Inter-gender/inter-generational

Recently there have been at least two very important discussions about the family. The first was sponsored by the Church with a focus on future trends in so far as they could be discerned now. A provocative report was presented by the psychologist, Fr Paul Galea. The second took place in the Social Affairs Committee of Parliament on the basis of a report by another psychologist, Angela Abela. What are your comments on their findings?

Fr Galea's main thesis was that the sexual relationship has come to be taken very generally in Malta to be just a private matter between the individuals entering into it.

For instance, if a young man and a young woman start living together, often without even having deliberated and consciously decided to do so but having almost imperceptibly slid and slipped into cohabitation, they behave as if it were a matter that just concerned the two of them.

The social dimension is ignored, with even their parents and close relatives themselves reacting passively, as if they accepted the assumption that they really were strangers to the affairs of the almost incidentally-happening 'couple'. The parents might raise quizzical eyebrows and ask a few questions, but their concern soon ends with a shrug and some such remark as: "As long as they love each other, it surely is OK."

This 'privatisation' of the general understanding of sexual relations is partly the result of the way in which marriage and the family have tended to be presented in Church quarters themselves. By placing the generation of children with its implications into a very secondary place when setting out the nature and purpose of male-female relationships, sexuality easily comes to be seen as a matter just for adults or adolescents encountering each other.

One of the most disturbing characteristics of post-modern culture is its almost exclusive preoccupation with grown-ups.

A significant expression of this attitude is the change in the name of one of the United Kingdom's main 'family agencies'; from The Marriage Guidance Council to Relate. The word 'guidance' implied that there was a clear understanding of an objectively-best way of undertaking marriage and that there also was an authoritative source of wisdom that could indicate to those desiring it what the good rules were to achieve success. 'Relate' is a verb used here without it being at all clear whether it was an imperative or a merely descriptive pointer to a state-of-affairs without any criteria for assessing how good or bad it was.

The main conclusion that I draw from the conference is that children need to be reinstated in the first place in all education in view of marriage and family life.

Was the focus in the parliamentary session different?

It was complementary. Incidentally the chairman of this parliamentary committee is now Edwin Vassallo, reputedly a stalwart Ratzingerite.

There was the same awareness that children brought up in single-parent families, step-families and re-disrupted families were overall and on practically every measure of social pathology much worse off than children who were normally resident with both their biological parents.

But here, in Parliament, more attention went to the realisation that both in fiscal and in social security terms there were inadequate signs of any preferential option for marriage and the family.

Presumably in a not-too-distant session concrete proposals about how to produce more family-friendly taxation and welfare measures will be forthcoming.

So both the discussions sponsored by the Church and Parliament reinforced the grounds for two strategic options:

On one hand, significant additions were made both to the quantified data and to empirical, psycho-social analysis about Maltese families. Such items of knowledge are required preliminaries without which discussion about introducing divorce is premature.

On the other hand, both discussions made the urgency with which legal regulation of cohabitation in any guise is needed even clearer and more cogent.

Can you clarify what you meant when you said that the manner of teaching about marriage by the Church itself in recent times may have contributed to 'privatisation' in popular understanding of marriage and sexuality?

Here are just two instances of what I had in mind. When I was a boy, the staple teaching was that marriage had two purposes: first, procreation; secondly, increase of love between the partners.

Nowadays, most often I hear it still said that there are two purposes, but the order is reversed: augmented love comes first and children second.

I believe both answers can be misleading. A better phrasing might be that marriage has just one, overall purpose: love, of which, in a married couple, the maximum expression is procreation.

In this formulation there is a shade less danger of totally eclipsing the essential social/public dimension of human love. It discourages consideration of the family as merely or mainly a haven of individualist intimacy, hived away from the jungle of competitive consumerism that our late capitalist society has become.

A second example is presenting Christian marriage as just an external likeness of Christ's communion with the Church and God's with humankind. It should, of course, be presented instead as an internal sharing and a practical-mystical way of actually participating in the mystery of divine-human communion, based on creativity.

There is in what might at first appear to be just subtle nuances between two ways of putting it, all the difference between the communitarian and the privatised ways of understanding the sacrament.

I have just been reading a collection of essays edited by Stephen C, Barton called The Family in Theological Perspective. I was amazed at the waffling nature of most of it.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.