A history of banking with a difference : the Unione Cattolica San Giuseppe and the collective power of the working classes in Malta

Abstract

One of the first to write about the Unione Cattolica San Giuseppe’s history was Herbert Ganado. In his landmark book, Rajt Malta Tinbidel, Ganado gives little but interesting information about this union and its involvement in the politics of the 1920s and 1930s. He hints that the Catholic Church was right, “to take over” this association for political reasons, to stop the Unione from becoming a bulwark of the Left. The history of this association would have remained a sentence or a paragraph in a book, were it not for the work of Joseph F. Grima who undertook to thoroughly research its origins. Such a study is relevant not only for the historical facts recounted but also for explaining how an association, destined to disappear, became one of Malta’s leading banks.