Society needed to defend marriage in the same way it was working to protect the environment, Archbishop Paul Cremona said yesterday.

“We need to build a culture in favour of the family and marriage,” Mgr Cremona said, pointing out that this should be a culture society should promote – not defend.

Speaking during a conference on the family at Birkirkara yesterday, the Archbishop said a parallel could be drawn between divorce, marriage and the way children in schools were being taught to protect the environment to ensure a more environmentally conscious future society.

Mgr Cremona said the current atmosphere was not helpful for the family and couples who wanted to get married were left to feel as though they were going against the current culture.

The challenge for the Church, he said, was to instil a culture in favour of the family.

In spite of this, the media contained few messages promoting the family, while reserving space for other issues.

“At 65, I am not young. You are youths, this is your future,” he said.

Before Mgr Cremona’s closing speech during the seminar organised by Link Youths entitled The Family: Diversity, Effort and Sacrifice, a workshop presentation concluded that divorce was not a right.

Reflecting on divorce in society, the group concluded that with the introduction of divorce, the perception of marriage would change from something everlasting to that which lasts until a person decided otherwise.

“If divorce were to be lawful, people would misconceive it as something right,” spokesman for the working group Josephine Pace Caruana said.

The group claimed that in other countries where divorce was introduced, the rate of cohabitation increased and marriages had dropped.

In Ireland, for example, cohabitation increased by 400 per cent and marriages decreased by 300 per cent, Ms Pace Caruana said.

In Malta, she said, seven per cent of the 95,000 married people experienced marriage breakdown. This compared well with other countries like England and the US which had a marriage breakdown rate of 50 per cent.

“In life, people tend to fight or flight. Divorce is like flight, where people run away from the problem,” she concluded.