Peter Serracino Inglott was born into a family of modest means. His father died young and his mother had to struggle to raise eight children and give them a decent education. For most of his student days, Fr Peter did all sorts of jobs in order to make ends meet.
Right at the beginning of Fr Peter’s first driving lesson, the instructor told him to press the clutch. ‘Where is it?’ he asked. The instructor decided to call off the lesson- Joe Friggieri
As a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics, he distinguished himself in all subjects and won the Chancellor’s Prize for English Prose.
He studied theology in Paris, where he worked in restaurants and slept under bridges, learning most of his French from waiters and down-and-outs.
He received his Doctorate in Philosophy from the Catholic University of Milan and was ordained priest in 1962 by Cardinal Montini, who later became Pope Paul VI. He considered the day of his ordination as the happiest day of his life.
He started teaching philosophy at the University in 1964 and became head of department six years later. In a very short time, he transformed the teaching of the subject, widening its programme to cover the whole of its history, the variety of its traditions and the full range of its problems and concerns.
As a result of this change, graduates of the department would feel equally at home in both spheres in which the world of contemporary philosophy was divided, the analytic Anglo-American school on one hand, and the continental on the other. His way of doing philosophy would cut across the great divide.
At the same time, the students who followed Fr Peter’s own teaching of metaphysics in particular could not fail to appreciate that his way of dealing with contemporary problems, whether they had Heidegger or Quine as their source, was inspired by his deep and detailed knowledge of Aristotle and Aquinas.
As a young priest, Fr Peter was one of the driving forces behind the movement which led the Church in Malta to reform itself and come to terms with the sweeping social changes which Maltese society was forced to face in the wake of independence.
As cultural promoter and critic, he not only encouraged Maltese artists and writers to develop modern styles and techniques but also wrote and lectured incessantly in an attempt to induce a rather reluctant public, and an even more reluctant establishment, to become more receptive, or at least less hostile, to their work.
As national chaplain of the Young Christian Workers Movement, he helped raise public and political awareness on a number of social problems and was himself instrumental in bringing about the required reforms, playing an active role in the drafting of the relevant legislation.
On the international scene, Fr Peter inspired or supported most of Malta’s initiatives for peace and the rational use of the world’s resources. He promoted the principle of the common heritage of mankind, formulated by Arvid Pardo, which dramatically transformed international law and led to the proposal of a charter of the Rights of Future Generations.
During Fr Peter’s rectorship, under his guidance and inspired by his vision, the University of Malta became a ‘multiversity’ geared towards the country’s needs, offering a much more varied range of courses at all levels, and making it possible for thousands of students to enjoy the benefits of tertiary education.
Fr Peter claimed that his early vocation and strongest desire when young was to become a circus clown. In addition to his achievement, his warmth, his generosity, and his amazing capacity for work, Fr Peter had a wonderful sense of humour.
He derived great delight from recounting the bizarre things that happened to him – real-life anecdotes involving tigers, hippopotami, bishops, cardinals, politicians, lost keys, missed flights, jackets left behind in hotel rooms, and a series of brushes with the law.
I have heard him tell the following story several times. Right at the beginning of his first driving lesson, the instructor told him to press the clutch. “Where is it?” Fr Peter asked. The instructor could hardly believe his ears and decided to call off the lesson, thinking it was rather dangerous to teach a philosopher how to drive.
On a more serious level, Fr Peter’s homilies, collected in Tal-Għaxra u Nofs l-Erwieħ, bring out his interest in God as a farceur and the stories of creation and salvation as analogous to circus clown skits.
Fr Peter was an outstanding and original thinker, whose intelligence and breadth of vision mark his scholarly achievements as witnessed by his wide range of publications in the arts, cultural history, politics, international relations, philosophy and theology.
I know of very few who could write so elegantly and so well on subjects as varied as Marx, Machiavelli and Mahatma Gandhi, Freud, Teilhard and Marshall McLuhan, Rembrandt and the Beato Angelico, Leonardo Sciascia and Thomas Pynchon, Gilgamesh and the Odyssey, Maltese prehistory and contemporary social problems, aesthetics and the liturgy, structuralism and secularisation, poetry, music and architecture.
In remembering Fr Peter, we are showing our gratitude and expressing our thanks for what he has done not only for the Church and the University, which he so generously served, but also for the country, which has benefitted so much from his wisdom and hard work.