Many have written, over the past days, their testimonies and appreciations of Professor Peter Serracino Inglott and have justly described him as one of the finest minds in Malta of this past half century, a man of a thousand abilities and a hugely keen intellect.
He humbly devoted himself to enriching the minds of many people and his time-consuming efforts were not always appreciated or made the most of by the recipients. Yet, he continued to give of himself, with no sign of ever regretting what he tried to do.
It will only be much later on, when time and distance give a better perception of things, that his real place in contemporary Maltese history can be established. For now, people, even those like me who did not have close relations with him, can best contribute to the appreciation by giving their own tuppenny bit worth on what he meant for them and how he fitted in their lives.
So here goes.
Oliver Friggieri, who like me joined the seminary course and entered the Royal University of Malta just a few days after Independence, has described in his book Fjuri li ma Jinxfux the kind of philosophy course we found in 1964.
He dwells a lot on Professor Mgr Giuseppe Sapiano, known to us all as Il-Karè, a thin, ascetic and abstemious man, the mirror image of Pope Pius XII, who not only taught in Latin but also expressed himself in purely scholastic terms. The philosophy he taught was as unreal as the Latin language he taught in and as unreal as the life he lived as a Monsignor.
Then, after a year I believe, Peter joined the Philosophy faculty. He had come from the Sorbonne and from a life, we now know, that was as distant from Karè’s aseptic one as the sun is distant from the earth.
Oliver’s book, I checked yesterday, does not give great importance to Peter’s impact on us. Maybe it was his way of delivering lectures, maybe we were used to being spoon-fed, maybe the concepts he used were all foreign to us. Maybe, immaturely, we focused more on his forgetfulness and his appearance than the substance of his teaching.
That, I believe, must have been one of Peter’s first disappointments.
Typically, he went to ground. He joined the Young Christian Workers and focused on teaching and instructing a small group of young people and a small core of priests there.
Meanwhile, il-Karè reached retirement age and Peter was appointed in his stead. The faculty was still part of the Theology Department and the vast majority of its students were still seminarians, with a few lay people that included women.
Those were also the years when Peter was active, when Malta proposed the Law of the Sea to the United Nations.
Those were also the years when the university had its first contact with a North American university in Montana and student exchanges began.
The best description of those years, I believe, is that found in Alfred Sant’s Silġ fuq Kemmuna and it is easy to identify one of the priest-teachers described in the book with Peter.
Even here, Sant describes Peter as from a distance, writing more about his outward appearance than about what he was teaching or trying to teach. Basically, the author focuses more on the impact that free and easy students from the US had on convent-educated girls.
In the 1970s, after Dom Mintoff won the 1971 election the Xirka Ġustizzja Soċjali was born. It was more socialist than Mintoff’s brand of government was and in time ended up opposing Mintoff’s government.
Writing in l-orizzont last week, Toni Abela, who formed part of XĠS, wrote about the input given by Peter to those unruly youths in those far-off days. He may have provided the link to students in those post-1968 years in Europe, which opened them to the neo-Marxist writers but I do not think Peter himself was a neo-Marxist.
He was, and remained, an intellectual, difficult to categorise and to label. He was above categories. And he was too well-read to be a disciple of one trend.
But, like the XĠS members, he too was soon swept away by the Mintoff bulldozer at university.
At that point, Peter left Malta. He joined the small Maltese community in Milan, and being always attracted by the concept that beauty and art are synonymous with God, joined the Scuola Beato Angelico in Milan, a religious institution that taught art.
In 1980 I travelled to Milan and spent some days with Peter. Those were the very same days when Carlo Maria Martini became Archbishop of Milan.
I was at that time the president of the priests’ society Christus Rex and my colleagues had suggested I try to persuade Peter that he was more needed in Malta than in Milan.
What I saw at close quarters reinforced this idea. Peter was trying to teach the philosophy of art to students who just did not want to listen. Those were the Anni di piombo in Italy when an entire student generation was taken over by the Left and most of the time was spent in marching around and in protests.
I do not think my argument convinced Peter: as I said, I was not really close to him. Maybe there were more influential voices that proved to be more persuasive. Anyway, after a short while, he returned to Malta.
The rest is history.
Toni Abela makes basically two points about Peter.
One that he was basically a man of the Left but was pushed to the Right by Labour’s ham-fisted approach to reform the university. This was however contrasted by his leader’s appreciation of Peter. In his statement, Dr Muscat said Peter was not of the Labour persuasion.
Toni Abela then says Peter was always like that: a priest but also a philosopher, a man of the Left but also of the Right. As if Peter did not have a clear idea what he stood for and flipped from side to side.
No doubt his family upbringing and the fact he was a priest may have had a bearing on his positioning. But maybe a far more cogent persuader was the simple blocking by the Labour leadership under Dom Mintoff of all those who were not in the Labour tribe. Had the Mintoff government received Peter’s input as the PN did for all those years, would he have withheld his contribution? He found space on the Right because he was blocked off on the Left.
Dr Muscat’s mistaken appreciation of this shows, in my opinion, that he is still has Labour’s tribal mind-frame. People are split into ‘with us’ and ‘against us’. It shows, once again, why PN wins elections and PL loses them.
Peter believed he had a contribution to make and he was given the space to do so. He used this space to contribute all he could to the country, as the numerous appreciations over the past days have shown.
I also believe he too was swept aside in the past months by the Gonzi government, with the eclipse of Louis Galea and Eddie Fenech Adami, his sponsors of the past years. He showed his disappointment in multiple public disagreements over the past months.
Even so, this eminent member of the European Convention, the only priest in that meeting, made some very lay points, as Dr Abela pointed out, in the latest divorce issue, as contrasted by some Cabinet members who were ‘priests’. In his last phase, Peter recovered the independence he had kept under cover in his advising the government at the highest levels.
On thick fingers and other things
The day Censu Tabone died, I received a message from Paul Borg Olivier ‘ordering’ me to be at PN HQ the next day to ‘salute’ Dr Tabone.
I messaged back that I was not a party member.
Minutes later an apologetic Dr Borg Olivier called me. That was all a mistake, he said, because my name on his mobile was just after that of Noel Galea, the Mqabba mayor.
Another case of ‘thick fingers’.
Last week, as readers remember, I was quite critical of Lawrence Gonzi and wondered if Simon Busuttil’s input would be enough to turn a compromised election around.
Around 98 per cent of the article was critical of Dr Gonzi. No one, neither in government nor in my paper, reacted.
On Friday I bumped into him as I waited at the Our Lady of Victories church. He saw me, smiled and came to shake hands.
But last Sunday afternoon, to my great surprise, I received an email from Dr Muscat, which I am reproducing here in its entirety.
“Hi Noel:
“I don’t usually comment on articles.
“Nevertheless, I just wanted to tell you that the following is factually incorrect: ‘The only glimmer of hope I can find for the PN is that for all its 56 per cent and upwards share, the Labour vote does not seem to have included switch-overs. The Labour local council thrashing was obtained by PN abstentions, not defections. Labour is still appealing to its traditional tribal support.’
“I hope GonziPN shares your analysis.”
Don’t say you were not warned. As I had exposed Dr Muscat’s former colleague Joe Mifsud when I felt he had stepped over the thin line that separates the media and party politics, so too it is only fair I do the same today.
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