MaltaMedia.com

A survey done by the University of Malta’s Chaplaincy has found that about 57% of university students say that divorce should be legalised in Malta. Another 37% believe abortion is sometimes morally acceptable.

The survey was carried out by sending a questionnaire to a random sample of 600 Maltese students. A high number of them, 421 in fact, replied, but only 39% were males.
The survey results indicate that the vast majority of students seem to disagree with the Catholic Church’s teachings on divorce, artificial contraception and pre-marital sex.

The survey also showed that only 44% of students agree with the Church’s position that divorce is morally unacceptable. This is 16% less that when the first survey was carried out 6 years ago. With regard to sexual practices and cohabitation, 44% of students said that they had sex recently, while 76% see nothing wrong in pre-marital sexual intercourse.

Almost 74% also said they agreed with pre-marital cohabitation. This is an increase of over 15% to what students said 6 years ago. Artificial contraception was the moral teaching least adhered to by the students, with only 15% saying that it was morally wrong to use artificial contraception.

The survey, however, did reveal that most students still supported marriage as a life-long commitment, despite the fact that the students preferred divorce to an unhappy marriage and believed divorcees who remarry should not be barred from receiving Holy Communion.

91% of the students claim to be Catholic while 5% are agnostic. 61% of the students said they attended Sunday Mass while 71% said they received Holy Communion at least once monthly.
Despite this, there were 11% of students who believe in the existence of more than one god, energies, re-incarnation, fortune telling and the horoscope.

The vast majority of respondents, a whopping 88%, said that their religious practice is a free choice. This is an increase of 21.9% over the same results of 6 years ago. However, there was a drop of 4.6% in those who pray and an increase in the number of students who said they do not pray frequently. Only 8% pray using the Bible.