Archbishop Charles Scicluna on Monday focused on hope in the homily he delivered on the occasion of the feast of St Paul.

The Maltese people, he said, are a people of good heart. They welcomed St Paul and the passengers of the ship he was on, showing what humanity meant.

St Paul was on a ship on his way to Rome but the ship he was on was shipwrecked in a storm, and he and others ended up on Malta, where they found inhabitants ready to help. Malta becoming a Catholic country is accredited to St Paul's short stay.

"I pose this question to the Malta of today, to each and every one of us," the Archbishop said. "What are we going to do? We who met with the Lord because Paul introduced us to him? What will we do with our lives, with our culture, our country?"

There's another question that comes to mind, given the circumstances of St Paul's visit. Would we, as a nation, welcome St Paul and given him shelter in the way our ancestors did, if he had to arrive today?

The Archbishop, in his own way, gave us an answer. "May it be that we do not lose the original decency of the first inhabitants of this island," he told the congregation last Monday.

It's probable that many of us have already lost the "original decency" that the Archbishop was referring to in his homily. When, for several years, migrants used to end up close to our shores, many times in distress after crossing from North Africa in the hope of a better future, our reaction was, at best, indifferent. Even the country's authorities, at times, did not react well or reacted late.

Tragedies have occurred. Many migrants died and continue to die as they use flimsy boats in their hope to reach what, for them, would be the promised land and a new beginning. And the truth is that many of us do not really care.

And it's not only towards migrants who arrive by boat that oftentimes we show lack of respect and offer little dignity. We are not always at the ready to accept people with a different culture and a different religion in our midst.

We have seen this happening in the last 10 years or so during which the population of the country has risen sharply as a result of thousands of foreigners being brought over to serve our economy. We hardly realise it but without them Malta's economy would collapse. Yet we - many Maltese and Gozitans - do not treat them kindly, and see them as just an added burden to our infrastructure and traffic woes.

It is true that it works both ways - people coming over to live in Malta should be doing their best to integrate themselves in the new society they live in. But it is also true that many Maltese and Gozitans do not make it easy for them either.

Religious matters aside, it is likely that Malta would not be so welcoming to St Paul as our ancestors were two millennia ago. And that's a shame.