On Sunday, June 10, 1798, while Mdina, the Catholic Church’s seat of the diocese of Malta was celebrating the feast of Corpus Christi, Bishop Vincenzo Labini brilliantly showed off his prowess at being the most tactful surviving ecclesiastic in the political and religious history of the island. His perceptive, arguably diplomatic, manoeuvres on this crucial day were evidence of the substance he was made of.

Insightful diplomacy

Painting of Bishop of Malta Vincenzo Labini by Emvin Cremona in St Publius parish church, Floriana, which he consecrated in 1792, when it was a vice-parish. Photo: The author, courtesy of the parish church

After mass at the Cathedral, the Neapolitan bishop, after consultation with the city’s jurats, not only offered the keys of the ancient city to French General Claude-Henri de Vaubois of l’Armée de l’Orient under the meteoric leadership of General Napoleon Bonaparte but also hosted in his palace a welcoming lunch to the French officers. The guests included Captain Vincenzo Barbara, the Maltese rebel under the Order, now in the French army. Barbara ended up signing Mdina’s capitulation on behalf of Bonaparte and the French Republic.

Considered an insightful move to befriend an invading militia, and assured of the French army’s promise of respecting religion, the considerate ecclesiastic did not seem to keep his distance from unavoidably committing the Church’s loyalty, which he represented, and ceding the old capital of Malta to the French Republic. He must also have dismissed the fact that at that very same moment in Valletta, Grand Master Ferdinand von Hompesch, head of a religious order himself, was still deliberating with his councillors whether to surrender the Maltese islands to the bishop’s guests.

General map of Valletta and its harbours. An ink and aquarelle on paper measuring 105cm by 176cm, giving full details of the forts. Preserved at the Chateau de Vincennes, Paris.

Perhaps to calm his conscience, or simply to slow down the speed of proceedings taking place on that eventful day, Mgr Labini, after lunch, promptly rode to Valletta in his calèche. There he dutifully led a procession with the revered statue of St Paul “reciting prayers prescribed by the Church for calamitous occasions” to obtain a peaceful ending to the threat represented by scores of war vessels carrying 54,000 men.

General Napoleon Bonaparte, commander-in-chief of the French Army of the Orient, 1799, painted by André Dutertre (1753-1842), the year after Bonaparte’s stay in Malta. Oils on cardboard 7cm. Preserved by the Fondation Dosne-Thiers, Paris.

As if this were not enough for the 63-year-old bishop, on his return to his palace in Mdina in the evening, he led the singing of vespers in the cathedral that were also devotedly attended by the newly installed French officers and soldiers. Certain sources record that, following the religious service, Bishop Labini dined with an incognito Bonaparte and showed him around the brilliantly decorated cathedral decked out with silver statues and candelabras. Impressed by the ebullient richness of the beautifications put on for the feast of Corpus, the young general assured the prelate that while taking Malta he had no intention to touch any of the Church’s seemingly extravagant wealth.

The archives indirectly confirm this by an agreement, entered into on July 5, 1798, between the Curia and the republican government, regarding compensation the Church bound itself to give in return for the exclusive use of St John’s Co-Cathedral. Witnesses verified and confirmed this covenant in front of notary Francesco Cremona on September 16, 1800, 10 days after the French capitulation.

The last foreign bishop of Malta

Born in Bitonto, near Bari, in 1735, Mgr Labini hailed from an ancient noble family. He was ordained priest in the Theatine Order in Rome in 1758, becoming well versed in belles lettres and incisive orating. On June 19, 1780, after summoning Bishop Giovanni Pellerano to Rome, the pope appointed Labini bishop of Malta. He arrived on the island on September 7, 1780.

Bishop Labini died on April 30, 1807, 215 years ago at the end of this month. He was destined to be the last foreign bishop of the Maltese islands. With his episcopate spanning three different reigns – 18 years under the Order’s grandmasters, two under the French Republic and the first seven of the British colonial era – the prelate conducted a policy of adaptation with the political and social reforms and counter-reforms introduced by the altering rulers.

The prelate conducted a policy of adaptation with the political and social reforms and counter-reforms introduced by the altering rulers

Relations with the Order and Inquisitor

Arriving in Malta, Labini found the situation of the clergy was not so pious. He introduced important restructuring in the seminary, seeing to the proper edification of those called to the priesthood. Striving to strengthen his authority, he stopped the prior of the conventual church from proposing ordinandi for the holy orders. The Holy See urged the bishop to recruit only honest candidates. Following these reforms, the number of clerics fell so drastically that in 1787 Labini complained of “a scarcity of priests”. Rome retorted that “quality was better than quantity”.

Mgr Labini lived through a period of prevalent debate on the separation of state and the Church powers. While before he was ordained bishop, Labini could be suspected of “harbouring Jansenist leanings”, in 1784 he condemned the Vidit, a secular counterpart to the Church’s imprimatur, subjecting ecclesiastics to civil authority.

He also had to deal with the new philosophers like the chief minister for justice of Grandmaster Emmanuel de Rohan, Gio. Nicolò Muscat, who was frequently embroiled in disputes, power-mongering and enlightened tremors that menaced the serenity of supremacies, often targeting the bishop and the Holy See. Tempestuous confrontations dragged on until 1794 when the Church finally cornered De Rohan, forcing his parting with the radical intellectual.

Prior to the arrival of the French, the liberal society, including dissident knights and followers of the French Revolution, do not seem to have known where Mgr Labini’s sympathies lay. When the Inquisitor sacked two Maltese rebel priests, Fr Giovanni Gatt and Fr Giorgio Portelli, from the posts of chancellor and procurator of the Roman Tribunal respectively, Labini did not intervene, even though it was alleged that one of them was almost beaten to death. No one could tell the real reason why the bishop disowned the clerics, but both had participated in the rising of the priests in 1775.

In April 1798, trepidation in the Curia must have set in when the new French republican government in Rome called back from Malta the last Roman inquisitor.

French sympathies

The bishop’s palace in Valletta where Mgr Labini stayed during the blockade of the French in the city during 1798-1800, enjoying a very cordial relationship with General Vaubois. Photo: The author

On June 13, 1798, the morrow of the signing of the convention in which the Order ceded all its possessions to the French Republic, Bonaparte appointed Labini’s secretary, Francophile Vincent Caruana, as well as leading cotton manufacturer F. X. Caruana, canon of the cathedral, to the government’s 10-man commission. The latter would later lead the peasants’ revolt.

On the same day, Labini led the canons, parish priests and heads of religious orders to a meeting with Bonaparte in Valletta, with the latter offering him exclusive use of St John’s Co-Cathedral. At the same gathering, Bonaparte invited the Maltese clergy “to preach the Gospel with utmost simplicity” and to desist charging the faithful for the sacraments.

Labini’s August 1798 pastoral letter in which he invites the clergy to respect public authority invested in the French republican commission, as it appeared in the Journal de Malte. Photo: Courtesy of the Bibliotheca, Valletta

On July 14, French national day, Labini said his first mass in the cathedral. On the same occasion, four poor girls, endowed by the new republican authorities, received the sacrament of marriage after registering their vows civilly. The prelate turned down an invitation to join external festivities on the palace square at the foot of the Tree of Liberty, where public celebrations continued.

Under the French, Labini found himself in a quandary. While counselling the clergy not to rebel against lawful civil authorities in August 1798, during the course of the blockade on March 21, 1799, he appointed insurrection leader Canon ‘general’ Caruana as his capitular vicar, with responsibility for the faithful in the countryside.

The fact that Labini remained in Valletta during the blockade, occasionally receiving gifts from Vaubois, which he normally gave to the sick, and organising religious services within the walls of the besieged city, often attended by French officers, makes his position quite ambiguous.

Historian Alfredo Mifsud calls Labini “a French sympathiser”. Labini respected all of Vaubois’s decisions during the blockade, including the execution of the Xerri-Lorenzi plotters in 1799. Was he protecting the freedom of the Church in practising its faith or was he containing the apparent damage to its temporal power and property?

Church’s privileges

Since 1154, Malta’s bishop had been suffragan to the Archbishop of Palermo. On June 13, 1798, Bonaparte ordered foreign clergy to leave the island, conceding their benefices to the local Church. On June 18, he further decreed that no foreign authority should have influence on the administration of religion. In 1801, under the British, Palermo’s ecclesiastical authority was suspended, with the Maltese Curia gaining full independence in 1831.

During Bishop’s Labini episcopate, 29 churches and monasteries were built, many of which he consecrated. Here his coat-of-arms appears on the façade of the church of St Joseph, annexed to the conservatory built for the education of young women, founded by Bishop Labini in Cospicua. The other blazon belongs to his successor Bishop Ferdinand Mattei, under whose episcopate it was completed. Photo: Tony Terribile, Teżori fil-Knejjes Maltin, PIN, 2002

Having survived two rulers, Labini was accused in the ecclesiastical court of Palermo of having collaborated with the French. Still, the persevering prelate kept his post as bishop of the Maltese archipelago until his death, seven years into British rule, focusing on further Church reforms and pastoral work.

During the first decades of colonial rule, the Maltese Church wasted no time in restoring its privileges. The 1802 Declaration of Rights of the Maltese asked the king of Great Britain to protect religion, insisting that no temporal sovereign should interfere in matters “spiritual or temporal”. In 1812, a royal commission concluded against abolishing certain clerical privileges early “as it would draw the indignation of an angry priesthood”.