The Church's argument that the availability of divorce causes marriage breakdown is based on false foundations, Martin Scicluna, the lead author of a report calling for urgent legislation on divorce, has said.
Mr Scicluna described the Church as being "in denial" over the rising incidence of annulment and separation.
And nowhere was its refusal to recognise the human suffering caused by broken marriages more blatant than in the way it kept referring cynically to "walking out of the marriage" as though that was how people undergoing marital breakdown approached separation or civil dissolution.
In the Church's eyes these people had "failed". "You made your bed. Now you lie on it" appeared to be the only response of which it was capable. But nobody in a happy marriage wanted to divorce, Mr Scicluna said.
He was giving a presentation in reply to a report by Proġett Impenn, a Church initiative made up of different organisations which work in favour of families and marriage.
The Church report came in reaction to a document supporting the introduction of divorce, of which Mr Scicluna is the lead author, published by The Today Public Policy Institute in May.
The Church's argument that it could not accept the civil dissolution of marriage after legal separation was not of itself a sufficient case for people who did not hold the same doctrinal views to be prevented from seeking divorce and having the right to re-marry, he argued.
"To allow for a mature, adult relationship recognised by society, friends and family, if not by the Church, should be the duty and objective of the State," he said.
To say that divorce caused marriage breakdown, rather than offered a legal remedy for the breakdown, was distorted logic. Marital discord and marriage breakdown preceded, often by years, legal separation or divorce.
Recourse to legal separation or divorce, far from being the cause of the breakdown, was a civilised way of reducing the negative consequences on society of marriages that failed irrevocably and allowed people to re-build their lives.
He said that in 1995 there were 5,098 annulled, divorced or legally separated individuals in Malta out of a total number of married individuals at that time of 181,875 - amounting to about three per cent. By 2005, this figure had risen to 13,354 out of 195,523 married individuals - a proportion of seven per cent.
The forecast by Discern, the Institute for Research on the Signs of the Times, was that the number of individuals who would be separated, annulled or divorced in 2015 would amount to about 17 per cent of all married people, more than doubling the number of individuals in broken marriages over the figures just four years ago and more than five times the proportion of 20 years before.
Between 2006 and 2008 there were 1,028 new or introduced ecclesiastical and civil annulments, with 844 cases pending, about 3,500 sworn separation applications submitted or mediations introduced, and over 1,000 separation cases pending - a total of 6,360 couples, or up to 12,720 individuals whose cases were in the pipeline, the majority of whom were likely to end up separated or annulled.
"What is it, therefore, about the Maltese Church that makes it adopt a high-handed attitude to the facts? Why is it that it appears not to wish to consider the severity or validity of these figures?" Mr Scicluna asked.
"What is it that it does not understand about a 160 per cent recorded increase in the number of individuals in broken marriages of all kinds between 1995 and 2005? Or the 175 per cent recorded increase over the same period of those legally separated?
"Or the estimated increase between 13,354 individuals in 2005 and the 35,000 divorced, annulled or separated individuals within the next six years?"
The Maltese Church was in denial, he insisted.