This Wednesday marks the 10th anniversary of the passing of Peter Serracino Inglott (April 26, 1936 – March 16, 2012). Priest, philosophy professor, university rector, cultural guru, adviser to prime ministers and ordinary people – and, for the last five years of his life, a Sunday Times columnist.
Here is a selection from those columns to remind us of his unique voice and continuing relevance.
On humanity
In order to understand what it is like to be a human being, it is the meaning of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ that should be explored.
A human being always dies because of mistakes that have been committed at and since the origin of the species.
On himself as priest and public intellectual
I have probably always been fonder of donkeys than horses because they do not move so fast.
I have myself for many years argued against a certain type of Crucifix that is very gory and pretentiously naturalistic not only in relation to children but to its Christian meaning… The Crucifixes I admire are rather the Byzantine type that display the suffering but show it transfigured into glory, as also happens in, say, those by Anton Inglott or by the young artist Austin Camilleri…
Theresa of Lisieux considered the Transfiguration to be the feast of the Holy Face to which she was so devoted. Pope Benedict frequently urges us to follow “the Way of Beauty” to God and that is my commitment.
Young Peter, with his sister, Miriam, dressed for carnival. Fr Peter loved popular feasts all his life. Photo courtesy of Stephen Serracino Inglott[There are] those who ask, for instance, what is Fr Peter, a priest, doing participating in a programme on the privatisation of the shipyards? They have an ultra-shamanic concept of the priest, as if his function were purely magical, outside the networks of human conviviality.
My perspective is not normally that of engagement in the struggle for power between political parties or other interest groups… My central concern is today [2010], as it has always been, to help work out in a totally undogmatic and hypothetical way the political implications in our context of the Christ-Event, which concretely can be summed up in the motto: Keep Left!
A party’s function is to keep the grassroots in touch with the leadership… It should not be taken over by technocrats- Ranier Fsadni
My perspective has never been to recommend strategies that are vote-catching by appealing to a wider range of selfish group interests. It has rather been that of drawing attention to those left-wing thinkers who are setting out up-to-date, non-utopian visions of a radically more egalitarian society on both a world and local scale.
On politics
George Steiner said that entering politics today (2008) is like joining a nudist camp. You have to pander to the voyeuristic instinct in everybody.
A party’s function is to keep the grassroots in touch with the leadership… It should not be taken over by technocrats.
For me, the saddest aspect of recent Maltese politics is that a leader apparently believes so strongly that everything is possible through PR.
The political processes of dialogue and democracy that respect the dignity of the human person take much more time than either the free market or central planning. Humanist politics, in particular Christian Democracy, require that much time be spent in negotiation, consultation, compromise-reaching or, better still, all-win solutions than zero-sum games.
Recent history has continued to show that the alternative systems that give absolute weight to economics are self-destructive precisely because a lack of total human and social fulfilment is bound to produce their political collapse in the end.
On constitutional reform
If it were up to me we would switch to a presidential system, we would set up a second chamber [he had in mind a Senate whose members are elected to represent the long-term perspectives of different social and cultural groups], we would change the Commission for the Administration of Justice because it is evidently not working… I find it surprising that we haven’t seriously thought of tackling it so far (2011).
On irregular migration from Africa (2009)
The PN, on the whole, seems more interested in preventing erosion of its vote from the Right. The PL does not appear to be even concerned about the components of a genuinely Left politics.
On heaven and hell
Heaven is being in a position where you can regard human existence, within the world of which we have experience, as a joke or, more precisely as a laughing matter.
Hell is a shorthand term to indicate a condition in which one desires extinction – fading into nothingness like the snuffing out of a candle – without being able to obtain it.
Our future body is as unpredictable as an oak tree by someone who has just seized an acorn. There will be some continuity with our present body, ‘the soul’, but not the same type of sexual activity. Love is eternal.
There will be a celebration of Fr Peter’s life on Thursday, March 17, at 6.30pm at Tarxien, at the church dedicated to the Risen Christ (aka All Souls, Ta’ l-Erwieħ Kollha). Mass presided over by Archbishop Charles J. Scicluna will be followed by a laying of flowers on Fr Peter’s grave and a selection of readings from his works. There will also be a symposium on Wednesday, March 16, at 7.30pm at the Archbishop's Seminary library in Rabat.