The Year of the Priest and the Priesthood is coming to an end. How has this year affected you personally, as a priest, and do you agree that it has left the Church more purified and richer?

Paradoxically, this year has effectively resolved the identity crisis that seems to have affected the entire species of Catholic priests since Vatican Council II because of the coming-to-a-head, with the Murphy Report, of the priest paedophile scandal that had been brewing for some 30 years.

Until then, I myself thought the phenomenon to be just a symptom of a much more general social problem that was not specific to the priesthood. In fact, by far the largest number of convicted paedophiles were married men, and proportionately, there were many more teachers, sport coaches and other professionals, whose work brings them into close contact with boys, than priests.

Of course, since priests were still generally perceived especially by Catholics as signs of the transcendent, the shock caused when they were discovered to have abused was of a different order.

But the mind-changing revelation of the Murphy Report and its digestion is the fact that the 'organic structure' of recruitment to the priesthood had led to its becoming attractive to men who were not psychologically strong enough to enter into either heterosexual or homosexual relationships of celibate intimacy and friendships with the risks and demands these imply.

It is this realisation that produced in myself as in many others the degree of humility that is paradoxically the cure for the identity crisis of those who had become agonisingly uncertain about the meaning of the priesthood.

The problem had arisen acutely not only for priests themselves but perhaps even more so for those parents who had previously thought of the Catholic priest as being essentially a sort of shaman, with his anointment with the holy oils empowering him exclusively to carry out such acts as presiding over the Eucharist, hearing confessions and forgiving sins, preaching the Word with authority and so on.

Vatican Council II highlighted two doctrines that had not been sharply impressed in the minds of many until then. The first was that any baptised believer shared in the fullness of the priesthood uniquely belonging to Jesus Christ himself.

The second was that the ordained priest himself remained nevertheless a member of the community, in need of receiving the Sacraments, such as Penance, and of his fellow human beings. It became difficult for many to synthesise the co-existence in the priest of his singular, sacramentally conferred powers and the ordinary humanity of his faith and moral strength.

By what a commentator has called "a tragic grace", the paedophile denouement in the Year of the Priest seems to have enabled both laity and clergy to grasp the never completely comprehensible dialectic that brings about the Christian priesthood.

What, in your opinion, is the most challenging factor being faced by the priests and the seminarians today?

Last week I took part in a discussion programme on One TV. The chairman said it was customary for participants to be addressed by their first names. As she had been my student, she felt a bit awkward not calling me Professor. I replied that hardly anybody did. If they were being formal, they would call me Father.

Helena Dalli, sitting beside me, who besides being a shadow minister is also a colleague at the University, turned to Charles Mangion, who was sitting in front and said: "I find it easier to call you Father than Peter because you have real children." He replied: "Do you therefore expect us to call you Mother? Listeners would think that you are the superior of a convent."

Immediately afterwards we were on air. So I did not have the time to point out that religious language is hardly ever properly understood if it is taken to be univocal. Actually, the concept of 'father' is analogical. It applies most fully only to God, since He is the only absolute giver of life.

Mangion and Dalli are only channels for its biological transmission, while my fellow priests and I do it in the spirit. The inability to be at ease with figurative, metaphoric as well as analogic language is, in my opinion, the most difficult aspect of the situation priests and seminarians are facing today.

This inability is also related to the reaction of those who ask, for instance, what is Fr Peter, a priest, doing participating in a programme on the privatisation of the shipyards? They have an ultra-shamanic concept of the priest, as if his function was purely magical, outside the networks of human conviviality. Our age is probably the first in history in which the priest has to confront not hostility, but indifference.

Georges Bernanos, in his book Diary of a Country Priest, said there is a moment in the life of Jesus where each one of us finds his/her vocation in life. What is it in your life which will sum up your mission and vocation as a priest?

When I went to study with the Beato Angelico Community in Milan, I found that the rule for this group of men and women artists devoted to the manifestation of the beauty of God in a monastic setting said that their vocation was to live the mystery of the transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor.

Iconographers of the Byzantine rite always make their first icon of it, because it is the counterpart of the 'beautiless' Christ on the Cross, as Isaiah describes him in the suffering servant poems.

Theresa of Lisieux considered the Transfiguration to be the feast of the Holy Face to which she was so devoted. Pope Benedict frequently urges us to follow "the Way of Beauty" to God, and that is my commitment.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.