Priest participation in politics under British rule in the nineteenth century

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to establish the extent of priest participation in politics under British rule throughout the nineteenth century. The history of Church-State relations have always been of interest to me. Thus, I knew I wanted to take this opportunity to research and review something that related to Church-State relations. This initially led me to the two politico-religious crises of the twentieth century, however these have already been studied by various people. So then I was instructed to go back in time to the nineteenth century and study the relationship between the Church and the British. Particularly, I decided to focus on the theme of priest participation in politics. I thought it ought to be an interesting theme since it is widely known that the Church at the time did have a considerable amount of influence on the Maltese population, which in turn determined precaution when dealing with the Church on the part of the British government. While writing my dissertation, it was very interesting to dive deeper and look at how disputes between the Church and the British resulted in ecclesiastics getting involved in politics. Therefore, this dissertation delves deeper into priest participation in politics, how involved they really were and what this meant both for the Church as a powerful institution in Malta and also for the British government. The timeline includes the pre-political party era and the first political parties, explaining how these also intertwined with ecclesiastics in Council. This subject is important as it affected and determined Church-State relations, and thus helps explain why both the Church and the British acted the way they did. In the last chapter, I have compiled tables for the population of Malta, including the priests, as well as the names of the priests that contested in the elections but were not elected throughout the years of 1849 and 1898.