Roamer's column

It would have been par for the course had the item appeared in the Vatican's Osservatore Romano, but it surfaced in the Wall Street Journal, an unlikely newspaper in which to find fatherhood celebrated and fatherlessness. The latter it described as an 'epidemic' and came up with a stark and dark statistic to justify its choice of word.

Citing figures in a recent Census Bureau Report the newspaper pointed at 'dramatic increases in divorce and non-marital childbearing'. More than 20 million children in the US live in a household without their father.

Survey after survey carried out abroad continues to show that the breakdown of a marriage has, for the most part, a serious and deleterious effect on children. Sir Paul Coleridge, the judge in charge of family courts across southwest England, recently and formally declared that family breakdown in the UK, which he described as a "cancer", was behind almost every evil affecting the country.

He blamed youth crime, child abuse, drug addiction and binge-drinking on what he called the "melt-down of relations between parents and children. The collapse of the family unit", he warned, "was a threat to the nation as bad as terrorism, crime, drugs or global warming" and the extent of the collapse in the UK was "on a scale, depth and breadth" unimaginable even a decade ago. "It is a never-ending carnival of human misery; a ceaseless river of human distress". And, "Almost all society's ills can be traced directly to the collapse of family life".

I quote Mr Justice Coleridge and not a priest or a bishop or the Pope precisely because he is neither of these. He holds a highly responsible secular appointment, has seen life close-up for years and concluded, from what he saw and heard, that family breakdown and single parent families were the greatest threat to social cohesion.

I wonder what the head of our Family Court in Malta can tell us about the situation that exists in Malta. And I wonder, too, how lawyers here caught up in distressing situations to which they are made privy, to whom stressed husbands and wives go for advice, do, in fact, advise them. I have it on good authority that in many cases no attempt at reconciliation is made by some lawyers. No sooner does the hapless couple present a case then it's settle-for-this or acrimonious litigation. This is a monstrous way of going about things that affect two human beings and offspring whose emotional rights are simply shunted aside.

Every so often we are fed statistics that raise no official reaction from the State or from the Church. The most recent claimed that more than a third of children in Malta live with only one of their biological parents. Which part of the air was this ambiguous figure plucked from? A third; how does it quantify?

In a contribution to The Times last Friday, Education Minister Dolores Cristina wrote, "We may question, and should question, the statistic that shows a drastic shift (in four years) from eight per cent to 37.5 per cent.' Well, don't just question it, minister, your administration must have the answer somewhere in the voluminous bumf that administrations are wont to gather.

More than useless to ask what changes that have taken place in Malta vis-à-vis the family mean, and then come up with, "In all probability teachers are best equipped to provide the answer..." Quite apart from the serious implications in that injudicious remark, she must be joking.

One hurried interpretation had it that, "This statistic exposes the reality of life in Malta...we need to equip the children with personal and social values to minimise the effect that this change has on their development."

This is all very unwell, since we are not told quite what these "personal and social values" are, and who would do the equipping; whether these values are anchored in traditional truths or relativised by "the reality of life in Malta".

It was also suggested by another source that in practically all cases where children had to adapt to a mother's or father's new partner, they did so as a matter of course. Everywhere else in the world, a diametrically different story is told. The DNA of Malta's children must be quite unique.

Repairing breakdowns

A UNICEF survey found that Britain, with one of the highest rates of family breakdown in Europe, was "the worst place in the developed world for children to grow up in". Children whose parents split were "75 per cent more likely to suffer educational failure, twice as likely to live in poverty". Conservative Party leader David Cameron is committing himself to create "a family-friendly Britain", to support families by helping to pre-empt breakdowns with the aid of serious funds for adequate numbers of counsellors, rather than paying billions to deal with the cost of social breakdown.

This still leaves us with a 64,000 dollar question. If the "reality of life in Malta" is what has been claimed, how did the situation come about? And a 128,000 euro question: what is being done, or can be done, to repair the damage? Instinctively, some have decided on divorce as a panacea when the experience of many countries shows otherwise.

A US Assistant Secretary of State once remarked that, "The biggest problem in the area of marriage and divorce is the broad cultural belief that success or failure in marriage is a matter of luck. The second problem is that when faced with a troubled marriage, people believe you have only two options: get divorced or stay and be miserable."

I do not know how far the cancer of failed marriages has spread in Malta; I do know that failed marriages exist.

Finger-pointing is all too easy but this does not preclude the conclusion that in some cases, marriage in Church or at the registry office was too lightly entered into; that in others the environment created by the media, in particular the film and television industries with their almost pornographic indifference to fidelity, militate against marriage from the start.

That other ills affecting marriage - monetary indebted-ness, conspicuous consumerism, the pressure on women to enter the labour market and the inability of private and public enterprise to ease the pressure on bread-winning mothers by introducing flexitime, to name but a few - are not easy of solution; that some family lawyers hinder rather than promote reconciliation when the going gets tough; that the Church in its pastoral responsibility may have done its best to prepare couples for marriage but has not done enough to maintain a prudent, pastoral contact with them after they tied the knot; that the State has done nothing, from what I can gather, to make sure that those she binds in matrimony understand the seriousness of their engagement.

And yet, society, State and Church have a vested interest in stable marriages, in protecting them against the sea of instability that lashes against the doors of this institution.

What follows may sound like a non sequitur; it is not and bears stating.

Nearly two years ago, Discern reported that Sunday Mass attendance had fallen to 52.6 per cent.

The drop starts after the age of 14 and was highest among the 25 to 49 age group. The Archbishop at the time declared that he was "worried by the situation". He acknowledged that this was "the time for pastoral people to be convinced of the urgent need of evangelisation and catechism (sic) especially among adolescents and young people".

The questions must be asked: how much evangelisation, how much catechesis has there been since then? I know a priest, who is a bundle of energy, whose reaction to the figures was to advocate daily Mass, never mind Sunday Mass, for it is the Eucharist, well understood and approached with a proper disposition, that binds Christian parents to one another and to their children.

Part of the answer to marital breakdown in Christian marriages - it was found in a survey carried out on behalf of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops - lies in Sunday Mass attendance. The survey found that "frequent Mass attenders are considerably more likely than infrequent attenders to find their views of marriage consistent' with a belief 'that marriage is a vocation... a lifelong commit-ment... (and)... contributes to the common good of society".

Has attendance at Sunday Mass improved - or fallen? The Eucharist remains what it always has been; without it all faith must perish.

Last Friday's leader in The Times kicked off with, 'The Catholic Church is in the process of drawing up a new policy on religious education...' Not a moment too soon.

The absence of such a policy during a period when, to quote Dolores Cristina, "times (were) a-changing", is deeply regrettable and has been commented upon, here, only a fortnight or so ago. Any strategy has to be two-pronged, one aimed at schools and youngsters, the other at parents-to-be and parents.

You can't have one without the other.