For once today it may be appropriate if I ask you a different sort of question from the usual because the topic that you may find impossible not to speak about calls for imagination rather than judgment. You told me that when your niece was very young she used to ask you not: “Tell me a story,” but “ invent a story”. Could you do that for me in the present context?

Let me have a try. I will tell my story in the first person, as if it were an autobiographical novel, or what is today called auto-fiction.

Whenever I hear the accusations levelled against me, I feel like Socrates said of himself at the beginning of his defence when accused of corrupting the youth. On one hand, I wax indignant at the deeds I am accused of; on the other, I cannot believe that the person accused of them is myself…

The deeds described come to life in my mind, but I am absolutely sure the perpetrator was another person, not I. Or rather, it was a non-person, a puppet driven by forces outside myself. I recognise the sequence of events narrated as capable of having objectively happened, but I cannot relive them with myself as subject.

At most, it might have been that a hidden, unconscious part of myself had taken over the determination of my behaviour. But I cannot acknowledge that it really belonged to my true self.

While thinking this I had exactly the same feeling as on those occasions when I felt inclined to take an overdose of my anti-depressant pills. My present state of denial is a kind of partially accomplished suicide. It is the mental destruction of a troubled source that has spoiled my being.

Am I seeking to persuade myself that I am a psychotic? A sort of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, as in the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson? Certainly not. Is it not obvious that there is a deep split in the personality of every human being?

There is an ambivalence, at once pungent and poignant, in my very accusers. It always seems to have been in them, in their attitude towards me, from the beginning.

This inner division was described sharply by the Latin pagan poet Ovid, and then also by St Paul speaking of himself.

I remember a famous Jesuit saying that a test that should be applied to all candidates for the priesthood was to check that they could live with a certain number of failings, so that they could feel what it was like to be an average human being. It comes to recognising that the traces of original sin stay with us in our psyche, if not in our soul.

Are you being faithful to the rules of the game that we established at the beginning? Have you invented the story, or rather filled up according to your personal intuition the story that has been most often told in the media over the past weeks?

No. My inspiration has rather been the story told by the writer, Nicole Malinconi, about a case that occurred in Belgium in 2004. The protagonist was not a priest, but a woman.

In fact I was somewhat surprised to read that the psychologists who have gone most deeply into the subject have not found great differences in the psychology of all those involved in sex abuse of minors, although it is more scandalous when religious are involved.

The report published by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City this year, entitled ‘The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010’ which surveyed 90 per cent of the accused, concluded that “neither the all-male celibate priesthood nor homosexuality was to blame”, but the priests had mostly not been strong enough to resist the tidal wave of social and sexual turmoil that swept across the country from the late 60s onwards, especially such phenomena as tolerance of child pornography and sexual tourism, a major chunk of which is paedophilia.

Incidentally the report gives a great deal of importance to the fact that almost 90 per cent of the cases were with adolescent boys – ephebophilia – not prepubescent children, paedophilia.

I understand you to mean that the first condition for effective action against paedophilia is understanding what leads up to it. An incidental consequence of such an understanding will be compassion with the victims in the first place, but not to the exclusion of the wrongdoers of whom only a tiny proportion are priests. What other lessons can one draw from this sad experience?

First is the realisation that child abuse is unfortunately much more widespread than we would like to think, and not only in the institutions where one naturally expects it to rear its ugly head.

An incidental benefit would be greater appreciation of the work done by the Missionary Society of St Paul, but the insistence of the Commissioner for Children that there should be a comprehensive transition from institutional care for children-in-need to other systems like fostering which can provide more family-like settings.

There is also a clear need for deep and open consideration of the priesthood-homosexuality relationship. American reports estimate that perhaps half of the US clergy are homosexual in orientation although mostly faithful to their promise of celibacy. Such a situation only creates serious problems if it is repressed from awareness.

For me, as for most priests in Malta, the blunting of our collective image has hopefully served to make us more humble and joyful in giving service.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.