Healing a turbulent past : reconciling church and politics in Malta

Abstract

Although officially the relations between the Maltese Church and current Labour administration are cordial – indeed the two often collaborating to assist the most vulnerable – one can still sense a level of animosity towards the Church from some Labour supporters. These past four years, the contribution of ecclesiastical authorities in the public sphere has been met with anger by those who claim the Church should not be involved in “politics” while recalling the turbulent sittinijiet as a time when the Church aggressively opposed the Labour Party and its supporters. This conflation of partisanship with politics would seem to limit the local church from being prophetic in the public sphere and this study suggests that this is because past wounds have not healed. The study focuses on this particular historical period, in its political, cultural and ecclesiological context. The first chapter analyses why the sittinijiet were the genesis of a traumatic experience for Labour supporters, while the second chapter seeks to understand why the wound seems to persist to this day. The theory of cultural trauma, as developed by Alexander and Eyerman, together with various sociological constructs that explain the deep factionalism that characterizes Maltese culture, offer a robust hermeneutic to explain why these echoes of trauma are still evident today. But, as the third chapter shows, the local church has done little to heal these wounds that partly continue to fester because our ecclesiology also continues to echo a pre-VCII mindset. Thus, the chapter will proceed to argue for a renewal of our understanding of church as “kenotic” and to propose a model of being church in the world that lives Christ’s kingship as servanthood, his priesthood as healing and his prophetic office as witnessing a politics grounded in communal living. The healing and reconciling of our turbulent Maltese past is also about our ongoing conversion as local church.