In a recent column, I argued that those who lobby for divorce legislation are wrong to target the Catholic Church, which is not the legislator, and should instead target all members of parliament, who are the real legislators.

My point was that the Catholic Church is concerned with dogma and that it cannot and will not change its dogmatic stance on the indissolubility of marriage. Religious tenets are religious tenets, and that’s the end of that.

But sometimes the Maltese bishops hoist their skirts and leap over the channel that separates their domain from that which is none of their business. And then we do have to say something and remind them what their place is in the scheme of things.

When the Catholic Church instructs its faithful followers that what God has put together no man may put asunder, then the rest of us need not argue against it. Faith is faith. Freedom of worship is a fundamental human right and if people wish to believe that there is a God who busies himself joining people together in holy matrimony and keeping an eye out to ensure that they don’t use contraception but stick to the safe period, then the rest of us should have the good manners not to mock and cackle - even though it is hard to resist the occasional little aside as I have just done here. And of course, one has to draw the line when there is too much public fuss about magic shoelaces. There are limits.

It is when the Catholic Church, through the medium of its Maltese bishops and archbishops, mixes questions of faith with secular arguments that it lands flat on its face and invites criticism. The archbishop’s main argument against divorce is one such. It moves from the religious domain to the secular and worse still, it is completely lacking in logic.

The Catholic Church cannot accept divorce because God’s spiritual authority to unite people in marriage cannot be transferred to man to dissolve, he said on Monday. Let’s take this statement apart piece by piece. Is Malta a theocracy? No, it isn’t. Therefore the state is free to legislate for divorce and the Catholic Church is free not to accept divorce, as happens everywhere else in the world except for The Philippines.

To move from a refusal to accept divorce on religious grounds to a demand for a permanent ban on divorce legislation for those of all religious persuasions, of no religious persuasion at all and even for lukewarm and lapsed Catholics is a complete non sequitur. Lack of acceptance of divorce on religious grounds is a matter of free will and faith, and not of secular legislation.

Another point: if the state cannot dissolve a marriage, then the state cannot ‘create’ a marriage either. But if the state can ‘create’ a marriage, then it can also dissolve it. Hence, if the Catholic Church recognises civil marriage and accepts the need for a secular instrument for the recognition of marriage of those who are not religious then it follows logically that it should also recognise divorce.

I don’t see the archbishop campaigning against civil marriage. We’ve had civil marriage legislation for the last 35 years or so, and the archbishop understands that it’s none of his business - no more than Muslim or Hindu marriages are any of his business. Difficult and protracted though the process has been, the Archbishop’s Curia has come by slow and painful degrees to understand that being Maltese is not synonymous with being Catholic, and that even if it were, Catholics are free to lapse or to reject the faith into which they were immersed from birth without their consent and often against their will. In the fundamental right to freedom of worship, the emphasis is on the word ‘freedom’.

The Curia understands that not everybody wishes to marry by the Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Hindu or Jewish rite, and above all, it understands that a couple’s decision to be married civilly rather than by any religious rite is their decision alone. The Curia knows that it can interfere only in what Catholics do, and there are limits even there. It cannot go beyond reminding Catholics of dogma and pointing out that transgressions will be punished to varying degrees. It cannot force people to uphold Catholic dogma against their will or by persuading the state to legislate in line with Catholic dogma so that we are forced not to divorce whether we wish to or not.

Just as the Archbishop’s Curia does not seek to prevent two people from contracting a civil marriage, so it should not seek to prevent them from obtaining the civil dissolution of that civil marriage. How the archbishop believes the Catholic Church has a say in this entirely secular equation is beyond me.

Between 1975 and 1993 (or thereabouts), everybody who married in Malta was married civilly. Even if we married in church, we popped into the sacristy at the end of the religious rite to go through the secular rite with an official from the Public Registry. After 1993 (give or take a year), the Catholic Church used negotiations on the transfer of some of its property to the state as leverage to obtain special consideration for the Catholic marriage rite. Those who have married in a Catholic Church since that year have had their marriage recognised by the state without the need for a civil marriage.

But even here the Catholic Church is on very shaky ground: just as the state can recognise a marriage, so it can cease to recognise it. Once the state no longer recognises your marriage, then that marriage doesn’t exist for the purposes of the law.

There is only one argument that the Archbishop of Malta can make sensibly and logically against divorce, and it is this: He should remind Catholics that if they wish to stick with their faith, then whether Malta has divorce legislation or not, they may not divorce. If they divorce, then they face the religious consequences. And he should leave it at that. Anything else is not just illogical but none of his business.

He might, of course, add something else, but I can’t see it happening because of that same old Catholic dogma that makes divorce a bigger ‘sin’ than leaving your spouse to set up home with somebody else, producing a second set of children in the process: that if you’re in for a penny then you might as well be in for a pound. If you’re going to hell for chronic adultery and fornication in any case, you might as well divorce because nobody has yet discovered that there’s a more horrid and even hotter hell for people who do all that and get a divorce too.

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