Over Memorial Day weekend, 72 percent of the Maltese electorate—about the same number of Maltese who go to mass each Sunday—went to the polls to vote on a referendum to legalize divorce. With just over 50 percent of the vote, the victory went to the pro-divorce movement. After some fine-tuning, a divorce bill is expected to pass the parliament this July, leaving to the Philippines the distinction of being the only country in the world where divorce is still not legal—well, the only country where 90 percent of the citizens aren’t celibate.
The divorce bill, its proponents say, signals the birth of a new era for Malta and will bring the country into the modern world. It’s a bold claim, and to those of us already comfortably situated in modernity, the actual referendum question may seem a bit tame: “Do you agree with the introduction of the option of divorce in the case of a married couple who has been separated or has been living apart for at least four years, and where there is no reasonable hope for reconciliation between the spouses, whilst adequate maintenance is guaranteed and the children are protected?”
Four years? I could be divorced four times by then in Nevada! But Malta isn’t looking to rush into modernity. Malta doesn’t want “Las Vegas-style” divorce, according to Joseph Muscat, the leader of the Labor Party and a supporter of the bill. Not yet in any event. Although it’s particular legislation may differ from our own divorce laws, the arguments made by the pro-divorce faction in Malta are reminiscent of the arguments made for no-fault divorce in the United States four decades ago.
There is the charge of hypocrisy. Malta does not grant divorce, but it does grant civil separations and civil annulments (as well as recognizing Church annulments). Married couples who procure a separation cannot remarry and are, therefore, forced to remain in loveless marriages or, should they meet someone else, into cohabitation. Married couples seeking a civil or Church annulment may be forced to lie in order to meet the criteria for annulment.
Better to call a spade a spade. Divorce legislation would allow couples in loveless marriages to stop living a lie. It would, according to one blog, “uncover the social problems prevalent in broken marriages but which are swept under the carpet, and provide a way to address them.” Divorce, in fact, would make marriage better.
No fault divorce proponents in the United States made a similar point. Rather than forcing those who want a divorce to remain in an unhappy marriage or to fabricate stories of abuse or infidelity, give them an honest and easy way out. Getting rid of those unhappily married would raise the tone of the whole institution.
As Brad Wilcox pointed out in National Affairs a few years ago, though, that didn’t work. “Marital quality fell during the ’70s and early ’80s. In the early 1970s, 70 percent of married men and 67 percent of married women reported being very happy in their marriages; by the early ’80s, these figures had fallen to 63 percent for men and 62 percent for women. So marital quality dropped even as divorce rates were reaching record highs.” Wilcox has a plausible solution: “Widespread divorce undermined ordinary couples’ faith in marital permanency and their ability to invest financially and emotionally in their marriages—ultimately casting clouds of doubt over their relationships.”
Another argument offered by the Maltese divorce proponents is that we must think of the children. Children should not be made to suffer through the long, drawn-out breakup of their parents’ marriage. Again, a similar argument was made by no-fault divorce proponents: Children will be happier if their parents are happier. So, if divorce makes parents happier, it will make children happier too.
And again, the facts haven’t born this out. As Wilcox points out, “the divorce revolution’s collective consequences for children are striking. Taking into account both divorce and non-marital childbearing, sociologist Paul Amato estimates that if the United States enjoyed the same level of family stability today as it did in 1960, the nation would have 750,000 fewer children repeating grades, 1.2 million fewer school suspensions, approximately 500,000 fewer acts of teenage delinquency, about 600,000 fewer kids receiving therapy, and approximately 70,000 fewer [attempted] suicide attempts every year.”
A final argument made in Malta, is that the current system is inequitable. While Malta does not grant divorces, it does recognize divorces granted in other countries. In Malta, divorce is the privilege of the rich who have the means to establish residence abroad, obtain a divorce, and return to Malta. Those without the means must make do with the current system of legal separation, annulment, or just toughing it out.
Here is another sign that Malta is new to modernity. In our thoroughly modern country—the home of “‘Las Vegas-style’ divorce”—intact marriages are now the privilege of the educated and upper-class while divorce is the burden of the poor. Many have observed as well that—despite the best intentions to give women an easy way out of abusive marriages—liberal divorce laws tend to benefit husbands and harm wives. When New York legalized no-fault divorce just last year, the Catholic Church was joined by the National Organization for Women in arguing that no-fault divorce takes away bargaining power from women.
Malta’s vote to loosen divorce laws comes just as some Americans begin to carefully look at the costs of divorce and to consider ways to tighten the ties that bind. In 2006, for instance, Congress provided five years of funding for a Healthy Marriage Initiative that would help married couples “acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to form and sustain a healthy marriage.” Wilcox and others have recommended reforms like one-year waiting periods and mandatory counseling before divorce and preferential treatment by courts for spouses divorced against their will who “have not engaged in egregious behavior.”
But changing a culture of divorce once it has taken root is a daunting task. Of course that doesn’t mean simply maintaining a culture of respect for the importance of marriage, the family, etc. is not also hard. Just a little less so than working from scratch. It surely would have been better for Malta to learn from the mistakes of the modern world before rushing to join it. Maybe the Philippines still will.
Meghan Duke is Managing Editor of First Things.
Comments:
This is a sloopy argument. Maybe the figures of happiness ( a very subjective measure, if any) can´t be compared at all when they come from different decades? How many women, specially, could actually admit (to themselves included) not being happy in a situation they had no escape or had a harder way to escape not only by legall, but also cultural reasons? If any, this entry title should have been: "The Philipines folly".
It's very unlikely that any culture, subjected to the influence of Western mass media, will resist the Spirit of the Age by remaining obedient to traditional moral authority and faithful to a Christian religious inheritance.
So expecting the island of Malta to be a holdout against divorce is unrealistic.
You say that "hopefully the people of Malta will continue to have low divorce rates without being coerced into doing so by the government."
The people of Malta voted in favor of divorce democratically. That is not government coercion.
Thus , such a couple , when they recieve the Eucharist , with its covenantal promise of trusting Him , in His Risen power , to be all that they can be in His power, it becomes a false oath , with its consequences !
It woudl be good for The Church ,to educate would be couples , in the premarraige courses , of all the ways that they undermine trust in Him and then also train them , to call on Him, in trust , esp. when dealing with the difficult areas so that dwelling on same do not get too much focus and power but instead , the grace to hold every thought captive to Him , to often call on His holy Name , on behalf of each other and many others who need same !
The Church even gives a guidance of the meausre of how often may be , with the concept of indulgence of 300 days for every time The Holy name is called with loving reverence ( in state of grace ) , as an indication of how good God is , aslo , to may be help us to be motivated to use same more - thus , a 30 y.o could use the invocation about 35 times and so on :) !
Thus , would be couples could start already , to bing His power and presence and holiness into lives of each other , those in each other's family etc :, ofcourse taking meausres to ask for the strenght to do all the things that are associated with that trust in Him !
Hope that The Church gets the funding , to help couples with such good projects - using the Icon of mercy and all such means , to develop the deeper trust , that in turn would become the rock upon which would be built the house of holy relationships !
It seems to me Jesus was forbidding divorce, not merely remarriage after divorce. "What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder." That is a hard saying indeed.
I was just reading, though, that it seems very unlikely the Pharisees would have asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" There was absolutely no question at the time whether a man could divorce his wife. The question of the day was how serious a situation there had to be in order to justify a divorce. Some said a man could divorce his wife for basically any reason, say, he didn't like her cooking. Others said there had to be some grave fault on the part of the wife. Nevertheless, it seems certain that Jesus forbade divorce altogether, rather than just siding with those who said the reason had to be serious. (But then along comes Paul and invents the "Pauline privilege.")
The problem with the decision in Malta is not that it legalizes divorce - it is that it will institutionalize high-conflict divorce which is inherently destructive and makes our legal system an accomplice to that destruction. What the new law in Malta will require is that the parties offer evidence and testimony of every flaw in the marriage, every alleged infidelity, every instance of physical or emotional abuse, every embarrassing or humiliating exchange of words, etc. And it will not be just the parties that will suffer in the process - their families and communities will be dragged into it and forced to pick sides. And there will be lies... oh, will there ever be lies.
The process is made even more unjust and destructive when, as is often the case, one side (usually the man) has superior financial resources and is able to outspend the other in an effort to humiliate them further and guarantee that the outcome will, at any rate, leave the other party in a draconian financial situation.
Imagine at the end of such a humiliating process - after all of the dirty laundry has been aired - a court could find that, no, in fact, these people should stay married after all because their marriage is not beyond all hope.
For better or for worse, our court system is adversarial. I don't support making either marriage or divorce an adversarial process. A court of law is not always the appropriate place for settling inter-personal disputes. There are certain legal matters that must be decided when a marriage ends, but offering a forum in which to air personal animosities and to incentivize that animosity with financial reward and the chance to humiliate the object of your bad feeling turns the legal system into an accomplice to abuse.
No fault divorce does not make more happy marriages. I don't know who said that or what kind of drug they were smoking. It is a ridiculous assertion. But the alternative is worse. The alternative is turning every decision to terminate a marriage into a public spectacle, humiliating in every instance, and universally prone to abuse.
The first Christian Emperors penalized divorce, except on good grounds, but they never sought to deny that it terminated the marriage; Roman legal tradition was too strong for that.
It was only in the West, where the courts of the Church successfully asserted exclusive jurisdiction over matrimonial causes that the indissolubility of marriage passed into the civil law
The answer is straightforward. Divorce is meaningless to the Catholic Church. As a category it does not exist. However, it does exist for the civil authorities. Annulment does exist but is discouraged unless given considerable thought. The process can take years. So the Catholic Church requires that couple get themselves straight with the civil authorities prior to pursuing sacramental annulment, i.e. the recognition that the marriage never existed in the first place. I've read that Ted Kennedy's annulment may have been on this basis: that he never intended to marry his first wife, i.e. be faithful to her. That's side A.
Side B: The Church opposes many of the current divorce laws due to their detrimental effects on the people, including the children, involved. Forty plus years ago, I might have said "expected" effects. The evidence is in. None of the benefits sought have come to fruition. Much if not most of the expected negative effects have.
To the Catholic Church, marriage is more than a piece of paper from the government. It is the one sacrament that is not administered by the Church. It is administered by the couple involved. The priest is just a witness for the Church.
Traditional wedding vows, such as "... to love and to cherish; from this day forward until death do us part" are rather meaningless to such males, who really don't want love and commitment from their current partner, only their "availability".
In the early Church, matrimonial misconduct by a Christian – adultery, cruelty, desertion, wilful neglect to maintain – was a pastoral concern, with refusal of the sacraments and, even exclusion from the society of the faithful as the penalty for contumacy.
The tangled matrimonial affairs of the haughty race of the Merovingian kings, the spiritual censures peremptorily inflicted on them by the Frankish bishops and the public penance they had to perform, as the price of their removal, are recorded by the chroniclers because of the eminence of the delinquents, not because such vigorous ecclesiastical discipline was unusual.
It is fanciful to suppose that a similar discipline could be enforced by the civil law, in a society in which the Faith is no longer the established and acknowledged religion of the nation It will only become, not only possible, but inevitable, insofar as the Church succeeds in her mission, as described by Belloc, “to take in men's minds even more than the place taken by patriotism; to influence the whole of society, not a part of it, and to influence it even more thoroughly than a common language.”
This is not to say that bishops should not exercise over their own flocks the same authority and apply the same sanctions as a Cyprian or an Ambrose.
