The Church admitted its mistake. Labour did not change anything from is-sitt punti which brought in the interdett. The Church had to admit it was wrong and that it tried to play the poltical game to keep Mintoff out of power and enthral the PN. Archbishop Gonzi was not knighted by the British for nothing!!

The whole point of this exchange is that Labour should apologise for the violence it condoned. But it is wrong to pretend that history started in the 70’s and the PN have nothing to apologise for. That’s all.

You keep missing the point. You made your own choice. If your political beliefs are in contrast with your religous beliefs then you have to choose.

And the reason why you can be both a catholic and a labourite today is because it is labour who has changed its position (except for certain stalinist manifestations like the board of vigilance) and not the church.

Again, you cannot equate the 60’s to the 80’s. The interdict left you with a choice. Stop attacking the church or leave it. Its rather different from an all out attack on freedom and democracy. I just can’t understand how you call it violence. Self defence is more like it.

But both periods had one main cause. Mintoff. Its as simple as that.

I minimise nothing. What’s condemnable is condemnable and I have condemned it. But the moral violence of the 60’s stands in a totally different league from the excesses of the 70 and 80’s. The violence of the 60’s was across the board to the whole labourite population.

If you are an atheist you can’t understand what it means that in Malta of the 60’s one is told to deny one’s poltical belief or face eternity in hell!! For you it was easy to give up your faith. For the rest of us it is not.

Repent Mike repent. Nowadays you be be both a Labourite and a Catholic. It was not always like that.

If I went to Tehran I would probably be hung. I am an atheist. I do not approve of religion, organized or otherwise. I do not support the catholic church. As a pragmatist, I just happen to think that in this case it was the lesser of two evils, and history has proven me right. Calling me a fundamentalist does not weaken my point about picking useless, unwinnable fights.

If Mercieca apologised, all it shows it that he was more subtle than Gonzi, preferring diplomacy to confrontation. Ring any bells?

I also don’t see why the PN should apologise to their political adversaries for benefiting from their political adversaries’ masochistic tendency to keep shooting themselves in the foot.

Again, stop blaming the church and/or the PN for your own self-inflicted ‘Insitutionalised psychological violence’, as you put it.

And if we want to talk about institutional violence, we can talk about the institutionalisation of torture at the police depot, including that of a disabled individual. ‘a few hotheads’ indeed. The creation of a quasi-police state is not the action of a few hotheads. I’m tempted to use the expression ‘shame on you’, repeatedly, but someone else has overused that already. (To great effect, I might add – more shots in the foot – more bells ringing, huh?)

Minimising the dark days of the 70’s and 80’s to the actions of a few hotheads is a bit much. I suspect you would be much more at home with Ahmedinajad in Tehran than I would. Like you, he is also a denier of history.

@AM
The Church tru Archbishop Mercieca offered such an apology (Mike C please note) The PN who were the main beneficiaries of the Church’s misdeeds never uttered a word of regret.

@David Buttigieg

You clearly have no idea how painful the 60’s were for liberals who were expected not to use their mind and follow the Church abuses blindly. You have no idea how many families were ripped apart. Insitutionalised psychological violence hurts much more than the physical violence of a few hotheads which is nonetheless condemnable in the strongest possible terms.

@DCG
I take your point. For you istory started in your youth and do not care about anything else. I’m different. I can understand the present better if seen in a historical context. Yet we both agree that GA is the best choice for Labour and for Malta.

“The fact that Arch Bishop Gonzi was one of the founders of the Labour Party does not make him a Labourite”

Excuse me? (incidentally he was also a candidate and won election to parliament, I think to the senate) Now who’s side is splitting? :)

What more does it take to be a labourite? What you mean is ‘it doesn’t make him a Mintoffjan’, which is perfectly true.

The Labour party was created by mixture of clerics and church friendly individuals and a lot of the reforms it carried out were based on catholic thought and publications of the time. Then Mintoff came along and hijacked the party, and its been sliding downhill ever since, with no reprieve in sight. The choice was confrontation (Mintoff) against diplomacy (Boffa), and confrontation won out. And has ever since. One useless fight after another.

And your comment about democratic credentials doesn’t make sense. I’ll try and make this as simple to understand as possible.

1) The Archbishop is the head of the local church.

2) He decided that the MLP’s politics went against the catholic church’s policies. He believed (as many still do) that the MLP was turning into a communist party, and we know communist parties in power always persecuted religious organisations. (and as we saw in the 80’s, he was right)

3) He instructed catholics not to vote labour, in order to prevent what he saw as a potential dictatorship coming to power

That’s perfectly democratic. If you belong to two clubs and they are in conflict, you choose one of them. Mintoff could have instructed Labourites not to go to mass, not to get married, not to get baptised etc etc. If I was a labourite at the time and I believed in my party I would have still voted labour, but I would not have felt any animosity to the church, I would simply have understood that my place was not in that church. If on the other hand I felt that my spiritual leader was right then I would have left labour.

You make your own choices based on conviction and principles. And I certainly wouldn’t accept EUR70 to change my vote, as Anglu Farrugia seems to suggest YOU would. But evidently our minds work differently.

And another thing. Daphne says “If the Nationalist Party were still what it was in the 1950s and 1960s, I wouldn’t support it. No member of my family on either my mother’s side or my father’s side did so”. What she’s telling you there is no secret, its that her family were Constitutional party supporters.

Well you know what? The Constitutional Party was interdicted too, earlier on in our political history, but you don’t hear her, or anyone else, whining about it, do you?

Get over it. Its just another one of the many useless fights you picked and lost. Remember my comment about the choice between confrontation and diplomacy above. Time you tried the other path.

If you consider orders from the church not to vote Labour (however ridiculous they were) equal or worse then the brutal violent regime of the eighties you really need to check yourself out.