Martin Micallef, Crux Invicta, Il-KurĊifiss MirakUluŻ u l-KapuĊĊini f’GĦawdex
Midsea Books, 2020, ISBN 978-99932-7-752-1.

You do not have to be a professional weight-lifter to hoist up Martin Micallef’s new book but it certainly helps. It is a huge book, in dimensions, but more importantly in contents, message, ambition, outreach.

Recently launched to a packed and awestruck audience at the President’s San Anton Palace, it now enriches the public domain for everyone to admire, learn from and be inspired by.

Such encyclopaedic works do not happen every day. When they do, they deserve unsober celebrations.

This one purports to throw light on a slim subject – a large old crucifix, a small convent, a big story of determined vision, of spiritual highs, of survival in the face of misunderstanding and of indifference. One could accuse it of more and more about less and less.

But Fr Martin’s OCD research programme pays rich dividends. It constructs a wealthy storehouse of valuable discoveries, relevant not only to the subject matter of the book but to profile, with unsparing sharpness, the national identity in so many other spheres.

Agius de Soldanis, Padre Pelagio, Grand Master Verdalle, Ignatio Saverio Mifsud, Bishop Alpheran, all figure prominently in this book, but then they also claim an ultimate relevance to other aspects of Maltese history in general.

This narrative revolves around a crucifix with a distanceless supernatural aura. Crucifixes symbolise all Christianity, and the Capuchins in particular.

The very first Capuchin ever recorded in Malta, Fra Roberto da Eboli, a truly outstanding and colourful hero of the Great Siege, has his legend hitched to a crucifix.

During the Siege, he rushed around from bastion to shattered rampart, holding high a crucifix in his hands, spurring the defenders to fight to the end, strengthening their determination never to give up, guaranteeing final victory over the infidel. After the Siege, Fra Roberto ended the target of slanderous scandal, but his faith overcame evil gossip.

The contents of the book fall naturally under six sub-heads. It starts with the growth of the crucifix, ‘scandal and folly’, humble emblem of revolution against pagan polytheism; it then proceeds to the antecedents to the Gozo crucifix, those of the Capuchin communities of Floriana and of Kalkara.

A big story of determined vision, of spiritual highs, of survival in the face of misunderstanding and of indifference

In the year of the Siege, the Capuchins were still a spanking new religious order, founded as late as 1528, a meagre two years before the knights of St John settled in Malta.

Fr Joseph from Cospicua, the first Capuchin custodian in charge of the building of the Capuchin church and friary in Gozo.

The Capuchins eventually spread to Gozo in 1736 and the narrative turns replete with pious benefactors, bureaucratic difficulties, dedicated holiness and the devil’s contrariness. What it went through during the turbulent French occupation also finds place in the chronicle, as do the times of plague and cholera.

The detailed history of the Gozo crucifix remains known mainly from a 1759 letter by Agius de Soldanis to Ignatio Saverio Mifsud, which traces, with some important omissions, the iter of the holy image from its arrival in Malta from Spain, to the private ownerships until de Soldanis himself bequeathed it to the new convent in 1746, and to the work involved in giving it space for public veneration. 

The last section covers the spread of the cult through space and time, the furnishing and adornment of the church, the booster charge the acquisition of corpi santi from the Christian Roman catacombs gave to the mystic atmosphere.

The author employs the Maltese language in an almost casual manner, devoid of rhetorical superstructures and the stilted purism that have made some ‘literary’ authors so unreadable and Herbert Ganado a household name. The former have gone as far as they could go to ensure the irreversible embalmment of the language, the latter have been its kiss of life. Martin Micallef understands that a tool is as good as the function it serves, not a function in itself.

The bulk of this book can, to some extent, be attributed to the lavish use of illustrations. There are images of anything relevant to the matters under discussion, from works of art to santi, from inscriptions to artefacts, from vari to portraits. Sadly, some of the images of old manuscripts betray the desperate state of their conservation.

Erardi’s painting of Our Lady of Graces, venerated in the Capuchin church, Gozo.

Imaging, mostly by Charles Paul Azzopardi, is never gratuitous and always subordinates to a functional purpose.

Short introductions by Stanley Fiorini and bishop Mario Grech add to the unfailing authority of this book.

Fr Martin guided his volume through what St Paul referred to as the ‘scandal and folly’ of the crucifix.

The whole of Capuchin thought and creative art runs through folly and scandal. Enter any Capuchin church, with its programmed economy of ostentation and you are wading through a paradox.

Everything revolves around the richness of poverty, the intrinsic insolvency of wealth, the aesthetic pleasures layered through suffering. Death by crucifixion was to the Romans the most infamous form of criminal execution. Yet, through the death on earth of a Son of God, that ignominy has turned into the herald of the highest glories.

If, by the time you have gone through this book, you will have pencilled in an entry in your mental diary to visit Gozo’s own crux invicta on your next trip, this book will have achieved one of its aims. Only one. You’ll be amazed how many scores of others you will be able to unearth by quarrying between these two hard covers.