Labour MEP Alfred Sant has said that the homily by Gozo Bishop Anton Teuma against the “empty” jobs that a number of people “enjoy” was a “brave one.”

The MEP stressed that “the Bishop was right in everything he said.”

MEP Sant also stated that “the Bishop showed double courage: to speak so clearly; and that he said this in Gozo.”

Bishop Teuma in his homily during the feast of Ghajnsielem and had questioned, “how many workers in Gozo are paid for work they don’t do! How many workers go to work for a few hours and then go and do something else!”

The Bishop had also stressed that “this is not work as they wish, it is deception! This breaks one of the walls of our homes, because without knowing it, as parents, if we try to get paid for what we don’t do, we will pass this habit on to our children and spoil the minds and hearts of the little ones.”

He insisted, “I don’t have the right to be paid for what I did by cheating… Don’t tell me: ‘Because our superiors do that.’ That argument does not work! If they do that above us, they do wrong, and we cannot do the same, it is not justified.”

MEP Sant, writing on Facebook remarked that, “what was also interesting in the Bishop’s words was the fact that he dealt with the problem from a moral and not an economic point of view.”

“It is a bad thing in itself to be paid for work that you do not do. But it is also bad because it destroys the sense of values,” the MEP said.

Sant added, “this happens fully at the core of how families live, so that something bad in it is seen, and seen as something natural by all the family members.”

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