The man with the stick and the other man with the underwater-birthing pool will probably denounce it as foreign interference and more grist to the mill of the invading Africans. But Katrine Camilleri was deservedly honoured by the United Nations’ refugee agency, the UNHCR. The newspapers here are dominated by the voices of the inhumane, the ignorant and the barbaric, and of those who lack any form of imaginative empathy. There are even academics who write newspaper columns and describe those who, like me, clamour for tolerance and humaneness as “pro-immigration”. They suggest, stupidly or disingenuously, that our active aim is to increase the level of immigration, when what we are speaking about is the need to treat the new arrivals, who have had a terribly rough time, with dignity and respect.

Meanwhile, Dr Camilleri and those who work with her at the Jesuit Refugee Service toil away quietly behind the scenes, out of view of the camera lenses and the reporters’ notebooks, trying their best to help put broken lives together in some shape or form. They do this while the self-proclaimed “believers”, who see themselves as fighting in the vanguard to protect our Catholic Maltese identity, write to the newspapers to urge the government to fight off the invaders, let them drown, send them on their way, or repatriate them to God alone knows what hell.

The man with the underwater-birthing pool has even suggested ignoring the norms of international law and brushing off our legal obligations towards those who are in distress at sea. The raison d’etre of the Frontex patrol was misunderstood by many – to my great astonishment – as a protective shield to ward off incursion. When the operation was called off, officials spoke about its success in terms of the number of lives saved, rather than the number of immigrants prevented from reaching Malta, and readers of the newspapers were surprised. They had imagined – because this was how the jingoistic elements of the government had sold it to them – that Frontex was a force put in motion to protect Malta from nasty boat-people, rather than an operation designed to help the Maltese Armed Forces in the thankless task of rescuing leaking boatloads of people in distress.

Enclosed in their narrow-minded little bubble, like the petty burghers of a small provincial town in Switzerland – where, incidentally, the problems of xenophobia, close-mindedness and racism are as great as they are in Malta – they cannot see that somebody who is prepared to cross the Sahara with small children in tow, then the Mediterranean in a leaky craft, with the ever-present risk of death, does not do so on a whim or for the pleasure of eating hamburgers in Europe.

Dr Camilleri’s receipt of the supremely prestigious Nansen Award is one in the eye for those politicians, in the government and the opposition, who feel the need to satisfy the blood-frenzy of the good burghers of Malta and the popolin, by posturing as heroic knights who are staving off the nasty blacks. The Justice and Home Affairs Minister has put a zip on it for now. Perhaps his parish priest took him aside and reminded him about the least of his brothers. But conditions at the immigrant concentration camps – an accurate, dictionary-defined use of the word, and nothing to do with the Nazi death-camps of World War II – remain atrocious. They are atrocious not just for those who are held prisoner there without trial, but also for those who have to manage the situation on a daily basis. They, at least, have the comfort of their freedom.

There will be no Nansen Award for Tonio Borg – of that, at least, we can be certain.

* * *

You don’t have to be religious to care about what happens to others. I am not the least bit religious – never was, and never will be, because I am not the “road to Damascus” type – and yet I care a great deal. It distresses me enormously. I do what I can by writing about it, in the hope that a few people may come to see the situation in a different light, and stop thinking of other human beings as animals. Though it has exposed me to a great deal of violence, vitriol and spitting hatred and rage – never have I seen people’s faces twist in such an ugly way as when they speak to me about this subject – I still believe that mine is by far the easier role to play. Those who are working in the camps, trying to help as best they can, harried and tripped up every step of the way, have taken on a burden that only some exceptional individuals are capable of carrying.

I doubt that many of them – except for the Jesuit members of the Jesuit Refugee Service, of course – are particularly religious or even religious at all. But if you are going to bang on (and on, and on, and on again) about being Catholic, then you might as well remember that your religion is not primarily a set of niggardly rules to which you must adhere if you wish to spend as little time as possible in purgatory. If your aim in life is to please God so that you might spend eternity in a celestial swimming-pool, rather than being tossed over a hot grill by somebody sporting horns, cloven hooves, a forked tail and a trident, you’d be better off throwing away your catechism and starting to care for your fellow human beings.

There are more brownie points to be had from alleviating the suffering of others than there are from taking great pains to ensure that nobody is allowed to divorce, even if they are allowed to separate, which brings all the pain of divorce but none of its comforts. If you are one of those Catholics who see suffering as a cross to bear, then you are probably the sort who expects others to bear their own cross with complacency and fatalistic indifference to the outcome. This is an excuse for selfishness and irresponsibility. This mindset is one of the reasons that the Catholic south of Europe fell so far behind the Protestant north in terms of economic development and welfare.

If you believe in the kind of God that sits around sticking gold stars on his believers’ copy-books, it’s your business. But at least, use some intelligent imagination. If you were God, who would you prefer: the mean of spirit who take great care not to have sex with somebody of their own gender, or somebody to whom they are not married, who go to prayer-meetings and never miss a mass – but who think and speak about the “invaders” as the Nazis did about the Jews? Or somebody in a homosexual relationship who spends much of his time and a lot of his money in helping those whom everyone else seems to hate and fear? Duttrina has a lot to answer for. I consider it dangerous to children’s minds because it locks them into egocentricity. The results are all around us.

* * *

It’s not the first time that I’ve noticed an “in your face” spelling mistake or grammatical error in a government ministry advertisement. When the advertisement has been put out by the Education Ministry, the x’gharukaza factor is scaled up a notch. A newspaper advertisement by the ministry’s “youth section” informed those who might be interested in a boat party earlier this month that “This event is free of charge. Bookings on first come – first served bases. Interested Young People are to contact the Youth Section… etc etc.” Tsk tsk tsk – youth today, eh? Standards in education have really fallen if not even those up at the educational headquarters know that you use capital letters only for proper nouns (proper nouns – what are those?), that no sentence should be without a verb, and that “bases” is the plural of basis or base.