Fr Borg was reacting to a statement issued by the Archbishop’s Curia yesterday afternoon in which the archbishop said he was not giving his blessing to Fr Borg’s appointment.

The archbishop explained that he had come to know of the appointment through the media, adding that Fr Borg did not seek his permission before accepting the role.

The statement carried on saying that the archbishop could not accept that a priest accepted a post of this nature because it went against the Church’s directives which state that: “Clerics are to shun completely everything that is unbecoming to their state, in accordance with the provisions of particular law. Clerics are to avoid whatever is foreign to their state, even when it is not unseemly. Clerics are forbidden to assume public office whenever it means sharing in the exercise of civil power.”

Fr Borg told this newspaper that he understood the spirit in which the decision was taken and was convinced that the Archbishop, in turn, understood his motivations, following a long meeting between the two yesterday.

He said that the years of work he had conducted with the Church’s media, under instructions from the Archbishop, will be of great help to him in his new work. “This is because”, he added “the work I will be carrying out is in substance the same as that I used to do for RTK and PBS in the last three years, in which I was guided by a sense of social justice and Catholic teachings, he added.”