I have said many times that I am not wildly fascinated by the question of the day. No matter what time of day I ask myself whether or not Malta should legislate for divorce, I somehow always doze off. Must be the hay-fever medication.

The dynamics (rather than content) of the debate are a different matter. One of the reasons I find them positively exciting is that the various whirls and eddies turn out to be a fair blueprint of religious belief and practice in Malta.

You might say we borrowed the principle from CERN, where scientists spend their time trying to psychoanalyse matter by banging particles around. Only in our case it’s far cheaper and actually works. Plus there is some evil fun to be had watching considerably big heads nurse considerably big bruises.

The other day I had a conversation with a 30-something who described himself as a “fervent Catholic”, by which he meant he’s happy to believe that Jesus is a living God whose agent on earth is the Catholic Church. As one might expect, he also goes to Mass on Sundays and wouldn’t dream of not baptising his children or not getting married in church, say.

And yet this person has been un-platonically cohabiting for some time. He also hasn’t entirely made up his mind to vote ‘No’ on May 28. Let me assure you that this gentleman is one of the sharpest and most level-headed people I know. He happens to be highly educated and well-travelled, and is not a schizophrenic.

I did abuse our friendship and prod him about his apparent inconsistency. He told me that the beauty of contemporary Catholicism is that it leaves room for individual “rational” decision-making and doesn’t require believers to “swallow everything the Church says”.

I suppose this is what the pundits mean when they talk about ‘à la carte religiosity’. Which is both unfair and simplistic.

Let’s take Żebbuġ on Good Friday as our point of departure. Events there, as in other places, involve the procession itself and the spectators.

A number of clues tell us that these two are kept conceptually separate. Spectators stand on the pavement and/or behind barriers. There is no eye contact between them and the various biblical characters, and cutting across the procession to cross the street is considered bad etiquette.

In actual fact, spectators hardly line up obediently behind barriers. Eye contact is not unknown (who can resist a wink to cousin ‘Samson’ or a chuckle at neighbour ‘Barabbas’?) and quite a few people do take a short cut across the centurion’s path. But all of this is thought to be in bad form and my point that the two are, in principle, separate worlds holds.

They also seem to be going in opposite directions. I’d love to know what the coach-loads of tourists make of the processions. I bet most of them see them as the face of a zealously Catholic southern society, and therefore somewhat exotic and charming. Indeed, that sort of religiosity (for that’s what it is) has grown tremendously. There’s more ritual and organised formality than I remember from the processions of two odd decades ago.

Things were rather different with the spectators, however. Business at the imqaret stalls was breathless and I saw masses of people running around smoking, drinking beer, and hoovering up pizza slices.

You’d have been hard pressed to find anything to eat at a Good Friday procession in Valletta in 1980. That’s because most people would have been fasting.

This is what I mean by two opposing streams. Mushrooming ritual on one hand; far less people bothering to fast on the other.

The simple answer would be schizophrenia or that awful word ‘hypocrisy’, but I’m sure the pizza guzzlers would put it otherwise. They would tell you, first, that they consider themselves fervent Catholics and, second, that no one should dictate what they might eat on which day at what time.

This hints at a sort of detachment between formal religion (‘the Church’, for want of a better word) and things like cohabitation and fasting and such, which people increasingly feel should be matters of individual belief and practice.

In other words it’s possible to be a fervent Catholic and not have a problem with contraception, for example.

This was exactly the case a year ago with the fuss over the missing invitations for the Pope’s Mass at the Granaries. Many apparently saw nothing wrong in asking for special seating for ‘partners’ to get a close-up view of the head of the Catholic Church. I don’t think they were being hypocrites, just detached.

This is where divorce comes in. Statistics tell us that in order for the Yes vote to stand a chance, many thousands of practising Catholics will somehow have to conclude that divorce is a matter of individual choice (which is not to be confused with ‘socially inconsequential’ by the way – lots of socially-consequential things are thought to be down to individual choice).

These people will have to be convinced that it is possible to be a fervent Catholic and vote ‘Yes’ for divorce. It’s not a simple matter of Church-state separation but rather one which cuts deep into the hearts of many and raises the key question of how to live one’s religion.

There was something else at Żebbuġ. Perched right on the church parvis was the latest in the cult series of anti-divorce billboards. It said something about some ‘mentalita divorzista’ or other. I found it charming, Malta’s answer to Banksy as it were, and proceeded to photograph it in sepia.

Not too apt, actually, since it was also an excellent metaphor of the times. The church parvis is a liminal place, betwixt and between sacred and profane. On May 28 the billboard will leave that comfort zone and walk in procession. Question is, will it do so in costume or as an imqaret-loving spectator?

mafalzon@hotmail.com