Last Sunday you made it to the front page of a Maltese language newspaper. There was a full length picture of you in profile and the headline proclaimed a scoop: that you, and not, as is usually assumed, the Prime Minister, chooses the Cabinet. How flattered were you by this?

Truthfully, it was the follow-up, or lack of it, that left me crest fallen. I had expected after the newspaper blow-up that a swarm of PN candidates would be buzzing around me petitioning me for a Cabinet seat. Alas! Not a single one approached me. They must have known all along that it was only to a relatively measly job that I had appointed George Pullicino more than 20 years ago, despite the high pitch at which I had sung his praises. Alas again! There is no credit one can claim for his subsequent assent to glory. Plainly one does not have to have a Sirano nose in order to sniff that out.

It is not the first time you have been called a priest-politician. What do you say to that?

Rather than priest-politician, I would describe myself as a priest-politologue, meaning someone who scrutinises politics from the point of view of a minister of religion and who intervenes, when he deems that the situation calls for it. As for the scrutinising role, I did not assign it to myself. When I was a 19-year-old seminarist, I was directed to study philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford. Over 50 years later, I was called upon to lecture to the conference of European Bishops on the Church and politics in Europe. Yet my rule is never to ground arguments on authority, but on fact and reason, and hence my tone is always undogmatic. My voice is that of the learning Church, not of the teaching.

Throughout a lifetime I have acted on the principle that a priest should not involve himself directly in any struggle for power, but that he should not hesitate to intervene when there were issues like those of human rights, or of Catholic-social teaching at stake.

I would certainly not call Mgr Philip Calleja a priest-politician because he has denounced the Azzjoni Nazzjonali billboard threatening to close down the open centre for refugees at Balzan. I felt that it was equally my duty to draw attention to the fact that there was a proposal by a political party such as the establishment of a centre that would promote 'open access systems' in our age of the Internet and in a society dominated by electronic communication.

This proposal is really the application of the principle of participation in management so clearly proclaimed by Pope John XXIII.. The point could easily have escaped attention and I think that it is an instance where I felt that intervention should follow scrutiny. I am much less certain that I should express judgments about people. Sadly, it has become difficult not to do so when political debate has come to centre so much on one's credibility.

However, there is possibly no call upon the expertise of a Christian politologue to assist in judgment upon such matters.

This week youth and education have been in debate.

I was shaken rather than shocked not so much by what I heard the politicians say as much as by the attitude taken up by at least one of the three or four 'experts' on education who intervened.

He actually claimed that only he and his like were entitled to decide upon the controverted issue. I could hardly believe my ears when I heard a self-styled 'democrat' so loudly dismiss the entitlement of the law-makers and the parents to have a say on a crucial schooling matter.

Not even the opinion of the teachers' union seemed to be of the slightest concern to this educationalist. I happen to belong to the breed myself.

It saddens me all the more when colleagues behave as if there were some value-neutral 'science' of education, and that therefore educational issues could be settled by simply adopting rather than adapting models from other cultures. Worse still, although I am not saying this about the current case, there are self-styled educational scientists for whom children are like guinea pigs or laboratory mice.

It is regrettable that education issues, like foreign relations, continue to be fought over in party politics, but it is good that there should be debate about such matters in which everybody, particularly parents, take active part.

The bad turn is taken when an educational project is launched not in the context of a general cultural and non-partisan debate but as a battlehorse equipped and mounted in the context of an electoral campaign.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Nicole Bugeja.