Sixty-one years ago today, the young Peter Serracino Inglott (1936-2012) was ordained priest by Giovanni Battista Montini, Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, soon to become Pope Paul VI. Had he still been alive, Fr Peter’s priesthood would have today reached pensionable age. Rather than mothballing this particular vocation, however, it’s worth looking at how Fr Peter lived it.

Fr Peter’s political adversaries liked to describe him snarkily as a priest-politician, meaning he was really a politician in disguise. His clerical critics liked to whisper that he wasn’t orthodox, meaning he was unsound and too ‘liberal’. And certainly many lay people found him to be quite an unusual priest, meaning he defied their expectations of what a priest should look and sound like.

What is striking, however, is that despite these views, and his formal titles, he was universally known as Fr Peter – in a country where inflation of honorific titles runs rampant. His core identity as priest seemed self-evident to everyone, even though his way of living his vocation challenged people to rethink what a priest could be.

Both his identity and the unusual way he lived it have their roots in his early life. By the time he was five, he was clearly attracted to the priesthood. Raised in Gozo during the war, his mother took her children to every village feast (except, for some reason he didn’t know, Nadur). After the war, he grew up in Valletta, in St Paul’s parish, and continued to attend its feast to the end of his life.

Fr Peter loved popular religious culture. Unlike many of his fellow priests, he didn’t see it as unredeemed paganism, something to avoid. But neither did he take a folkloristic attitude, praising it as an antique to be preserved.

He was interested in the innovative energies of culture. He was interested in anything that made people come fully to life. That perspective came more easily to him thanks to his studies in philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford. Then, in Paris and Milan, he studied under some of the key theologians who would shape Vatican Council II.

For someone who never doubted his vocation, he had several changes of mind about how he should live it. As a seminarian, he considered joining the Little Brothers of Jesus, inspired by Charles de Foucauld, not all of whom are priests, and who are dedicated particularly to service to the poor.

In the mid-1950s, he also gave serious thought to pursuing a life of dialogue with workers and communists, in a country such as Poland.

In Milan (1960-63), he lived in a mixed community of Christian artists, the Scuola Beato Angelico. It was mixed in two senses: laity cohabited with clerics, and men with women. He later set up a branch in Malta, and lived with two women in a religious community for five years, developing materials for the (then) new liturgy using innovative technologies. After five years, he bitterly had to come to terms with the project’s failure.

For someone who never doubted his vocation, he had several changes of mind about how he should live it- Ranier Fsadni

In mid-life, he thought that perhaps he should have become a Benedictine monk, with the aim of setting up a male branch of the order in Malta, whose vocation would be to develop a theological aesthetics appropriate to the country’s culture.

Despite the shifts, there’s a consistency. Fr Peter was deeply interested in both aesthetics and politics, in beauty and policy. His published writings on aesthetics dwarf his many writings on politics. It’s an unusual combination, which is perhaps why he changed his mind about how best to pursue both.

But, for a priest (as for Marxists), it’s a comprehensible combination of contemplation and action, of having a vision of what makes human beings fully alive and then seeking the practical means to allow people to enjoy liberty and emancipation.

Every French seminarian of Fr Peter’s generation was familiar with the 1936 novel by Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest, where the protagonist asserts that each priest finds his vocation in a particular episode of Christ’s life. Fr Peter, citing Bernanos, identified with the Transfiguration, the episode where Christ’s energy shines through every pore.

He was an energetic promoter of all the arts, a catalyst for post-Independence poets, painters, architects, composers, and so on. In the arts, he found intimations of profound communication between the deep past and the sprouting future of humanity, the alpha and the omega of the cosmos.

Like St Paul, one of his heroes, he resented being called unorthodox and enjoyed working with enterprising women. He was known as a ‘liberal’ priest but he never argued for changing the articles of faith; only for reforming (or ditching) the outdated clerical apparatus that administered them.

Where revelation was silent, he applied reason and listened to what accumulated human experience had to say. No encounter was wasted. A homily was as likely to draw a lesson from being attacked by a hippo in Africa as it was from a conversation with Greek shepherds in their mountain shack.

He was acutely aware that the crisis of the priesthood was linked to the eroding meanings of fatherhood and manhood in contemporary society. The increasingly familiar figures of the ineffectual, hand-wringing priest, sheltered from the world, and the bullish cleric harking back to pre-Vatican II splendour, were the result of a deeper social crisis that had yet to come to terms with the ideal of radical equality between fathers and sons, men and women.

To the end of his life, he himself continued to be sought at all hours by people from all walks of life. They would talk and pour out their dreams and troubles and leave more clear-headed, having found, in his steady-eyed attention, the silence they needed to find their own original voice.