If you believe that the Muslims have a cunning plan to rule the world, come to hear Mass on a Sunday morning at Marsascala. Here you will find your very own champion, a young priest who preaches that the Muslims are telling Christians to be afraid, for a great battle is coming during which Muslims will take over Europe.

The Muslims will do so because ‘we’ Christians are not making enough babies, so that Europe will be overrun by a tidal wave of Muslim sprogs (because they all have multiple wives, you see).

He preaches that to be Maltese is to be Christian and that ‘they’, the Muslims, must be stopped by ‘we’ Maltese becoming better Christians.

Last Sunday I could not believe my ears. Surely, I thought, this young priest was mis-speaking and his point was that Christians needed to live more authentic lives. I went to point this out after Mass, that although his message was doubtless positive, he could be easily misinterpreted as reinforcing all the negative stereotypes that many Maltese had of Muslims.

I was in for a second shock.

A strong and united Malta and Europe can be, and should be, a cultural and religious rainbow

He calmly confirmed that he meant every word that he said. Asking me loftily if I had studied the Koran (which he had, of course), he informed me that it encouraged Muslims to kill Christians. I replied: did he know how many anachronisms the Old Testament has? And was he aware that polygamy is a minority practice in the Muslim world?

Surely he must realise that he was simply strengthening negative stereotypes and that this was harmful?

The young priest reacted in horror. Was I saying that the Word of God was not true? He ignored the other questions and informed me with absolute conviction that his task was to tell the Truth (as he understood it from an interview he had read with a Belgian Imam, apparently) and that he would not be hindered from this task.

Any further talk was fruitless. Here was a consecrated young man who was using his priestly mantle to dignify his dangerously simplistic black-and-white vision of Europe and its cultures, including both Christianity and the Muslim faith.

In his vision of the ‘truth’, Muslims and Christians in Europe could not live in harmony but in a permanent state of tension and suspicion. He could not understand that suspicion breeds fear and fear breeds violence. In feeding the suspicion, he was unwittingly giving another turn to the wheels of the terrible juggernaut.

Such a blinkered perspective would be problematic in anyone. In a priest declaiming his vision from a Sunday pulpit, in a local and international scenario where the relationships between Christians and Muslims have never been this close to combustion, it is irresponsible.

I am writing because this is not the first time that this young priest has used his pulpit in this way. This was not a mistake.

In Malta today, the idea of letting desperate children, women and men drown, of considering these ‘black muslims’ who make it to Malta as meriting less dignity than ‘we’ Maltese, is no longer the muttered blasphemy of a far-right minority. It is now infused in the conversation of our neighbours and friends.

In the face of this normalisation of the unspeakable, we need priests who can read beyond the hysterical ramblings of a Belgian Imam, who are able to discern the signs of the times. We need our priests to lead us in praying for and helping our fellow Christians in Syria and Iraq. And, at the same time, we need them to lead us in praying for and helping our fellow Muslims in Gaza and in their terrible journey through Africa towards Europe, their distant hope.

We need our priests to be brave apostles of fraternity, as Pope Francis has been in Korea. We need our Catholic Church to be a sign of contradiction, to say the unpopular even in the face of terrorism, to be on the side of the truly poor who in Malta are dark skinned and profess a Muslim faith.

I believe that Maltese and European Muslims are my brothers and sisters. I believe this because I am a Christian. I believe that a strong and united Malta and Europe can be, and should be, a cultural and religious rainbow, not the dour monochrome favoured by fundamentalist Christians and Muslims. And I believe that my Church believes this too.