My attention has been drawn to an article by Fr Joe Borg (‘Teaching Francis Some Christianity’, September 4).

I am deeply, deeply flattered to find excerpts from my writings over the last three years on Pope Francis (who I greatly admire as a leader) being recycled by Borg in response to my article of August 10, ‘Assisted Dying: For and Against’.

Regrettably – in a hatchet job of which his media students would be proud – his piece was marred by his resorting solely to Francis’s own views on the subject as the counter-argument. Talk of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut!

But it is Borg’s own inability to construct his own arguments to counter mine which is most revealing. It seems, not for the first time, a tacit admission by Borg that he is too intellectually bankrupt or lazy to deploy arguments of his own to support his case.

I last came across Borg two years ago when I chastised him for his disloyalty to former Archbishop Paul Cremona for leading a coup to remove him. I leave people to judge for themselves which of these two actions was the more egregious: his act of public disloyalty to his Bishop, or my conscientiously held difference of view with Pope Francis on euthanasia (or, for that matter, contraception, IVF, women priests and other aspects of outdated Church doctrine).

I adhere to what I wrote on August 10: “Despite any views of the self-righteous and intolerant Religious Right in Malta, traditional religious beliefs should play no part in the debate on whether or not there should be a law on assisted dying. Those whose religion tells them they should not support it are wholly entitled to hold that position – and not to participate.”

This is not an argument about religious beliefs, but about the universal values of charity, justice, compassion, mercy, dignity and kindness.