The letter by Francis Falzon (The Sunday Times of Malta, February 17), on sports and lack thereof, at the Archbishop’s Seminary coincided with an article (by Davide Schiappapietra) in the Catholic Weekly in Sydney. It is titled ‘Vatican mass appeal has Italian cricket joining T20’. (A short form of cricket played at international level including a World Cup competition).
The letter revived significant family memories and other emotions as well. Benito Mussolini outlawed cricket, considered to be inextricably connected with England, as part of a process called Italianisation. Cricket was the symbol of the ‘evil’ British Empire.
Despite the attitude, Mussolini spared football, another British sport. Football, ‘calcio’, was already a global game and football served well the Fascist propaganda machine, with the Italian team winning back-to-back World Cups in 1930 and 1934.
The process now turned full circle as Italy has been granted full T20 international status. The Italian national team was ranked 27th in the world and fifth in Europe.
Arthur Hinsley, who became Catholic Archbishop of Westminster in 1935, and later a Cardinal, is credited with keeping the flame of the game alive. This emphasis and the mention of Hinsley rang a bell and took me to check family history notes to confirm the impression I harboured of a special, old and beneficially fruitful connection between Collegio and family.
In 1917, the year Hinsley became rector of the Venerabile Collegio Inglese, an uncle of mine, Salvinu (i.e. Paul Boffa’s brother) was studying for the priesthood at the Collegio.
Soon after he arrived in Rome as rector of the Collegio, Hinsley bought land that was adapted as a cricket pitch. Despite Mussolini’s decree banning cricket, there was one place in Rome where he could not entirely exert his power, the Vatican.
‘Religious cricket’ was still played there and in Catholic seminaries and monasteries by British, Australian, African and others from other parts of the Empire.
The game survived and slowly emerged in post-war Italy, with members of the Catholic church joining local teams, alongside English-speaking expats, and increasingly the ‘new Italians’ from Sri Lanka, India and other cricketing countries.
Cardinal Arthur Hinsley is also remembered as ‘Churchill’s cardinal’. In June 1940, at the height of the Dunkirk crisis, he wrote to Churchill encouraging him to keep up the fight. Hinsley wrote clearly that Europe faced something new and sinister in Nazism. When Italy entered the war he said that Italian fascism had now been taken over by Nazism and had broken with the Christian civilisation that had built Europe. Churchill noted: “The cardinal is vigorous and tough!”
At the same time, Paul Boffa, a kindred spirit of Cardinal Hinsley, nurtured by the ideals and the atmosphere of the Collegio Venerabile, spoke in Valletta. He encouraged the Maltese to react against fascist sympathies expressed by Maltese fascists on Radio Roma.
Meanwhile, the clouds of war, dark and threatening, were nigh. The fascists had a list of Maltese who would be dealt with after the invasion. Mussolini was preparing his Declaration of War speech.
As war approached, in Cottonera, where I was brought up, I was taught the rudiments of cricket by a good friend who played the game at his college.
Now I relax watching cricket in one of the top cricketing countries.