The guardian of emigrants and immigrants for 50 years, Mgr Philip Calleja, who turns 80 tomorrow, speaks to Ariadne Massa about abject poverty, immigration today and the St John's Co-Cathedral museum.

Philip Calleja was still a student when he trudged through the streets of Valletta collecting signatures to support Pope Pius XII's proclamation for the dogma of the Ascension.

He stumbled into a two-roomed flat in Merchants Street where a woman waved him in and gruffly asked if he could write. When the young man nodded, she sat him down in her tiny room and pointing to a pencil and copy-book page, instructed him to write a letter to her son.

To his disbelief she uttered a string of expletives, which he pretended to scribble down, too afraid to protest. The woman was hurt that her son, who had left for Australia four months earlier, had cut off all contact with his family. It suddenly dawned on him that both mother and son were illiterate and there was no way the two could communicate.

That is when the mission of his life flashed before him - he could be the go-between for emigrants and their families.

"That evening, when I met my friends, I recounted the story and we had a good laugh, but I told them that the woman's predicament led me to take care of emigrants. I wanted to remedy this heartbreaking situation," he says, in his soft, yet raspy, voice.

This incident has shaped Mgr Calleja's life, who has dedicated the 50 years of his priesthood to a cause that he has seen change drastically from an imbalance of sexes in the 1950s when so many men emigrated, to a situation where Malta is stumbling under the weight of African immigrants arriving by the boatload.

Born in Valletta on December 8, 1928, Mgr Calleja was the eldest of six children, although two siblings died young. He was brought up in a simple and modest family.

Tragedy struck the family when the young Philip was barely 17 - his father died in 1945, after succumbing to war injuries. The boy's education, which his father had always supported, was threatened. Luckily, his grandmother inherited some money from an uncle who had made a name in the US and this was divided between the siblings.

Resting his head in the palm of his hand, Mgr Calleja stops momentarily to reminisce about his childhood, running into the bombed shells of houses, rifling through the ruins in search of wooden beams they could use to fuel a fire to cook their dinner.

He was ordained in 1953 at the age of 24, and soon assigned the post of director at the Good Shepherd Institute of Victory Church. This cared for the poor children of refugees - who had lost their homes in the war and lived in tents in the harbour area - and children of barmaids, among others.

Mgr Calleja sometimes got an earful of what went on in the lives of barmaids working in Strait Street, since he lived in St John's Street.

"At 11 p.m., when the barmaids closed shop, everybody would roll out singing loudly and stumbling over the glass bottles. It was another world," he says, the fine skin around his eyes crinkling in a smile.

But then he frowns as he remembers the poverty the children faced. On a mission to instil some cheer in their lives he would buy a cake when one of them celebrated Holy Communion, or give their family a chicken for Christmas.

He also began organising summer camps in Gozo, children's carnivals, swimming and events at the Upper Barrakka Gardens that would be attended by some 300 mischievous boys.

Mgr Calleja moved quickly through the ranks. In 1956 he was appointed head of the Marriage Office at the Archbishop's Curia, eventually becoming chancellor in 1986, a post he held until 1994.

He was instrumental in introducing the Scheme of Remuneration for all priests, overhauling Dar tal-Kleru, and acquiring the land where Dar tal-Providenza operates today.

He originally joined the Emigrants Commission of the Catholic Action in 1952, going on to be appointed the first national director of Catholic Migration Activities in 1958.

The 1950s was an extremely busy time for Mgr Calleja, as Malta grappled with the reality of shiploads of Maltese men leaving the island in search of greener pastures.

In 1954, a record 11,447 Maltese left, and in 1957 there was an imbalance of the sexes, with 9,309 more young women of a marrying age, than men. To address, Mgr Calleja decided to set up the single young women migrant scheme encouraging them to go abroad and settle there. He smiles when he remembers how some had deemed this a shameful scheme - for it had worked.

During those years he opened an office with a bustling staff at Palazzo Caraffa, Valletta, where he began providing a letter-writing service to help Maltese communicate with their relatives abroad. The government would then post it for free, because it understood their predicament.

Eventually, they even organised orientation classes for the illiterate men who planned to leave, where they explained the geographical position of Australia, the temperature, the time difference, and other matters, which the men could not even begin to believe existed.

An English language course was also provided before the men left, though they were nowhere near as detailed as today's.

"We would teach them the numbers, the days of the week, sit down, stand up, how much, where's the market and so on," he says, adding that these courses proved so popular that not even the huge Palazzo Caraffa could cope with the numbers.

Mgr Calleja constantly touches on the extreme poverty people faced. The trip to Australia would cost €24, while to the UK it was €6, an amount which those seeking to emigrate could not afford without the government's social assistance.

"They would carry their belongings in a sack, not a suitcase. Once, this man was at the harbour waiting to board the ship when a silver piece rolled into the sea - the man had to be held back from jumping in," he says.

Looking around the boardroom of the Emigrants' Commission, in Valletta, he points to memorabilia given to him by Maltese who settled in Egypt.

"They had become rich, so they set up a Malta Relief Fund to pay part of the trip of the Maltese," he says.

The commission, known as Dar l-Emigrant (the emigrants' home), was founded in 1969 and Mgr Calleja set about busying himself with special radio and television programmes that brought down the barriers of geography and communication between families.

In 1980, the Archbishop appointed him delegate for the secretariat for migrants and tourists, and he went on to be elected treasurer and governing member of the International Catholic Migration Commission, Geneva.

Malta got one of its first tastes of immigration when the government agreed to take in 360 refugees who fled Uganda, under the rule of Idi Amin in 1972. They were given temporary refuge at Tigné barracks in Sliema, until they got their papers in order and resettled elsewhere.

In the early 1990s, Malta experienced a wave of immigration from Iraqis and later from the former Yugoslavia. Mgr Calleja said the only difference was that at the time colour was not an issue because these immigrants blended in with the Maltese population... plus, they had entered legally.

Most of the immigrants were highly qualified, skilled people. However, at the time they were not allowed to work, and the only benefits they were entitled to were free hospital care and education for their children.

These immigrants did not stay long and were often resettled in North America and Australia. Then in 2001, the Refugee Act was introduced and soon after Malta began to encounter boatloads of Africans landing on its shores, an influx that has been sustained to this day.

The situation worried Mgr Calleja so much that in October he released figures to prove that in such a small island stretching barely over 112 square miles, there were about 40 immigrants per square mile - some 4,500 - alongside the 3,000 citizens crammed into the same space.

At the time many had felt these remarks, coming from the champion of immigration, would further foment racist sentiments, but he defends his position saying his intentions were far removed from such suggestions. His only intention had been to encourage the EU to share Malta's burden.

Was it a misguided decision at the time?

"Not at all, I wanted to urge Europe to understand our situation and help us. Immigrants can move around Europe if they want, but in Malta they get stuck," he says.

He refuses to dwell on whether Maltese are racists or not, preferring to believe that although the voice of dissent was louder, the actions of the numerous benefactors and charitable people were what mattered.

However, he admits he is worried by certain questions he faces when invited on radio programmes, which he feels sometimes verged on the "imbecile".

"People need to understand this situation," he says, admitting that those who failed to grasp the situation often harass him verbally or taunt him whenever he attends a conference on the matter.

His car has even been vandalised on occasion, but he shrugs off these incidents, describing them as trivial matters.

Whatever the situation, Mgr Calleja persists in helping the droves of immigrants that wait outside his office everyday seeking some form of help.

He is very worried that several married couples are deprived of the joy of their families. Only those granted refugee status can bring their wife and children to Malta, those with temporary humanitarian protection were sometimes separated from their families for years.

"This is a heart-wrenching, unjust situation. The men carry their photo in their pocket and come to me asking for help, but there's no remedy. It's impossible for every immigrant to bring their family to Malta."

Trying to steer Mgr Calleja away from his pet subject is hard, but he recently made the headlines over the proposed St John's Co-Cathedral underground museum when he strayed from his usual soft-spoken self.

Last month, Nationalist MP Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, speaking in Parliament, accused Mgr Calleja, who is the president of the St John's Co-Cathedral Foundation, of allowing himself to be used as a "mouthpiece".

Mgr Calleja did not mince words when he retaliated and said: "I have never been faced with such unjust and untruthful allegations. This is an uncalled for attack on my personal integrity."

Could Dr Pullicino Orlando have been insinuating that the prelate was speaking on behalf of Richard Cachia Caruana, Malta's Permanent Representative to the EU and a member of the foundation?

"Mr Cachia Caruana is a member like I am, we are equal and we were there from the start. He has his ideas and I have mine, but the foundation is one, and I won't accept any other situation. I would leave if that were the case," he stresses.

"If I disagreed with something I wouldn't have approved it. The museum is a project the foundation agreed on unanimously. I repeat, St John's has changed and we're doing our utmost to have it entirely restored."

Mgr Calleja says the idea is to have an underground museum, similar to that beneath the Monza Duomo. The foundation even held talks with the engineer of this project to get the lowdown on this development.

"We wanted to do something beautiful, which was part of the St John's Co-Cathedral compound. So we will go through with an environmental impact assessment to ensure we're doing the right thing. If the EIA results show it's impossible to achieve, we'll stop," he says, unperturbed by opposition to the plans.

"Whenever you introduce something new, there is always the risk of opposition," he says, dwelling on the days when he had come up with particular schemes in the 1950s, which did not go down so well at first.

Unable to resist not talking about emigration, Mgr Calleja shares a final episode that meant a lot to him - a recent visit to Navarres in Valencia, where he met with descendants of Maltese immigrants.

"The Lord gave me a gift. They took me to a place where there's the urn of a priest of Maltese descent, Vicent Sicluna, who was ordained Blessed in 2003. I felt such a great satisfaction that the children of immigrants had done so well. This moment was the crowning of my career."