Author Daniel Massa.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott, left, smoking a pipe and discussing logistics with Joe Boffa during voluntary service in Italy in 1967.

It is hard to pin down Peter Serracino Inglott with a one-word description as journalists like to do.

A philosopher, he is also a priest, a political strategist, a would-be clown and – in the words of Prof. Massa – “an adept sniffer of paradoxes”.

Fr Peter’s life is characterised by complex thought processes, intellectual dialogue and spiritual reflection that are grounded in a practical way of doing things.

From his attempt to set up a lay community, an institute, in his hometown of Tarxien with Gemma Cachia to addressing UN meetings on the importance of safeguarding the rights of future generations, to his unstinting efforts at transforming the University of Malta and controversial contributions on divorce and embryo freezing, Fr Peter’s life was anything but that of a cooped-up intellectual.

Now, Fr Peter’s extraordinary life, thoughts and adventures are documented in a 900-page book by his contemporary Prof. Massa.

In his foreword, Prof. Massa says the hundreds of hours of intimate face-to-face interviews with Fr Peter, friends and people who knew the priest, allowed him to embark on a “veritable journey of discovery”.

From the first chapter that leaves the reader crying with laughter over Fr Peter’s misadventure when first setting foot in a French seminary – he arrived very late when everyone was sleeping and twice had to wake up the rector – to the last that prompts tears of sorrow over his gradual death at the hands of a degenerative disease that ate away at his brilliant brain, the book is a collection of paradoxes.

And like a musical masterpiece, it ends with a coda in the form of a dialogue between the author and Fr Peter on the existence of God and the search for Holiness.

PSI: Kingmaker, right, is authored and published by professor Daniel Massa and printed at Progress Press. It will be on sale at all leading bookshops from Tuesday.