The joint statement by the Bishops of Malta and Gozo that cohabiting couples should not receive Holy Communion because "the way of life of such people goes against the sacrament of marriage" is a perfectly proper reminder of where the Church stands on this issue.
Whether it was either tactful, charitable or timely for the Maltese Church to make such a clunking statement of the obvious at such a time is a different matter. The political touch, which is such an important part of a Bishop's leadership role and which Archbishop Paul Cremona had seemed to demonstrate when he first was appointed, appears to have deserted him - presumably under pressure from his more fundamentalist colleague.
Catholics in Malta face a cruel dilemma. Compassion for the victims of marriage break-down who have formed second unions, in which they lack the recognition and protection of law, pull many thousands in one direction, while the traditional teaching of the Church pulls down an opposite road.
This division, however, misrepresents what is at issue. Neither compassion nor the Church's doctrinal teaching on marriage bears directly on the citizen's duty. The moral, as well as the civic, duty to be considered is the doing of justice for all members of our society.
The civic point can readily be grasped. Persons married but separated are denied the right to re-marry in Malta. Legally, if they form a new relationship there is no husband, no wife, merely a cohabiting couple. The social stigma of the couple's non-status - which the Maltese Church has just pitilessly underlined by its statement - and the psychological disability of having no means to confirm formally their commitment to one another are compounded by problems over property rights and much else, since none of the legal entitlements enjoyed by the married can be invoked by persons in such a second union.
It is clearly a work of justice to seek to rectify this manifest inequity in our society. The obvious way to do so is to bring such couples within the scope of marriage law. The availability of the divorce remedy would make this possible. The government's intention merely to draw up a cohabitation law is only a half-baked answer, demonstrating moral cowardice on its part, as it fails to tackle the fundamental issue and the logical solution: re-marriage after legal separation.
Justice should be an issue for the Church as well, in particular what justice (and compassion) demands in regard to persons whom the Church may believe to be in error. The relevant aspects of its teachings would appear to be the Vatican Council's declaration of religious liberty, which asserts that a person must not be prevented from acting according to conscience.
A law which prohibits a man and a woman from marrying one another despite their belief that they can and should do so comes clearly within the ambit of the Vatican Council's repudiation of coercion, provided only that both the man and the woman are free of contradictory commitments.
In assessing such a law, the determining factor for the Church has to be the requirements of justice (and charity), which apply to all, and not the Church's marriage doctrine, which may be preached to all but forced on none whose conscience it offends.
The absence of divorce has plainly spared Malta none of the pains and tensions and destabilisation of the modern age. All that it has done is made life more difficult than it need be for many thousands caught up in this tragedy.
The question - which neither the government nor the Church has faced up to - is whether an apprehension, a fear, that the situation might be made worse would justify the continuation of an actual and existing injustice. It is a pity that Church leaders seem only to speculate on what might happen if divorce were introduced, rather than ensuring that Vatican II's teaching on justice is known and understood by the government and practiced by it in Malta. Fiddling at the margins with a law to regulate cohabitation can never provide the right answer to the injustice being perpetrated daily on thousands of Maltese.