Angelik Caruana of Borg in-Nadur fame, who keeps claiming that the Virgin Mary is speaking through him, has now announced that she is telling him that the situation in the country is “ugly” because of the constant talk of divorce.

It was not made clear whether the reference to ugliness also included the way the country actually looks, in which case, with all due respect, we didn’t need Our Lady to point this out.

I’m fully aware that there are many people who genuinely believe that Angelik is actually a mystic, and as far as I’m concerned, if they wish to believe he has a direct phone line to the Virgin Mary, and that makes them feel happy, well…to each his own. Personally, just one look at the man and I find it impossible to take him seriously, but maybe that’s just me.

But even if it is true that he has these mystic visions, and the Madonna is really warning us about the dangers of continuing in our heathen ways, does anyone honestly believe that this will suddenly make anyone change their lifestyle?

People will do what they want to do, because the days when fear of retribution and priests scaring the living daylights out of you as they preached fire and brimstone from the pulpit are long gone. Everyone knows this except for those who don’t wish to see Malta as it is today, but prefer to pretend that time stopped somewhere around 1965.

Actually I would say that even up to 1985, social pressure to live according to what the Church teaches was still quite strong. Of course, people were still quietly separating and getting on with their lives at the time but they did it without a great deal of fuss, and didn’t go around flaunting it as they do now. Teenage pregnancies and unwed mothers in the family were a source of shame and something to be kept hush-hush – today, grandmothers proudly parade their grandchildren “born out of wedlock”, and speak nonchalantly about how their daughter gave birth at 17. I’m not being judgmental, I’m just pointing out how things have changed, and thank God they have. Supporting and loving your children no matter what they do is undeniably better than throwing them out of the house and refusing to speak to them ever again, as used to happen in the not so distant past. Parental censure, disapproval and social ostracism were powerful weapons even as recently as 25 years ago. Today, well, not so much.

The downside to this on a national scale, of course, is that once the social taboo on something has been lifted, it happens more frequently and becomes easier to accept – hence the latest statistic that one out of four children is born out of wedlock. What can you do, the grandparents sigh and commiserate with each other – perhaps slightly grateful that it hasn’t only happened to them and that the neighbours’ tongues are not so laced with acid anymore now that surprise babies are popping up everywhere you look. As our very colourful Maltese expression puts it, kulhadd ghandu xi jxomm (loose translation: everyone’s armpits are smelly). For, as anyone with children will tell you, it’s always best not to tut-tut too smugly about other people’s out of control kids, because the next knocked up teenager may be your own.

Having said that, this one-out-of-four statistic cannot be taken in a vacuum either – people in their late 20s and 30s are also having children who are technically “illegitimate”, because they are in new relationships after their marriages broke down, but cannot remarry. These aren’t “oops I’m pregnant” scenarios, but very much planned pregnancies. After all, once your family has got over the shock that you’ve left your husband/wife and are living with someone new, having a baby with the someone new is a mild aftershock in comparison (and half the time it’s almost expected).

While I can understand how some elderly Church goers and prayer group devotees would prefer to bury their head in the sand rather than acknowledge this new reality, I find it slightly bizarre that we have politicians who continue to act as if the Maltese family unit has not shifted when it so patently has.

I know of one family in which seven of the 14 cousins are either separated or living with someone who is separated, while two of them have had children out of wedlock. If you take these statistics found in just one typical Maltese family and multiply them by 1000 families that would give you some idea of the numbers we are talking about nationwide.

The social landscape has changed irrevocably and there’s no going back.

So while Angelik continues to mutter under his breath about the evils of divorce (under instructions from Up Above), may I just gently point out once again that the hysteria the D-word provokes is completely misplaced.

Thousands of couples haven’t exactly been sitting around waiting for divorce to be introduced – they have just gone ahead and done what they’ve wanted to do anyway. And there’s nothing remotely mystical about that.

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