Robert Galea is wearing black skinny rolled-up jeans, a pair of black Converse and stripy coloured socks. The sleeves of his black T-shirt fall exactly on his heavily muscled, tattooed biceps.

This Maltese 35-year-old has spent the year performing repeatedly in front of a 50,000-strong audiences around the world.

His young fans jostle to take selfies with him; his concerts are sold out within minutes; he is booked three years in advance and an X-Factor crew flew to his house four years in a row to convince him to take part. Oh, did I mention he’s a priest?

That’s slightly important, as all his singing, tattooing, and gym-busting is related to his vocation. It is his way of bringing people back to the fold of the Roman Catholic Church.

Fr Rob, from Ibraġġ, got his calling at the age of 21. At the time he had a girlfriend for four years, but when abroad, he saw a priest performing at a concert who had “this great energy of spreading love around him”.

It got him thinking and “eventually my girlfriend and I decided to break up.”

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How did you know that it was your calling, I ask. “Well, you don’t know for sure. I mean how do people know that they married the right person? All I know is that I am very happy as a priest,” he says.

At 23, after he completed his first degree, he entered the seminary in Tal-Virtù. A year later it was time for the compulsory gap year which all seminarians must undertake before they pursue their studies.

“I opted to go to university in Melbourne. It was a conscious choice because I wanted to be far away from Malta for that year.”

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In Australia, he ended up singing in front of Pope Benedict XVI during his meeting with youths and his act was a great hit.

“By the end of my gap year, I was being constantly asked by the diocese to stay on and finish my studies there instead of returning to Malta.” He refused and came back.

However, his superiors here – the then Archbishop Paul Cremona and Monsignor Anton Gouder – encouraged him to head back. “It was not easy because I had no family, no relatives, nothing,” he says. But 12 years on, he is still there: technically he belongs to the Maltese diocese but is on loan to the diocese of Sandhurst as a missionary.

In his first year there, he used to go to church to “a mass of white hair”. Church-goers were all at least five decades older than him. “There were no young or middle-aged people anywhere,” he says.

I go as someone who is in love with God and wants to share that love with others

So he devised a plan to go and reach out to young people: he wrote music for clubs and then went knocking on club doors. His music soon was in demand. Next, he set up a band and started recording music. Then he set up this outreach movement called ‘Stronger Youth’ which is now one of Australia’s largest youth ministries.

Today he ministers about 300,000 young people in a year. He travels, in Australia or around the world for about three days a week to address crowds, sometimes as big as half a million – he gets 800 invitations every year for these kinds of events.

This week, for example, he will be heading to Canada where he will be giving a keynote speech to 50,000 students and 10,000 adults and then sing some songs. Income from these events, he hastily clarifies, goes back entirely to the youth ministry. Like all other priests he simply gets a stipend “which is less than half the minimum wage in Malta”.

The rest of the week he spends at his parish, where apart from saying Mass, and administering weddings and funerals he reaches out by “hanging out in bars, singing in pubs, going to prisons”.

He has made it his mission to talk to young people who have never heard the gospel. He talks a lot about his love of God and Jesus. “I go as someone who is in love with God and wants to share that love with others,” he says a number of times.

But I bet those teens in the crowds fancy him quite a bit. I don’t know of any priest in Malta who has tattoos (or those muscles come to that – although he wouldn’t flex them for our photographer), I tell him. He brushes this off.

“In Australia no one comments about tattoos and gym – there’s bishops, even cardinals, who go to the gym every day. It’s only here that people are confused [by my look],” he said. Daily exercise is discipline and meditation, he says. In fact, the first thing he does when he lands in a new country is to put on his shoes “and go for a run”.

His tattoos, in case you’re wondering, are religious. The one on his left arm says ‘Forgiven’; the one on his right is a biblical quote from Romans 10, about the importance of evangelisation.

And he doesn’t wear a collar because it’s bad news in Australia. “I was attacked three times because of it – shouted at, spat at and mugged. Sadly the collar has become synonymous with child abuse cases.”

He trailed off, frowning, angry and frustrated at the priests who abused their role and “took away people’s hope and destroyed lives”.

“They must get the justice they deserve and even that can never undo what they did to others,” he says.

“We harmed our credibility and our mission and it’s going to take us a long time to trust the Church as a beacon of hope again,” he says, acknowledging that the world is going through a time where it is rejecting the Church’s voice.

 Still, he thinks the Church should keep speaking out, because would Jesus be quiet in the face of injustice? “We still need priests around; we need priests who are real, who are true to themselves.”

He is in Malta because he wants to reach out to the Maltese youngsters. And he is doing that by recording an album with singer Ira Losco, whom he says has been very generous in her collaboration.

“Ira is someone who is loved by the country that I love. She represents the contemporary music scene here,” he says.

One of their songs is about how life can break you into a million pieces “but when our brokenness comes together then we become a work of art”.

His singing even took him to the stage of X-Factor Australia two years ago. He sailed through the auditions but stopped just before the finals and the signing of contracts. He pulled out, he says, to “protect my ministry, my vocation and my heart”. 

He didn’t want any compromising dancers behind him while he’s singing and he couldn’t be busier than he already is.

So what’s in the pipeline?

“I just want to make God famous … Who knows I might contest the Eurovision one day,” he jokes.

Or maybe he’s only half-joking. Now that would be the ultimate outreach method to get all the Maltese people back in the fold.