Every time I listen to the Maltese Church, or to spokesmen from Żwieġ bla Divorzju or their apologists, I am vividly reminded of Pope Pius IX (Pio Nono). He was the bizarrely popular Pope who decreed papal infallibility some 150 years ago, ensured that the Vatican held out to the last against the unification of Italy and published the appalling Syllabus of Errors, which declared the papacy opposed to “progress, liberalism and recent civilisation”.
No prizes then for spotting the similarities to modern-day Malta in the current divorce debate. In under a week Malta will be faced with finding the answer to one fundamental question: should we, as a society, prevent separated people from beginning a new relationship based on marriage, if they wish to do so? In responding to this question, we have to choose between three options.
The first course is to leave things as they are: the do-nothing option favoured by the Maltese Church, the Nationalist government and the likes of Żwieġ bla Divorzju (‘Marriage without Divorce’). The second course is to focus simply on tidying up the current arrangements for cohabitation, while leaving other legal arrangements for the breakdown of marriage unchanged. This is the government’s proposed solution. The third course, favoured by those campaigning in favour of Iva għad-Divorzju: Iva għaz-Żwieġ (Yes to Divorce: Yes to Marriage) is to introduce the draft legislation drawn up in the joint Private Members’ Bill by Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando and Evarist Bartolo allowing for the civil dissolution of marriage after a long period of legal separation, and the right to re-marry.
To leave matters as they are is no longer an option – except wrongly, but for understandable reasons, in the eyes of the Church (the Church’s dogma, which I respect, prevents it from entertaining any other course of action). The current situation in Malta, however, is intolerable and is only growing worse. The legal provisions in place are inadequate. The growing number of marital breakdowns is alarming. The effects on society are harmful and untenable.
All can agree that steps to buttress Maltese marriages need to be taken urgently and determinedly by the government, but its record to date shows it has no stomach to do anything about it – except mouth platitudes about ‘the need to strengthen families’. But even if the government were ready to exercise political will and introduce the financial priorities to do so, any improvements could only be seen as stopgap measures at the margins of the problem. Society would be deluding itself if it thought otherwise. The Maltese Church, the Nationalist government and their apologists, Żwieġ bla Divorzju, are simply condoning this delusion.
The reality is that marriage breakdowns will continue to occur, with the resulting strains on the family and society. It would be Canute-like to suppose that the trend of marriage breakdowns in Maltese society can be reversed. They can at best only be ameliorated, but never eliminated.
Today, large numbers of separated couples cohabit in what are essentially pseudo- or quasi-marriages. Many have children. These relationships are extra-legal and, when children are born, are invariably disadvantageous to the female partner who has no security over maintenance rights or co-ownership in her partner’s acquisitions. This has led to a fracturing in our society that can no longer be ignored. The current available remedy of legal separation has proved inefficient and inadequate.
It would be tempting to suppose – as the government would have us believe – that the second option available to us, of introducing safeguards in the law for cohabiting partners, would provide the solution. But quite apart from the sheer hypocrisy of following such a course − when the government has largely based its objections to the introduction of divorce in Malta on reasons of Catholic faith in tandem (‘twinning’ in the apt description of the founder of the Cana Movement) with those of the Church, which regards cohabitation as an offence against God’s seventh commandment – the practical reasons for introducing a cohabitation law as the solution to Malta’s problems are misplaced. Even the most carefully drawn-up safeguards on cohabitation can never equate with the status and stability of marriage.
By definition, and in practice, cohabitation is more fragile than marriage since the couples cannot enter into a legally binding contract. Research has shown that married couples provide a far more stable environment for adults and children than cohabitation. To make an artificial necessity of cohabitation would be incompatible with encouraging marriage to meet Maltese society’s needs. This would be the kind of hypocritical Maltese improvisation that simply satisfies those unwilling – or too blinded by dogma – to accept the deep malaise of broken marriages in Malta and the need to encourage the stability and social order which re-marriage would provide.
Encouraging and sustaining cohabitation – for this would be the effect of the Nationalist government’s law – is not the right answer since it would encourage more couples to cohabit and to enter into inherently less stable relationships to the detriment of the common good of society. With its policy on cohabitation law, the government would be incubating the very instability in marriage it claims it wishes to remove. A practical, viable solution for creating stable families should therefore be sought through other means. Remarriage after legal separation would do so.
All Maltese have a responsibility to ensure that the social dislocation, which has developed in Malta as a result of increased marriage breakdowns, and the absence of divorce legislation and widespread cohabitation and one-parent families, is avoided. Allowing people to remarry after legal separation is the most just legal response to the very difficult problem of marital breakdown in our society. Without the option of divorce, people have simply sought their own solutions once they have separated, with the social consequences we are witnessing in Malta today.
The stark question that thinking people in Malta face on 28 May, therefore, is: is the wider good of society best served by denying the chance of remarriage to those whose marriages have broken down, or by encouraging cohabitation? It is cohabitation which is inimical to the institution of marriage, not the right to remarry after legal separation. The right to remarry, which would arise from the civil dissolution of marriage, should be viewed as the just, fair and necessary resort after all other options aimed at saving a marriage have been tried and exhausted.
At the core of the argument is the conviction that the civil dissolution of a marriage which has already irrevocably broken down may be sanctioned to prevent greater harm to the common good which is caused by the dislocation and insecurity in society of cohabitation and the injustice of preventing those who are already legally separated from remarrying if they wish to.
The Nationalist government, the Maltese Church and, hanging onto their coat-tails, Żwieġ bla Divorzju, are simply opting out of their responsibilities to the Maltese people by their adoption of the do-nothing approach to broken marriages. There is an urgent need for long over-due divorce legislation to be introduced to allow remarriage after legal separation. This is a civil right and it is unjust of the government to withhold it from its citizens any longer.