It is normal for countries holding a referendum on something that impacts greatly on the daily lives of the people to refuse to go the extra mile at the first attempt. Both Italy and Ireland turned down the first referenda on divorce held in their respective countries.

This being Malta, with a far stronger and vital Catholic presence and a Church that is still alive and present in so many spheres of society, with a conniving government and a media domination by the same, all the signs point to a victory of the No vote on 28 May.

Besides, the Yes camp has made so many tactical mistakes, they will only have themselves to blame when the inevitable recriminations start flying. Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando has turned himself into an icon Nationalist supporters love to hate. The Labour Party seems that at times it has turned the issue into one of Labour v Nationalists: we even had l-orizzont saying that a true Labourite must vote Yes.

In other words, were it left to the politicians, the referendum will be a test vote ahead of next year’s local council elections and the general election the following year.

But the divorce issue is too big for political manoeuvring of this sort. It is even bigger than the ones who brought this referendum about. Whatever the outcome, there will be repercussions: people on either side of the national divide have simply no idea how a No vote, or even an improbable Yes vote, will be felt by the nation as a whole. A No vote will be perhaps the most keenly felt especially by the young, today’s children, including those who, due to the inability of the political leaders, have been deprived of a vote when they should have had one, as well as those whose future presence in Malta, already tenuous, may be snapped by a No vote.

I cannot see anything similar happening if a Yes vote wins. Malta will have joined the rest of the world if that happens, so where would one disgusted by the result flee to? The Philippines?

An ominous silence has fallen over Malta: even some mainline media that have hitherto been very much on the side of divorce have fallen silent. So too within the Church many priests who adopt a humane attitude with regard to the issue and related issues in personal conversations and who had spoken out on the issue just some months ago. Where are they today? Where are the media-friendly priests? Even if one accepts there has to be some internal discipline within the Church, where are the opinion leaders when it’s time for them to stand up and be counted? Where is academia? Where are the writers, the novelists, the thinkers?

Today I would like to address one key constituency that the Yes campaign has ineptly left unaddressed: the women of Malta.

As I go back to the years of my childhood, those far-away post-war years, all I seem to remember are streets full of children playing because there was simply no room for all those children at home. Our school in Hamrun had to have double shifts to be able to accommodate all children. There were families with 10 or even 12 children living in two rooms. These children are still alive and can speak for themselves.

Many of their mothers may have died: only they can tell of the pressures exerted by priests every time they went to confession and asked about the sexual details of their intimacies with their husbands and made to beget more and more children and not to abstain from this because this was God’s will. Later on, God’s will was brought to bear on voting patterns. Priests (one such died recently) used to go round the quiet areas where namrati (courting couples) congregated and report the miscreants to their parents. Parishes kept detailed records of families – not just their Easter duties observance but also their MLP affiliations.

That is only a part of what women went through in those far-away days: it was a male society, ruled by males (women were enfranchised in 1947, the year I was born). Girls became housewives and had children, again and again. Very few women worked outside the home, unless they worked as maids. Very few women were professionals.

Compare that situation to that of today: women work, women study, the university is full of them, two out of every three cars on the roads are driven by women, women have a far higher standard of living, enjoy far more of the comforts and pleasures of life (and would have more if they could get a better salary). Although the figures still say that women’s participation in the labour market is still a European negative record, I say that a very high proportion of the increase in GDP came from women’s increased contribution.

This, indeed, is a vastly different Malta from the one in the 1950s. That older world, the 1950s one, tried hard to keep its grip and to slow down the process that enfranchised women, that led to the liberated women of today.

We may ask: what’s wrong with marriage annulment procedures, civil or Church, what’s wrong with separations? Don’t they have more or less the same effects as divorce? This is precisely the male-oriented thought, enshrined in bastions of maleness such as the Church and, until a few years ago, the Courts of Law.

I say it will not be until women (and men) get the real chance to divorce that women in Malta will be well and truly enfranchised and truly liberated.

For women are still the victims of family break-ups. And family break-ups are increasingly becoming the order of the day. The No camp would be right in its arguments if less and less families were breaking-up, so who would need divorce? Keeping divorce out of Malta when so many families are breaking up is very much like shutting the stable doors after the horses have bolted.

Did the Church protest, did we protest, when the first pole-dancing bars opened, and have now mushroomed all over Paceville? Did the Church, did we, protest, when the mind-bending drug-hazed parties started to be held? Did the Church realise, when it blessed the first hotels, that the tourism industry would bring so many tourists and foreign lifestyles to Malta? Did the Church realise, when it was generally in favour of Malta joining the EU that this would open up Malta even more to foreign influences?

Anyway, this is how life in Malta has evolved, it was futile then to try and stop the waves and it is even more futile now.

There is an issue of equity, justice. People can now go and live abroad, and get divorced there. But the poor who cannot do so have to make do with separations and marriage annulments. And they cannot ever regulate their shattered lives and give themselves a new beginning. Their lives, already an emotional mess, become one legal mess as well.

Many appeals for emotions will be made over the coming weeks: the plight of children above all. But I say that what hurts children are quarrels between the parents, especially if accompanied by violence, and the separation from one beloved parent. Whether that is done by a separation, an annulment or a divorce is immaterial.

The Prime Minister complained, in his speech in Parliament, that the forthcoming divorce procedure would be a ‘no fault’ divorce. I invite him to sit in on one of the many separation procedures where he can see how the ‘fault procedure’ is used, many times by the guilty party, sometimes on the advice of unscrupulous lawyers, to get any evidence or some such, to blame the other party when none of that would be true. And Dr Gonzi would have us believe this is a far better procedure than a no-fault one.

The absence of divorce in Malta has not stopped any family break-up nor has it stopped the creation of new family units. I defy anyone to prove the contrary. On the contrary, the absence of divorce has undermined the stability of family units, because if a family unit is unregulated by law it can very easily be dissolved and the innocent party suffers further injustice.

The only way to go about dissolving a marriage in the present legal framework is through a marriage annulment by the civil court. I am purposely refraining from speaking about marriage annulment through a Church procedure. The most important feature of a marriage annulment procedure civilly is the fiction that something must have been wrong with the relationship before the marriage begun. So couples who want an annulment, as long as the break-up is a non-contentious one (in this case there is some merit in this procedure, for otherwise many would remain contentious) agree between themselves how to present the pre-marriage fiction. If they get it right, they get an annulment.

But if the break-up is contentious, or if the court somehow decides, as it sometimes does, that there is no case for an annulment, then both parties are stumped, including the innocent party.

The annulment rationale is a fiction because it focuses exclusively on what went on before the wedding, and only considers what went on after the wedding only in so far as it proves there was no valid consent at the outset. But it is a fact, experienced by all of us, that even marriages that looked perfect on the wedding day turn out to be a bed of thorns later. People change, liaisons are made, people are unfaithful, or even lose interest. There is simply no way all these variables of life can be condensed in the arid formulas of marriage annulment procedures.

For many people, the argument that the Church says divorce is bad may be one huge persuader. Or the statement that anyone voting for divorce, in the referendum or in Parliament, would be committing a sin.

Seen from the Church’s point of view that is indubitably right: the Bible is after all full of statements condemning divorce, especially the New Testament. That the Church is against divorce is indubitably correct and according to the Church’s tradition and history.

But that may not be the way many voters see it. I am sure that many of those who on 28 May vote for divorce will still go to church the next day and may even go to Communion unless, that is, the priest asks each and every one of them what s/he had voted for. The Church and its leaders can rant as much as they want against this a-la-carte Catholicism but that is the way it is. And it has been so for many years as regards issues such as pre-marital sex, contraception et al.

The Yes campaign need not become an anti-Church campaign, not now nor in the heat of the coming weeks. I completely disagree with the anticlerical slant many from the Yes side are adopting. The Church is a force for good and its institutions have and are still doing a lot of good in our society. There are many good, humble, hard-working people in the Church and people only notice that when they are somehow no longer there.

It is also true that one can find, if one looks carefully enough, instances where marriages that seemed irretrievably lost have found the way to reconciliation, where forgiveness is given and accepted, where people have drastically changed their lifestyles. It may also be true that the availability of divorce could perhaps lead to marriages that could be saved to seek the line of least resistance.

On 28 May the Maltese public will choose between this admittedly slim chance of reconciliation against the many cases where people can restructure their lives and start afresh.

For 34 years, until five years ago, I was a priest. I always knew this divorce issue would come up and I always knew that come the day, I would be taking this stance. All that my life has taught me, all that my experience has taught me, all that the people who shared their experiences with me told me, this would be the line I would take.

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