The past week will surely remain etched in your memory because of the loss of two dear although very different friends. First there was Mario Felice. How did his death affect you?

Even among those who remember him as a past master of quick fire repartee in our Parliament, only a few know the part he played in the reconstitution of the University after 1987.

His help was invaluable in the process of changing the University from an institution with no earned income into one which earned a significant proportion of the funds needed for its development through its own efforts not only in the way of selling courses both of a special kind to a local market and to foreign students but also from sponsorships, project management, efficient running of restaurants, residences, fish farms and many other commercial enterprises.

Perhaps even more importantly he was one of those very rare people who succeeded in breaking the bureaucratic monotony of most sessions of the University Council with his maverick mind. He had brought about the premature end of the political career that he had begun brilliantly precisely because of his love of detours off the beaten track without warning to any party boss. In the same style, he was also capable of gestures of eccentric generosity.

The question that he has left almost like a legacy in my mind is: Must we conclude that the party political system that has become established in Malta leaves no more room for an individual who conforms to no set pattern of behaviour to be able to survive for more than a decade?

Your second loss was that of Cesare Catania, who was 20 years younger than Felice. Did that loss occur wholly unexpectedly?

I suspect I was the last person to have a conversation with him. He had accompanied me, as he had been doing almost every year around Christmas time, both in Milan and in Malta, to the circus with a few other friends of different ages.

Usually people with my kind of religious conviction have to struggle in order to try to re-achieve in their adulthood the childlike attitude prescribed by the Gospel. But Cesare appeared never to have lost it in spite of life-long academic study and many painful experiences.

Even on practically the eve of his death, he was entertained by both the trapeze and the clown performances at the circus with a simple spontaneity that I could not help feeling contrasted with my own second-order kind of enjoyment of the acts not in themselves but as suggestive of a transcendent meaning.

This apparently perennial freshness of attitude as well as of complexion in Cesare was at the same time the cause of both much of his suffering and also of the communication of joy and provocation of laughter that he was able to give in almost any circumstances whatever.

He was looking very eagerly forward to the publication in the coming days rather than weeks of two books. The first deals with the politico-religious question at the centre of which there was Lord Strickland. He had been revising his doctoral thesis on the subject as new documents became available. The recent possibility of access to the relevant Vatican archives enabled him to throw new light on the two versions of Mgr Robinson’s report.

The second book was of poems in Italian with Maltese translations, in which images of incidents of his everyday experience are transfused into almost surrealist dimensions. Cesare had published a novel called It-Tarf which dealt mainly with the politico-religious question in which Dom Mintoff was the protagonist, but the two new works are likely to confer upon their author a different status.

He had also written several chapters of another novel inspired by his 35 years of life in Milan. I hope that this unfinished opus will also be published and will keep alive the kindliest core of Cesare’s heritage.

In many ways, for instance in politics, Felice and Catania belonged to opposite camps. Was it easy for you to be a close friend of both?

Both of them always refused to allow themselves to be enclosed into tribal cages that segregated people from each other.

Their style, as everyone could see, was as different as arctic from tropical climate. Felice deployed a rapier-sharp wit sparking of more words per second than anyone else I knew. Cesare spoke almost with phlegm and mimicry that went well beyond simian capabilities.

You were kept with an ironic smile playing about your lips when listening to Felice; you held your guffawing sides when Cesare put on his farceur cap. But both performances came from the extreme ends of the gamut of techniques of laughter provocation. In both cases, some stupidity was highlighted, but in a way that somehow put pleasure in the place of pain.

It was all too easy to get a superficial impression from either of them that they were flippant, sometimes even to the point of cynicism but when the critical moments came in which the depths of their soul was allowed to emerge, although never exhibitionistically because both were fiercely protective of their privacy, then you could see that they were both innately Christians – in the sense of the word in which it means fully human.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.