This is a one-off letter after becoming aware that Mr J. Guillaumier had other pastures besides the Times of Malta and Malta Today. His diabolic mission is universal and I must confess that I am jealous of the alacrity with which he manages to monopolise the correspondence columns in all the English-language newspapers.

He will, of course, continue to vent his spleen, sarcasm and cynical diatribes against anything holy and the Catholic Church, though his arguments are invariably rationally challenged and ultimately pummelled and pulverized. This is as sure as night follows day.

But his letter entitled Catholicism does not need protection (TMIS, 30/8/15) that the Church, if necessary, resorts to persecution and violence is a travesty of the truth and must be rebutted in the strongest terms. Were we living at the time of the Crusades or the Inquisition, he may have been partly justified - although a lot of people have the wrong impression of the extent of the persecution and violence carried out by Christians, whilst the horrific images perpetuated by the Muslims are mutually concealed. Those conflicts, thankfully, occurred in the ancient past.

In 2015 AD, on the other hand, although it is dangerous to be a Christian in some parts of the world, the Church in Africa has grown by 29 per cent, in spite of a 100,000 being killed elsewhere every year. It is, indeed, ingratitude of the highest order for Mr Guillaumier not to recognise and acknowledge the Catholic Church's universal humanitarian, educational, health-care and peaceful missions carried out restoring human dignity to mankind and its suffering as much as possible: a far cry from his imaginary Don Quixotic violence.

I think that Mr Guillaumier is so obsessed in his campaign of smear and ridicule of the Catholic Church that he must have mistaken it for the IS and its horrendous genocide. It is high time for him to abandon his monstrous, spiteful, repeated mantra that the Church had a shred of violence and vendetta in its agenda. Like its master and founder, Jesus Chris, only peace, patience, goodness, love and joy - and certainly no rancour - can emanate from such a peaceful and benevolent institution.

John Azzopardi

Zabbar