01/06/2026
https://timesofmalta.com/article/dialogue-human-dignity-religious-freedom.1129315
THE FOLLOWING IS MY INITIAL RESPONSE TO THE ABOVE OPINION ARTICLE. IT HAS ALLOWED ME TIME FOR SOME REFLECTION:
Fundamental rights must be respected precisely because they are fundamental. However, as often happens in left-leaning camps, these must not be inflated into a political language by which every demand, every demographic transformation, every labour-market convenience, and every claim for permanent social accommodation is removed from democratic judgment and placed beyond the national interest.
Religious freedom is real. Human dignity is real. Dialogue is valuable. But none of these creates an automatic right to settle permanently in Malta, to transform its demographic future, or to redefine the historic character of the Maltese nation. Religious freedom must be respected for all persons present in Malta; it does not follow that Malta has no right to decide who may enter and who may remain.
This is the point which is too often avoided. A narrow question about individual rights is answered as though it exhausts the whole matter, while the larger national question is pushed aside. Yet the national question is precisely the question that cannot be evaded: whether the Maltese people have the right to preserve Malta as their national homeland, and whether our laws, economy, citizenship policy and migration policy must be ordered toward that end.
The Maltese are not merely an administrative population managed by permits, employment contracts and market demand. They are a historic people, rooted in a particular land, languages, faith, memory, custom, law, family continuity and civilisational inheritance. Malta is not simply a platform for economic activity. It is the homeland of the Maltese people: small, already extremely densely populated, and entitled to order its future according to the survival and flourishing of the Maltese people. That fact is not sentimental rhetoric; it is the foundation of any serious politics worthy of the name.
The real question, therefore, cannot be avoided. Do the Maltese have the right to preserve Malta as their national homeland? Do they have the right to decide the scale, character and permanence of immigration? Do they have the right to protect their languages in ordinary social life on their own islands? Do they have the right to real social cohesion, rather than an imposed imitation of it? Do they have the right to preserve their religious inheritance, their cultural continuity, real and affordable housing capacity for fruitful Maltese families, sustainable infrastructure, labour conditions worthy of a Christian and European people, and their demographic future as a Maltese nation?
If the answer to any of the above is no, then the language of rights is being used against the nation itself. It becomes a means by which the Maltese people are morally disarmed while decisions of historic consequence are made over their heads. That is not justice. That is not Catholic social doctrine. That is not human dignity rightly understood. It is the reduction of a national people to an economic unit and of its country to an administrative space subjugated by liberal individualism and globalism.
If the answer is yes, then it must be said plainly: the Maltese people have the right to national continuity. They have the right to preserve a Malta which truly and strongly is and feels Maltese, not Babylonian. They have the right to maintain a political order in which citizenship is not treated as a freely disposable certificate, but as a solemn bond of inheritance borne of Maltese generations, national inheritance, duty and belonging.
Present citizenship laws are not sacred. They are political instruments and may be changed. A nation has every right to ask whether its laws still serve the common good, whether they protect the continuity of the people, and whether they distinguish properly between temporary residence, economic usefulness and full membership in the national community. Citizenship should not be reduced to paperwork granted by a liberal, materialistic and anti-national establishment. It should be rooted in real loyalty to Malta, respect for true and proper Maltese culture, acceptance of the country’s spiritual and historical inheritance, and a genuine commitment to the long-term survival of the Maltese nation as such, not merely of any population inhabiting the islands.
Nor should Malta accept an economic model that engenders dependency on foreign labour and calls it progress. It is not progress, it hardly speaks of Labour, it speaks of capitalism of the worst sort. When an economy relies on continuous foreign labour to sustain inflated growth, suppress wages, strain infrastructure, crowd housing, and weaken social cohesion, it is not serving human dignity. It is building a hierarchy in which the Maltese are encouraged to imagine themselves socially mobile while others are imported to occupy the lower rungs of a shameful and socially dangerous system. That is not fraternity. It is not justice. It is not true development. It is a caste-like economic arrangement dressed up in the language of inclusion. However, the harsh truth is that this economic model depends on an unfairly exploited mass of foreign labour. Without that low-wage dependency, it would be economically unsustainable; and if wages and conditions were made genuinely decent, the argument for importing such labour would collapse, since Malta would either attract workers from within the European Union or be forced to abandon a model built on cheapness, overcrowding and demographic distortion. In the end, therefore, the model is economically false, socially dangerous and nationally unsustainable if any genuine national interest is to be respected by our political class.
Any foreigner who sincerely respects Malta should understand this, for many of them are being used as tools in the machine, and there's little real human dignity to be seen.
Also, allow me to interject a premise and idea here: The authors seek to claim that many foreigners are decent, substantially law-abiding and honest, while possibly a lot of them claim and do love Malta. I am sorry, that is the beyond my points here, and is actually irrelevant and is another device to evade the actual questions of revelance. The only relevance for such arguments is that they confirm that if a foreigner does not act in the manner I described in this paragraph, then he should be first in line to be deported, punto e basta.
Let's return to the central questions now: A country that loves itself rightly does not hate the foreigner. However, if it has dignity, it will not dissolve itself for the convenience of employers, parties, bureaucrats, developers, ideologues or international fashions. To respect Malta is to respect the right of the Maltese people to remain themselves in their own islands.
This is the distinction that must be restored. Human dignity does not abolish the nation. Religious freedom does not abolish borders. Dialogue does not abolish national democratic self-government. Inclusion does not abolish limits. Catholic social teaching does not command a people to surrender its homeland to a market-driven demographic experiment.
Christ, true God and true man, is the cornerstone and true beacon for the dignity of every human person. The same moral order that commands justice toward persons also commands justice toward families, communities, peoples and nations. Malta has obligations, and all Maltese have duties toward all those present in Malta. However, the Republic of Malta also has a prior duty toward the Maltese nation, its own children, its own future, and the generations of Maltese who have not yet been born.
Therefore: Malta belongs, in the first place, to the Maltese people. Its laws, economy, citizenship policy and migration policy must be reordered toward the survival and flourishing of the Maltese nation. Anything else is not progress. It is the gradual dispossession of a people through administrative language, economic dependency and at times moral intimidation.
The point is not that genuine rights should be denied. The point is that genuine rights must not be used as instruments by which the Maltese people are expected to accept their own displacement in silence. For many of us, the transformation of Malta has already gone far beyond what is reasonable, and it is only worsening. The wounds are real. Opinion articles such as the below do not heal them; they throw more salt into them.
Nor should improper expression by some be used to delegitimise the substantial national concern. Crude expression should not be endorsed. But neither should it be exploited as an excuse to silence those who are substantially right about the danger facing Malta. Really and truly, the authors of the article below miss the point of those expressing genuine and respectful concerns — and even of others whose manner of expression may be wrong, but whose underlying concern cannot simply be dismissed.
Dialogue is welcome. Human dignity is real. Religious freedom must be respected. But none of these can be used to deny the Maltese people their right to remain a historic nation in its own homeland, to govern its own future, and to place national continuity above the ideological and economic interests of those who would transform Malta beyond recognition.
Allow me to recall a poignant quote from Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas:
"Indeed, the promotion of the common good can never be separated from respect for the right of peoples to exist, to preserve their own identity and to contribute their unique qualities to the family of nations. [84] Moreover, any attempt or plan to eliminate or subjugate a nation is gravely immoral and therefore unacceptable."
What many do, and with respect I would include the foreign authors of the article below, is ignore the substantial content of the above paragraph and use the former lofty principles in a manipulative manner to assert a foreign presence which, if entrenched, distorts our Maltese living in the Maltese islands. We are Maltese. We see the situation in Malta. Our politics must be based on our prudential judgments, reflecting our national realities.
The Pope speaks to all of humanity, and rightly so the same encyclical speaks of fundamental rights, human dignity, social justice, religious freedom, dialogue et cetera. But these principles are not opposed to the quoted paragraph above. They must be read together. Catholic social doctrine does not set the dignity of persons against the rights of peoples, nor does it set religious freedom against the right of a nation to preserve its own identity and future.
Indeed, what the real establishment is foisting on the Maltese nation seems nothing short of a factual attempt to subjugate the Maltese nation: politically through moral intimidation, demographically through mass dependency, economically through a labour model indirectly inimical to the demographic flourishing of Maltese families, culturally through the weakening of national continuity, and socially through the normalisation of Malta as a mere administrative space rather than the homeland of the Maltese people. It is a politically left-wing, yet vehemently capitalistic, anti-national vision of society. Allow me to state that this is hardly exclusively the Government's fault, for business operators and solely self-interested individuals are the main drivers of this, while the Opposition is timid where it should oppose the strongest, smaller parties are even worse if not inimical to the nation or essentially electorally unsustainable, and much of civil society is either replete with organisations that directly or indirectly encourage this status quo or do not care or fail to express themselves as they should in on a reasonably grounded national interest.
We understand that it is hard, but we are here to contain this drift in our people and of our people, so as to retain Malta for the Maltese nation, in full respect of the genuine fundamental rights of all.
avv. Edric Micallef Figallo
President - M.A.S.
P.S. Also, allow me to point out that in this response I have given the benefit of the doubt, and avoided exposing real issues of Islamification affecting many European nations — and God forbid that they should ever affect Malta. I am not saying that the authors of the opinion piece below are in favour of Islamification, but suspicion is not unreasonable when one considers the possible end result of their worldview. I am sure there are many concerned Maltese about this: some vociferous and questionable, many others silent but rightly concerned, others overly tolerant because perhaps their tribal party still says it is acceptable, and still others who have no care for the national interest and believe their politics will thrive through imposed social engineering and possibly chaos. For now, I reserve my position thereon, and I believe others are more in the know to provide material on this. However, I am pretty sure that in most European nations now negatively affected, it all started with “dialogue”, “respect”, “tolerance”, “inclusion” and the like. No, Islamification as a socio-cultural process in Europe is wrong and is not about religious freedom, and we do not merely have a right to oppose it, but a duty.
Muslims in Malta have for many years contributed positively and peacefully to the country’s social, economic and cultural life
