On July 25, an overwhelming majority of 52 MPs out of a total of 69 voted in favour of the Divorce Bill. Eleven voted against whereas five MPs decided to abstain. An applause followed the result of the Catholic MPs’ vote. It seems that the divorce saga is over but the worst is still to come. We are not really aware of what we have blindly opted for!
Catholic Malta has not been spared from the ever increasing post-modern tendency of sidelining God and his plan for marriage and the family. In his homily on the occasion of the National Day of Croatian Catholic Families, during his apostolic journey to Croatia last month, Pope Benedict XVI gave an accurate analysis of the moral situation the European continent has sunk itself in.
“Unfortunately, we are forced to acknowledge the spread of a secularisation which leads to the exclusion of God from life and the increasing disintegration of the family, especially in Europe. Freedom without commitment to the truth is made into an abso-lute, and individual well-being through the consumption of material goods and transient experiences is cultivated as an ideal, obscuring the quality of interpersonal relations and deeper human values; love is reduced to sentimental emotion and to the gratification of instinctive impulses, without a commitment to build lasting bonds of reciprocal belonging and without openness to life”. Will not divorce foment family disintegration on our islands? Will it not encourage sentimental emotion to prevail over committed relationships? We wait and see for ourselves!
In the Pope’s words, Christianity is “called to oppose such a mentality!” As Christians we are urgently invited by Christ to be “salt of the earth” and “the light of the world” (Matt 5, 13-14). We cannot risk being thrown out and trodden under foot by men (see Matt 5, 13).
Neither can we afford hiding ourselves after our fear of what others might say of us. “A city set on a hill cannot be hid,” our Lord tells us (Matt 5, 14).
The time has come for us to show that we belong to Christ absolutely, precisely by the way we live our marital commitments. As the great Orthodox theologian, Sergius Bulgakov, put it: “For the best self-attestation of the Good is its defenselessness in the face of the power of evil. The best attestation of Truth is silence in the face of much-talkative falsehood”.
The good and silent witness of the spousal fidelity has indeed a big message in the divorce culture Malta has recently willingly espoused!
When our society will be plagued with high divorce rates, spousal fidelity will be the sign of the love of Christ for our hardness of heart as a nation.
This point was eloquently stressed by the current Pope when he said: “The fidelity of spouses has itself become a meaningful witness to the love of Christ, which permits marriage to be lived out for what it truly is: The union of one man and one woman who, with the grace of God, love one another and help one another for a lifetime, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health”.
If we hail ourselves to be European, the time is ripe for us to bear witness to our genuine Christian identity by living out our Christian understanding of marriage both in its unity and indissolubility!