Canon Len Black of St Michael and All Angels Scottish Episcopal Church in Abban Street, Inverness is on an ecumenical errand of mercy with a difference to help a fellow priest on Malta.

Father Black, an IT expert, has agreed to solve a computer problem for Father Paul Bonnici, formerly a monk at Fort Augustus Abbey and priest at the tiny Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception in Stratherrick near Inverness, who has gone home for a time for family reasons.

“Father Paul is so dependent on his PC for communicating with his friends and the Church authorities that he was tearing his hair out when a major glitch meant that he could no longer send or receive his e-mails,” said Father Black.

“We have been good friends for a number of years through a shared interest in local radio, and we are still producing radio programmes together when the opportunity arises. We will be making several together while I am on the island, including Christmas in Malta and the Feast of St Paul’s Shipwreck, which is a major celebration every year.”

He keeps in regular touch with Father Paul, whose Scottish parish is in Shetland, through Internet phone calls, but recently they had to revert to more expensive telephone calls because of his computer problem.

“The answer was to go over to Malta and sort it out on the spot. As I was going to London anyway on church business and, with the advent of cheap flights making Malta more accessible, the logical answer was to hop over on a plane, see an old friend and help him out,” he added.

“It might seem strange to be going all the way to Malta to fix a computer, but Father Paul has been a very good friend over the years and I am very much looking forward to seeing him again and experiencing Malta through the eyes of someone who was born and brought up there,” Canon Black told the Inverness Courier.