Another Easter has arrived and will soon be gone. Does anybody notice anything different from the last one? Well of course we have all, from babies to old people, added another year to the burden we already carry. Many have, as a matter of routine, bought figollas or pannettones or other sweets; we do live after all in this art ħelwa. Once again, most families, except for those who have either split up or passed away during the year, will celebrate Easter by having lunch together.

Many will have participated in the devotions of what Christians refer to as Holy Week. For those of us of that persuasion there is nothing more important then the sacrificial death and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God!  For, as Paul of Tarsus reminds us, “if Christ had not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith”. Are we really being superstitious?  Despite the official sealing of the tomb and a guard of 16 Roman soldiers who would have suffered horribly if they had all gone to sleep at the same time, there are still those who insist that the body was either stolen by a small group of folk who were actually in hiding and fearing the most fearful of retributions, or that the dead man who had been scourged, nailed and lanced in the heart had managed to survive and indeed simply walked away.

Yes, there are many who do think that it is all superstition, that it is all a rather stupid fairy tale and not relevant to the needs of this century. They will trot out the usual arguments that religion is for the poor and ignorant; that intelligent people and secure people have no need for it; that religion is obsolete and religious people are “freaks”. They will remind us, as they constantly do nowadays, that religion has no place in politics, which is rather difficult in a democracy where people take their moral convictions with them into the voting booth. They will point out that society is now more fractured than it once was, with people moving in and out of jobs, countries, partners and relationships with a frequency that is without historical precedence and any attempt to put a brake on all this would not only be futile but would go against the worship of the cult of the individual to whom any reference to the common good is completely and utterly irrelevant.

Many such are adherents of the new religion known as scientism, where provable facts, they believe, will one day replace the mystical, distant and illogical being called God. When faced with the question of who, or what, originally lit the fuse that brought about the laws, known and unknown, that govern our universe and our lives, they tend to hesitate a bit and then seek refuge in Einstein’s god. The fact remains that scientism is a religion that worships in labs instead of in churches. Man, it seems, cannot do without some form of belief. So it has been for centuries and so it will remain.

But questions of that nature apart, it is our Christina heritage that is stoking the fires of the divorce debate today and which is putting back on the boil the question of immigration. It is Europe’s Christian heritage that was outraged by the attempt of one person to impose her belief (or lack of it) on millions of people by demanding that the school her child attended had to remove the crucifix from the wall. It is not as if there were no other choices available to her. Had we not had a Christian culture, would we have to bother whether putting aside the person to whom you had pledged your life deserves to be legalised after a public debate? A recent survey in the UK has revealed that an estimated 48 per cent of all children born today will not grow up with both their parents. It claims that the move away from marriage as the socially recognised context for bearing and raising children is heavily implicated in our high break-up rates.

The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) maintains that it recognises that marriage today has evolved and changed, and an overly simplistic or idealised view of marriage, which ignores the presence of diversity, is not to be recommended. At the same time, they point out that although some people may have partially rejected the institutional view of marriage, they still want to marry and the symbolic and distinctive significance of the commitment of marriage remains high. The challenge therefore is not so much to defend institutional marriage; rather it is to protect people and society from the damage caused by weakening the structural value of marriage.’

The CSJ also states that marriage is not a magic bullet or panacea and to combat the current tendency for family breakdown requires a broad range of measures such as greatly increased access to relationship education and couple support and broader family support. It also requires recognition that a learning approach to couple relationship is no admission of failure. There is a need to have access to parenting education. Such policies complement explicit support for marriage, for example through the introduction of transferable tax for married couples and the reinstatement of marital status on government forms and in government research.

Alarm bells are now beginning to ring all over Europe. Sadly, over here we seem intent to import a product that in many countries has reached its sell-by date. Sadder still is the fact that our young people seem to be completely unaware of what is taking place abroad, which in itself can hardly be considered a credit to our education system. Yet these same young people are expected to cast an informed vote on the introduction or otherwise of divorce in a few weeks’ time. Let’s hope that the recently introduced educational structures will finally produce citizens who will read and research and reach informed conclusions; that is if by that time it is not too late.

It is not worth quoting stats that can be manipulated either way, but from what we have learnt about a child’s development we know that it needs to grow up in a loving and stable environment. Haven’t we, in our usual fashion, failed to see the writing on the wall simply because it did not seem to correlate with votes that could be won? How right Geoff Mulgan was when he declared that governments underestimate what they can do in the long run and overestimate what they can do in the short term. We may yet have to pay a heavy price for that structural failing.

Perhaps as the statues of the risen Christ are raced up the hill, one can still dare to hope that it is not the papier-mâché that is being celebrated but the message that many great people, both past and present, have tried to live, and even died for.