The government has been praised in some quarters for its plans to regularise in part the situation of those who live together without being married, and of children who are born out of wedlock. I think this is absolutely ridiculous. Before you regularise the status of unmarried couples, you have to give them the opportunity to marry. The main reason that people live together here without being married – and by this I don’t mean casual couples but the ones who are on a long-term project, possibly involving children and homes – is because they can’t marry. So, to avoid the normality of divorce legislation, which every other country in the world has (except The Philippines), the government has instead come up with a backdoor solution. Yes, some other European countries have laws governing the relationship between unmarried couples, but they also have divorce. Having the first without the second makes no sense at all.

I am agog to see how the experts are going to work this one out without ending up giving us de facto bigamy. Instead of allowing people to divorce and remarry, the government is going to allow them to “remarry” while they are already married to somebody else. We will end up with situations in which people have both a cohabiting partner with legal rights and a spouse. To compound the government’s problems further, the Church has already made its views known about this: it doesn’t approve of giving legal status to cohabiting couples. The government’s situation is clear. It must tell the Church to back off, and legislate for divorce and the legal status of cohabiting partners, or leave everything as it is now. There is no third option that will keep both God and Caesar happy.

We have been reduced to the level of ridicule and sadly, there are those who interpret this abject behaviour as the glory of high-flown moral ideals. Dear fools, wake up: nobody admires us. They pity us. And worse than that, they think we’re nuts.

* * *

A recent survey in The Sunday Times backed me up on something that I have been banging on about for the past couple of years: that only a minority of Maltese are Catholic, and that most Maltese use the tag “Catholic” as a badge of identity, rather than as a religion to be practised. I have stopped getting into arguments with people about this. It’s too damned boring. They say things like “I am proud to be Catholic” or “I call myself a Catholic”, and when I ask what’s so Catholic about their life, their beliefs, or even their behaviour, they say that it isn’t necessary to believe everything or to follow all the rules. All the rules? Many of them hadn’t followed any of the rules for years.

This idea that you can think of yourself as a Catholic while be indifferent to what Catholicism teaches must be something unique to Malta. I have never encountered it anywhere else. In Italy, Spain, Britain, France, Bavaria, wherever, Catholics follow the rules or think of themselves as lapsed Catholics. Or they will say things like “I was brought up a Catholic but I don’t practise anymore because I don’t believe any of that stuff.” Here, the Catholic badge of identity is so strong that it is more important than the religion itself. People believe none of that stuff but they still think of themselves as Catholics rather than lapsed ones.

It’s weird, but it’s not wonderful. It’s just another example of our breathtaking capacity for self-deception and self-delusion, not to say out-and-out hypocrisy. It’s exactly the same syndrome that allows the government to think that legislating for divorce is wrong and immoral, but regularising the status of cohabitees while preventing them from remarrying is right and moral.

Just over 99 per cent of respondents to that survey said that they are Catholic. Subsequent answers to questions about morality and about Catholic teaching revealed most of them to be anything but. Clearly, the constant harping on in the public and private spheres about how Malta and the Maltese are Catholic has had the extraordinary effect of persuading people that it is enough to call yourself a Catholic. You don’t actually have to follow the rules to be one.

The survey didn’t include any questions as to whether they believe in the virgin birth, in transubstantiation (which is the conversion of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ while retaining the appearance of bread and wine), or even in the bodily assumption into heaven of the Madonna. These beliefs are fundamental to Catholicism, and they are the major factors which differentiate it from other leading Christian religions like Protestantism. I think I can hazard a guess that a resounding 90 per cent of respondents would have answered “no” to all three. Not coincidentally, they are also the issues which provoke most questioning and dissent in schoolroom religion classes, and to which the traditional answer from the besieged teacher is “It’s a matter of faith.” I still remember one girl muttering in class: “So if the Church decides that the air is full of invisible flying pigs, are we supposed to believe that too, as a matter of faith?” And no, the girl in question wasn’t me. These three tenets of dogma are the greatest obstacles to belief in Catholicism, not just because of their fairytale mysticism, but because of their essential pointlessness: religion is supposed to be about how we live our lives. Whether or not the Virgin was taken up bodily into heaven is irrelevant.

Funnier still are the attempts made to explain the virgin birth, transubstantiation, and so on to little children. They don’t even known what sex is, but they are expected to understand that the Madonna was a virgin when she conceived her son, and was still a virgin when he was born, despite having a husband called Joseph. What are little kids expected to understand in a situation like that? Well, my generation of little kids couldn’t work it out at all (“it’s a matter of faith”). Today’s little kids live in a very different Malta. My four-year-old niece went home from school the other day and solemnly announced to my sister that she now knew who Joseph was. “He wasn’t Jesus’ daddy,” she said. “He was Jesus’s mummy’s boyfriend.”

Please don’t all write to me at once and try to boss me into believing why the assumption is relevant. That’s not the point here. The point is that, by our own admission in those answers to The Sunday Times survey, most of us are not Catholic at all. We just call ourselves Catholic. There is absolutely no difference between how I see things (and, because of how I see things, I say that I am not a Catholic) and how an overwhelming percentage of the population sees them too. The only difference is that they insist on claiming they are Catholic while I belong to the one per cent of the population that doesn’t bother with such ludicrous self-deception.

* * *

I do so wish that our religious and secular leaders would get their history right. The Bishop of Gozo, while agitating against cohabitation and in favour of marriage (allow them to marry, and they probably will), said that “the family is a natural society built on marriage” and that “the family existed before the state did, and the state should respect this.”

I hate to be rude, but what sort of rubbish is this? The family did exist before the state – that much should be obvious, given that human beings have always lived in extended family groups even when they were stuck in the caves wearing skins. Yet the concept of family is fluid across history and cultures, and remains so today. The family model of mum, dad and two kids, with the grandparents on the sidelines, is not universal and never will be. The concept of marriage, too, is fluid. Our kind of marriage is not the universal kind of marriage. Marriage means different things in different cultures, and so does family.

Besides, the Bishop of Gozo should know that the Christian marriage rite we use today is a fairly recent development. It certainly does not predate the concept of the state, nor even the concept of family. Up until – what? 400 years ago? – Christian people were considered married if they lived together. There was no rite to speak of. “Getting married” meant taking the decision to live together and then doing so, with sexual consummation. In other words, there is no difference between the Christian idea of marriage up to 500 years ago and today’s cohabitation. The only cases in which living together did not constitute marriage were when a high-born man lived with a low-born woman (high-born women didn’t have the freedom to go off and live with a low-born man), and it doesn’t take much imagination to see why that was.

In the past, de facto marriage and de jure marriage were one and the same thing. The distinction only developed after the gradual development of the formal Christian marriage rite a few hundred years ago – and not at the dawn of Christianity 2007 years ago, as some people naively believe. It was secular laws, and not religious ones, that eventually cast this distinction in stone: it counts for nothing if you are married in the eyes of your God if you are not also married in the eyes of the state. It is legal marriage that counts for the purposes of the state and not religious marriage. Catholic marriage only counts in Malta because, since the 1990s, it has been recognised at law as a valid form of marriage. Before that, people here married twice: a religious marriage in front of the altar, and then a civil marriage in the sacristy, where an official from the public registry was waiting. That was why, before the 1990s, the congregation had to wait after the religious service was over, while the bride and groom popped into the backroom. What were they doing there? They were getting married all over again, in the only form of marriage recognised by the state.

Lots of splashy generalised talk about the family being built on marriage and how the family predates the state may be all right if you’re addressing an audience of village pensioners who never got past primary school education, but it’s more than a little insulting to the rest of us. Officials of the church are obliged to tell believers the whole truth – but to do that, they first have to learn it themselves.