Three quarters of University students believe that there is nothing wrong with pre-marital sex and only one in four do not want cohabitation to be approved.

Even though 91 percent of respondents said they lived with their parents, 44 percent said they had sexual intercourse recently, according to a survey carried out by the University Chaplaincy.

Only 0.5 percent said they were cohabiting.

The least acknowledged moral teaching was that of artificial contraception, where less than 15 percent said its use was morally wrong.

According to the authors, the survey reveals overwhelming support for marriage as a life-long commitment, despite the fact that the respondents prefer divorce to an unhappy marriage, and think that divorced people who remarry should not be excluded from Communion.

The findings were based on 421 responses out of a total projected random sample of 600 Maltese students, where 91 percent claimed to be Catholics and five per cent claimed to be agnostic.