Boy's Christmas sermon

Mr Alfred Cauchi ("The Boy's Christmas Mass Midnight Sermon", The Sunday Times Christmas Supplement, December 5) writes that the boy's Christmas sermon is usually the product of a priest.

I have been writing the boy's (and boys' when it is dialogue, and girl's) sermon for the last 20 years, first at the St Theresa church in Cospicua, and now at the Carmelite parish church in Fgura.

The original idea belonged to Fr Benjamin Galea, OCD, who asked me to write a Christmas Midnight Mass sermon, as he put it, "from a layman's point of view", which I did. Apparently the idea and the sermon went well, and I have been doing it, with a different script every year, since then.

One very popular novelty we introduced then was that the boy (later boys) did not preach his sermon from the pulpit or from the lectern, but from the centre of the altar, and not dressed as an altarboy but in a Discalced Carmelite friar's habit.

This practice has been taken up also by the Carmelite friars in Fgura.

As for the "(sermon) script being handwritten on an ordinary school copybook", I type the script, submit it to the parish priest for vetting, and he in turn photocopies the script and hands it to over the boys chosen for the sermon.