Roamer’s column

“No, I do not agree with the introduction of divorce in our country because I feel this would weaken the backbone of Maltese society, the family. I have been writing against divorce for many months now.” Who wrote that? Eddie Fenech Adami? Cold.

And this? “When a doctor receives a patient with a splinter in his legs, he tries to remove this rather than amputate his leg. We cannot, for the sake of a minority of married couples whose marriage has gone phutt, place in danger hundreds of other couples.” Fenech Adami? Freezing cold.

And this? “It is a fact that in Western societies divorce has increased at an alarming rate during the past 20 years... The increase is the consequence of a divorce mentality ushered in by the media and by accessibility to divorce.” Fenech Adami? Ice-age cold.

Let me put you out of your agony; the author was our intrepid Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, who presented a Private Member’s Bill before Parliament calling for the introduction of divorce; who is now the principal speaker for the pro-divorce movement; who declared last Sunday that if the electorate voted against the introduction of what opponents to no-fault divorce regard as divorce-on-a-whim, he would apply for divorce online and get it within six months from the UK – forget four years when it comes to the privileged. No sweat; no fault; divorce online, eBay stuff.

Same day, an ex-Labour minister claimed that men who had children from three different women, called on him asking for government accommodation.

Perhaps, went on the ex-, had divorce been available, the problem of more than one woman would not have arisen. Even in a quasi-comatose state, most people would arrive at a different conclusion; specifically, that if divorce were available, these Don Juans, flitting from one woman to another to another to another, would have applied for divorce four times! No fault, naturally.

The fault-lines of no-fault divorce

The proposed four-year cooling period that is already being trumpeted as ‘extremely restrictive’ will, in the human nature of things, become less and less restrictive, more and more whimsical.

No-fault legislation will quickly come under fire by even brighter, self-proclaimed progressives for its restrictiveness. Even the chairman of the Yes to Marriage Yes to Divorce Movement admitted there was no guarantee that the four-year lark would not be changed through parliamentary process. We must beware.

No-fault divorce is the inevitable precursor of instant divorce on demand; those who claim otherwise are either naive – there is no evidence for this – or deceiving themselves and others.

No-fault divorce not only makes dissolubility of marriage easier. Variations of it will undermine still further the very concept of marriage. The Yes movement steers clear, wisely, of how this concept has been grotesquely distorted in other countries. We must beware.

We are asked, no; it is demanded of us that religion should not play a part in this discussion. The state, says the secularist lapsing into French, c’est moi; precisely the claim made by such luminaries as Hitler, Mao, Stalin and other dictators that sprang up like dragons’ teeth throughout the secular 20th century.

Their take on eugenics, the family and abortion, to name but three tyrannies condemned at the time by every self-respecting democracy in the West, is now being practised or actively encouraged by the same democracies in the name of personal autonomy, of civil rights. We must beware.

Modern secularity, as Pope Benedict told a Study Conference of the Union of Catholic Jurists early in his pontificate, has come to mean what it did not originally mean – “the exclusion of religion and its symbols from public lifeby confining them to the private sphere and to the individualconscience”.

And secularism has itself become a religion because if there is no God to worship there remains only Man, making I-centred laws without reference to morals, which underpin his humanity, creating his own world and, finally, the tragedies that follow; notable among these we already have frivolous divorce; abroad they have abortion on demand at the start of life, euthanasia (mercy killing, of course) at the other, and at some future date, no doubt, consensus bestiality, which has already been targeted as the last taboo that the enlightened must eliminate. How the beast will indicate his consent remains an open question.

The right to religious language

And those of our secular preachers, many of whom, to judge by their contribution to the debate, are unread or crude in their beliefs, would do well to ponder the words of the atheist philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, described “as the personification of liberal, individual and secular thinking”. During a civilised encounter in 2004 with ‘the personification of the Catholic faith, thanks to his understanding of God, man, and the world’, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he told an invited audience:

“When secularised citizens act in their role as citizens of the state, they must not deny in principle that religious images of the world have the potential to express truth. Nor must they refuse their believing fellowcitizens the right to makecontributions in a religious language to public debate. Indeed a liberal political culture can expect that the secularised citizens play their part in the endeavours to translate relevant contributions from the religious language into a language that is accessible to the public as a whole.”

What a difference to the ill-tempered contributions and meretricious, hysterical offerings from some of our secular friends in Malta.

All this the Catholic needs to consider before he goes to the polling booth. In the secrecy of that booth he is being asked, essentially, to decide whether no-fault divorce will, ultimately, contribute to the country’s common good; to decide on how he views the indissolubility of marriage and its dissolubility; to societal disintegration; to reach his decision in the context of an informed conscience based not on subjectivity, on what he or she feels, but, if he or she is a Catholic, on truth, the truth into which each has been baptised, which each is solemnly committed to uphold; to take into account the disastrous effect divorce will have on children and on future generations growing up in an environment where the vow is meaningless – and commitment, too; to disabuse so-called liberals of the startling opinion that ‘the silly guff about divorce somehow (my italics) affecting the children or society as a whole... is patently just that’ – and citing legal separation as already doing that. This is like arguing that if an arsonist has set fire to a residence, another arsonist can do the same to the residence next door!

One last observation about divorce and its effect on cohabitation. The pro-lobby insists that the introduction of divorce will solve or at least mitigate the problem of cohabitation and domestic violence. False, and false.

Cohabitation has burgeoned wherever divorce has been introduced; understandably. Marriages have declined in number as divorce and cohabitation increase. Why marry if marriage is not for real, if a contract is not a contract, if a word is no longer one’s bond? The pro-divorce people have, lamentably, failed to answer this question; with good reason. There is none.

We have heard much about the Irish experience, to which mast the Noes have stuck their colours. That experience has not been edifying. Cohabitation has increased; single parents have doubled; births outside marriage have shot up – hardly a flagship to invite into our harbours.

Nor has the elementally serious matter of the effect onchildExtra Ecclesiam nulla salus, ren been remotely tackled by the Yes group. Last Sunday, Labour MP Marie Louise Preca ringingly informed the pro-group that no study exists to show that the lot of children was improved as a consequence of divorce. On the same occasion Bernard Grech expressed the opinion that if children were given the vote they would cast theirs against divorce.

A propos that event organised by the No-to divorce group, I must remark that under the sure and steady chairmanship of Andre Camilleri, he and his team have run a campaign marked by integrity and a calm passion to pass on the truth about divorce, the broken societies it has helped to create, and the integrity of...

...the vow

In defence of which, Chesterton wrote, more than 20 years before he became a Catholic: “The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant place and time. The danger of it is that himself should not keep the appointment.”

And: “The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves...

“It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.

“Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-favoured grin, the largest liberties and thefullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the heavens,as the record of his highest achievement.”