• Message by Auxiliary Bishop Joseph Galea-Curmi

  • The Archbishop’s Curia, Floriana
    17th June 2019

    Your Eminence,
    Dear media professionals and guests,

    It is a great pleasure for me to welcome you to Malta, and in a special way to the Archbishop’s Curia, for this important conference on media and communication. From this building, we strive to be of service to all and to reach out to the needy and most vulnerable through the 70 parishes and various entities of the Archdiocese of Malta.

    The Archdiocese is present in various realities on our island: it employs 1,500 people in almost 100 entities (and if you add all Church entities it would be around 5,000 people), it educates 17,000 students in 60 schools, it provides residence to 400 immigrants and refugees, 300 elderly citizens, 115 persons with a disability, and 80 children in various homes, not to mention those who sleep in our emergency shelters, those who reside in centres for victims of domestic violence and those individuals who follow residential programmes for drug-related abuse to mention a few.

    As you will appreciate and understand, communication is crucial in our mission, not only internally but also with society at large to bring hope to those facing hardships and to share the positive experiences, or as you would call them ‘human stories’, which we encounter on a day-to-day basis. I am not here to teach you but rather to learn from you on how to be authentic, truthful and how to build human communities through the media, as His Holiness Pope Francis himself invited us to do in his message for this year’s World Communications Day which we celebrated just over two weeks ago.

    To conclude, in an age in which the most essential principles and foundations of life are challenged, and Malta is no exception, I exhort you as Catholic media professionals to work together to be beacons of light in Europe, to support life from conception to natural death, and to cherish life with love as Christ himself has shown us. To quote the words of Pope Francis “truth is revealed in communion”. I wish you a fruitful conference and an enjoyable albeit short stay in Malta.

    ✠ Joseph Galea-Curmi
       Auxiliary Bishop of Malta

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