When stability counts for less

The parish priest of Luqa, unhappy about the dismal state of marriage in his parish, decided to do something about it. In a sermon on the miracle of Cana, intent on bringing married folk to their senses, he assured his listeners that married couples went either to heaven or to hell; purgatory was not an option.

For his pains, some bristling soul reported him to the Inquisitor for propagating unorthodox views. (Did I forget to mention that Don Michele Maxta preached his sermon 240 years ago?)

I owe the anecdote to the historian Frans Ciappara. His study of perceptions of marriage in late 18th century Malta (2001) outlines a world in which parish priests often put on record their deep worry about the frequent marital brawls, desertions, informal separations and cohabitation.

Many lay people resisted the Church, although the grubby state of marriage also seems to have repelled many from the institution; they preferred not to marry, in numbers three or four times larger, in some parishes, than in France. Nor did they thereafter resign themselves to a life of Christian chastity - to go by the Protestant visitor who, in 1800, was moved to write that "chastity does not appear to maintain its due rank among the virtues of their religion".

This historical snapshot has some implications for our divorce debate.

It indicates how uncomfortably real life fits into dogmatic corsets. To all those who see in it evidence that human sexual nature and the state of marriage are always the same unless repressed, the reply is: The evidence actually points to the contrary.

It may have taken a long while but the state of marriage in Malta, as well as the satisfactions of family life, eventually improved. They probably still are on the whole better today than they were 250 years ago. And preaching - in both religious and strictly secular terms - a vision of marriage in which the values of stability and authenticity play an important part, must have had something to do with it (although clearly it was insufficient on its own).

Therefore, all those people who today insist that it is dogma, not realism, to portray high rates of marital breakdown as a "state of nature" are right. Somehow, public policy ought to incorporate this insight where possible.

However, the same sketch is also discomfiting for some of the certainties of the anti-divorce campaigners.

For example, when Mgr Paul Cremona says the Church is basing its position on "the facts" he neglects to say (I guess because he does not realise) just how much the meaning of those facts is based on the historical framework one chooses to put around them.

Mgr Cremona is right to say that the Western experience, over the last 60 years, is that most liberal reforms in marriage law increased the instability of marriage. That is, the rate of marital breakdowns increased at a faster pace, although (something the Church tends to glide over) it was continuing to increase anyway.

And it is an important thing to say: A legislator needs to know that introducing divorce is likely to accelerate the rate of marital breakdown. But should it automatically mean, as Mgr Cremona says, that divorce legislation ought not be introduced?

What the Maltese historic example shows is that if you widen your frame of comparison, and go back further in time, one finds long stretches of high marital instability despite either no divorce laws or else very restrictive ones. Indeed, 18th century Malta was not untypical of European society.

In terms of stability, across Europe things got worse in the 19th century, despite divorce being very restricted, if it even was available.

Writing in the mid-1980s, the historian of divorce Lawrence Stone compared England's late 20th century divorce landscape (and its associated hardships) with the situation 100 years before. Mr Stone wryly remarked that it was difficult to decide if any general amelioration had occurred, although he stopped short of saying that the legal reforms had made things worse. Anyone who argues against divorce because of the sorry state of too many families in liberal England today has to acknowledge that a comparable sorry state was also in force some time before divorce laws were liberalised.

It is not a pedantic point. If "the experience of other countries" is to be weighed in our deliberations, then all of it should be weighed.

And what that experience shows is that there are situations, easily conceivable, where marital instability without divorce is so high that it becomes highly questionable if the criterion of stability (always a political preference, anyway) can be the over-arching one if stability is so elusive in practice.

There will be room for legislators to believe, like Moses in a different but comparable situation, that the ailing institution is best served by laws that are guided by other criteria, which have more practical chances of making the best of a contemptible situation.

Whether we are there yet cannot be decided by sociological or historical "proofs" but by informed, political argument over what solutions best cohere with our disputable judgments about our incompletely understood social experience.

ranierfsadni@europe.com