally to make that British act of Parliament applicable to the island. “Malta was ablaze.”
Inflammatory, monster mass meetings were held on three successive Sundays in March 1896 on the Floriana Granaries to protest against what was deemed to be a breach of trust and of the ancient prerogatives of the Maltese. “The British began to fear that the agitation would endanger public peace and the matter was allowed to drop.”
Honeyed assurances from London defused a truly incendiary situation. One of the very few times when the colonial authorities acknowledged Maltese popular sentiment, however misguided it might appear today, and backed down. In truth, popular sentiment did not count much, but the security of the British hold over the fortress colony did.
The mixed-marriage dilemmas were never completely solved. Up to relatively recently, the Maltese courts still refused to recognise the validity of a marriage contracted by a Maltese Catholic anywhere in the world, unless he or she had tied the knot according to Catholic rites.
Many Maltese, validly married in the United Kingdom (or in other lands of traditional Maltese emigration) according to the laws of the country, could obtain a fast-track declaration of nullity of their marriage from the Maltese courts by simply affirming under oath that they had been baptised as Catholics and that they had failed to get married according to the Catholic rites prescribed by canon law – and, hey presto, their marriage obligingly disappeared. Marriage? What marriage?
That loophole saw many bogus Maltese nouveau-Catholics (mostly men) slithering out of the marriage bonds, denouncing maintenance and other marital obligations, on discovering, quite belatedly, that they must have been, after all, true-blue Catholics all along. All they had to do was to unearth and dust, at the right moment, a long-forgotten Catholic baptism certificate that, but this is quite incidental, enabled them to behave as the most un-Christian should.
The Maltese courts were on their side, though some judges found the guts to voice their disgust at being used and misused by scoundrels who had at the most convenient moment rediscovered an itching nostalgia for the Catholic faith, but whose only faith was in their ability to evade their legal responsibilities.
And their fiscal ones too. The scam included remembering your Catholic baptism when this served to save on income tax. In furtherance of tax avoidance, the court granted a declaration of nullity of a marriage validly contracted in London according to UK law by a Maltese sort-of Catholic and his (wealthy) Protestant wife, still happily living together.
The presiding judge observed that “this court is well aware that the plaintiff is making use of the religion which he claims to profess... for economic purposes, but this, in itself, does not negate the juridical interest required by law to exercise the present action”. This arrant misuse of religious faith to favour the most undeserving, fully supported by the most compliant, only came to an end, and none too early either, in 1975.
Up to 1891 at least 700 mixed marriages had already been recorded in Malta: almost without exception of British men with Maltese women, and virtually never the other way round. Not a single one involved a Gozitan woman (very few British ships or troops were stationed in Gozo).
Many mixed-religion couples opted to go through both a Catholic and a Protestant wedding ceremony, to make really sure, you never know, just in case. It seems that Borg was not interested in double insurance and only intended to get married in the Protestant church.
Providentially, when the mob’s behaviour started getting more and more dangerously threatening to the newly-weds, someone finally had the good sense to call in the police. By this time the groom had escaped, abandoning his terrified bride to the rather unsubtle attentions of the rabble.
As The Malta Times put it facetiously, the police arrived “not before a temporary divorce had been effected between the bridegroom and his newly-made bride who were forced to betake themselves to flight and seek for safety by fleeing in different directions”. Same version from the Portafoglio: the groom, in a confused daze, upped and fled, leaving the bride to face the disorderly hoodlums on her own.
The police intervened and arrested 11 of the most unruly. The next day the accused were hauled before Magistrate Salvadore Ceci (on the bench since January 1, 1829), and charged with creating a public disturbance. He acquitted one of the market boys for lack of evidence and found the other 10 guilty, fining them 10 shillings each, which they all paid on the spot.
The press applauded the conviction of the mischievous rowdies: “exceedingly well condemned” exclaimed one newspaper, but some other observers felt the scoundrels had been let off too lightly – “a general impression prevails that the prisoners ought to have been more harshly dealt with”; another said: “in our view the penalty was too lenient, insofar that it will not serve to prevent, in the future, such dishonourable and repulsive scenes.” Being critical of court penalties seen to be too light, was not a community pastime invented yesterday.
The conservative, anti-exiles L’Ordine wrapped up its reportage with a sentiment I suppose we could all share: “Let us hope never to have to witness again scenes as unpleasant as this and that the police will be alert to prevent any repetition.” Few would have disagreed with that, whatever salt Borg may have rubbed in the patriotic ego.
Concluded.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Maroma Camilleri for assistance at the National Library and to Charles Farrugia at the National Archives.