The last time I spoke to President Emeritus Guido de Marco was shortly before his untimely death. He crossed the room at an official function to congratulate me on the think-tank report, For Worse, For Better: Remarriage After Legal Separation, of which I was the lead author. He said quite simply: “We must do something about this problem. We cannot go on as we are.”

President de Marco was not only Malta’s best-ever Minister for Foreign Affairs and also, I would venture, its best-loved President, but also – and this was the acme of his success as an international statesman – a realist. Of course, he believed fervently in marriage and the need to strengthen families. But I am confident that he would also have realised that, once marriages broke down, an enlightened legal remedy had to be found to deal with the resulting social instability with justice and humanity. As a legislator, he would have worked to achieve this.

When President John F. Kennedy, the first and only Catholic President of the United States, was running for office he said: “I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish;...where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all...I do not speak for my Church on public matters; and the Church does not speak for me. Whatever issue may come before me as President...I will make a decision in accordance with these views – in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be in the national interest and without regard to outside religious pressure or dictates.”

Contrast those words with what was said by President Emeritus Eddie Fenech Adami recently in the public debate about the introduction of legislation to permit remarriage after legal separation in Malta. He said: “Jesus Christ, who is not any other philosopher but the Son of God, said divorce was bad for society. This is the truth and it is what I believe in. I will not budge from this position.”

President Fenech Adami then went on, nonetheless, to support the introduction of cohabitation laws in Malta, which he had first proposed in the Nationalist Party manifesto when he was still its leader and which latterly, as President, he introduced from the Throne when opening this legislature. He also endorsed the stand of those members of Parliament who have said they would go against the democratic will of the people if the forthcoming referendum came out in favour of the introduction of divorce legislation.

I had the honour of being President Fenech Adami’s defence policy adviser for two years when he was Prime Minister and have a profound respect for his contribution to Malta’s development and well-being. He fought for democracy in the 1980s and Malta’s accession to the European Union in the 1990s, probably the most pivotal political step in Malta’s history after Independence.

I, therefore, find it extremely difficult to reconcile the expression of his fundamentalist Catholic beliefs with the secular and pluralist Constitution of which he was until very recently the head, and his undemocratic espousal of those of our legislators in Parliament who would flout the will of the people in a referendum. It is always a shock to discover that a leader one had admired has feet of clay.

It seems President Fenech Adami will have no truck with democratic expressions of will when these do not fit with his own narrow religious beliefs. He, and those who think like him in Parliament, appear to have forgotten that religious faith is a private matter and that the principle of the clear separation of civil and religious authority is among the most important characterisations of a liberal democracy.

Moreover, his support for cohabitation, rather than remarriage, is the height of hypocrisy when it is well-established that cohabitation is inherently less stable than marriage and, in the Church’s eyes, amounts to adultery. How he can so contort his beliefs as to support cohabitation over remarriage defies all logic.

Our legislators have agreed that a referendum should be called to decide whether the introduction of divorce would reflect the will of the people. Whatever the outcome, legislators now have a moral obligation to honour the people’s wishes.