Fr. Peter Serracino Inglott | A rebel in the establishment

Without doubt, Fr Peter was intellectually left-wing: a firm believer in workers' participation and a pioneer of the common heritage concept which he lately applied to question intellectual property rights in the digital age.

At the same time, he was one of the architects of the PN's transformation into a party, which as Guido de Marco aptly put it (quoting Italian post-war leader De Gasperi), stood at the centre but looked towards the left.

Fr Peter surely helped in inspiring the party's fundamental principles.

In an interview published on MaltaToday in 2001, Fr Peter recalled how in the mid 1970s, together with a team of others, he published a manifesto to push the idea of worker participation, welfare, an all-inclusive society and the common good of the community on a monthly paper that used to be called 'Illum'.

"The Nationalist Party then adopted that manifesto as part of its policy."

He also inspired a generation of Nationalist politicians like Louis Galea, who gave the party a more social orientation by advocating the notion of a welfare society which kept many aspects of Mintoff's welfare state while seeking to personalise services.  

What is sure is that Serracino Inglott who is known to have administrated the sacraments to interdicted Labourites in the 1960s was turned off by Mintoff's anti-intellectualism, his reverence for an industrial model based on cheap labour and his authoritarianism.

Serracino Inglott even inspired some of the most radical but never implemented proposals made by the PN before 1987, like the free doctor of your choice scheme, through which the State would have subsidised family doctors to provide their services to their clients for free.

Unlike most intellectuals, Serracino Inglott did not shy away from direct political involvement, serving as a close advisor of Eddie Fenech Adami, who was probably more conservative on moral issues than the priest who advised him.

This curious aspect of the relationship between the more traditionally-minded Nationalist patriarch and his more secular advisor came across very clearly in Fr Peter's observations on the parliamentary vote on divorce.

He observed that for Fenech Adami, "human beings belong to a zoological species in which when a male and a female form a couple, it is for life (as with a class of pigeons, and unlike cats and other species)".

But according to Fr Peter, a Catholic politician may well think "it may be thought right not to forbid divorce in order to avoid that cohabitation becomes rife".

At the end of the day, while defending Fenech Adami from the charge of being anti-democratic by upholding the right of MPs to vote against the will of the majority on divorce, he seemed to suggest that in the same way Gonzi would have had no problem with conscience had he voted for divorce.

"It seems to me unfair to both to accuse Fenech Adami of being unfaithful to his democratic principles as it would be to accuse Lawrence Gonzi of being unfaithful to his moral principles were he to decide to vote in favour."

What is sure is that when advocating Christian Democracy, Fr Peter was more concerned about concepts like pluralism, social justice, subsidiarity and the welfare society than with bans on contraception, IVF or divorce.

Fr Peter strongly hinted that the Papal encyclical 'Humanae Vitae' was questionable; on IVF he presented a strong case against those who seek to ban any embryo freezing on the false premise that a zygote is a human person.

He also opposed the government's plan to entrench the ban on abortion in the Constitution, arguing that this showed a lack of confidence in the democratic process.

Still, despite his highly unorthodox views, Fr Peter never fell out (at least publicly) with the Church hierarchy. 

One reason for this could be his sheer intellectual prowess, which would have rendered any attempt to tame him ridiculous. Perhaps he was too big for the small fry running the local Church. Moreover, his thinking was always rooted in liberal but still orthodox and deeply rooted Christian traditions, which made him immune to attacks from conservatives.

As a skilful acrobat, although he threaded on dangerous ground, he never crossed the lines. 

He even towed the official line with a sense of deep conviction by presenting arguments in favour of the inclusion of a reference to Christianity in the aborted European Constitution.

In fact, Fr Peter's greatest contradiction may well have been his ability to cross the lines by harbouring anti-establishment thoughts while being an integral part of a post-1987 establishment.

As University rector he presided over the entry of thousands of students.

He also presided over a system of benevolent patronage, which cultivated the rise of new stars in the political system like former PN secretary general Joe Saliba, whom he encouraged to pursue a course in Theatre Studies at the University of Malta while he was a construction worker.

As advisor to Fenech Adami, he did not always have it his way. For example, he recently revealed that his (and Josef Bonnici's) advice to adopt the euro, as a parallel currency before EU membership, was not heeded. But the relationship was marked by deep mutual respect.

He was more vocal in his criticisms of the Gonzi administration,  of which he was not a part even if it was reported that he played a part in advising the party before the 2008 election - especially as regards the 'green' transformation of the party,  and the ditching of unsustainable projects like golf courses.

Surely, since then, his criticism has become more biting; questioning the decision not to roof the Renzo Piano Theatre and even hinting a sense of ideological disenchantment with the drift to the right. Recently, he also lashed at the national curriculum, lamenting the loss of school autonomy, during an AZAD meeting.

He certainly questioned the identification of the PN with the more neo- liberal orientation of the European People's Party, which he described as being more right than centre-right.

"The increased relative majority obtained by the Popular Party cannot be considered to be a victory of Christian Democracy.

"Even my life-long friend, Guido de Marco, who is above any suspicion of being a Marxist, defined his position on the political spectrum as being centre-left. The dominant group in the Popular Party is now rather more right than centre-right".

Still, he never warmed up to the Labour Party.

The motivation of his "post-election blues" (after the MEP elections in 2009) was "the loss of the elections by the left" adding that "the local victory by the Labour Party certainly cannot be considered an exception to the general trend", a remark which hints that he regarded Joseph Muscat's party as more right wing than left wing. 

However, he did not shy away from giving free advice to Joseph Muscat.

"The economic plans that I would expect him (Muscat) to be proclaiming at the present moment could not be spun out of impossible ways in which Malta could flourish economically while the rest of the world is undergoing the fierce pains of the agony of free market capitalism.

"They would have to be our proposals to Europe and the world for remedies as radical as the problem that needs to be faced."

His solution was a departure - on a global scale - from the policies, which led to the public debt crisis, namely "the Reagan-Thatcher all-privatising right wing revolution, pursued ever since then by such politicians whose aim was getting voted into power rather than beliefs in definite policies as Blair, Berlusconi and Sarkozy".

As a result of this, the economy slipped entirely out of the hands of public authority into those of speculative financiers.

"This take-over inevitably led to the drying up of really productive investment."

But the rebel priest still envisioned a "radical alternative that has happily emerged on the horizon" - in the form of a knowledge society organised on a wholly participatory basis.

A key to this utopia is greater access to knowledge in the digital age and the advent of what Fr Peter called "digital man". 

In 2008, long before people were debating the dangers posed by ACTA, Fr Peter was questioning attempts by producers of cultural goods to keep controlling access to their products in the same way as before digitalisation came in by technical means, through the emergence of Digital Rights Management Systems.

"But these systems proved both to be increasingly foiled by the technical ingenuity of system breakers and also to alienate public sympathy."

Instead, Fr Peter contended that digitalisation has opened "vast new spaces for the application of the belief that certain resources should,  by nature, not be subjected to any property regime, but treated as goods from which everyone is entitled to benefit". 

For Fr Peter this is the same belief which had inspired the Maltese proposal that the resources of the deep-sea bed should be declared common heritage of mankind. 

The application of this belief to knowledge - at least in some of its forms - is plainly of much greater significance in the 'knowledge society' that has been born, and is clearly destined to global growth. 

Fr Peter’s pearls of wisdom:

On Mintoff

‘The great pity is that I have always had a great deal of sympathy with Mintoff’s ideas. It was his manner of implementing them that I always thought was wrong…” – August 2001

On internet restrictions

“Digitalisation has opened vast new spaces for the application of the belief that certain resources should by nature not be subjected to any property regime but treated as goods from which everyone is entitled to benefit.” – November 2008

On the contraceptives Church ban

“There is no doubt that the faithful have not accepted the encyclical Humanae Vitae and that teaching is very questionable.” – April 2010

On entrenching abortion ban in Constitution

“The only point of entrenchment seems to be to ensure that a future government will not be able to introduce abortion easily. This is a lack of confidence in the democratic process. Our President, who has really deeply-rooted democratic convictions, used to say as Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition that he has trust in the people. If one has this kind of trust, then one should not seek to establish principles like abortion through constitutional amendments or such means. Trying to entrench it is a bad sign because it seems as if one wants to use means of compulsion when these things should rest on conviction.”

On voting for divorce

“Divorce should be permitted if it is scientifically proved that society is better off with it than without it… On this basis, even a Catholic politician can vote in favour.” – July 2010

On the post-referendum divorce vote

“It seems to me unfair both to accuse Fenech Adami of being unfaithful to his democratic principles as it would be to accuse Lawrence Gonzi of being unfaithful to his moral principles were he to decide to vote Yes.”

On the European Popular Party

“The increased relative majority obtained by the Popular Party cannot be considered to be a victory of Christian Democracy. Even my life-long friend Guido de Marco, who is above any suspicion of being a Marxist, defined his position on the political spectrum as being centre-left. The dominant group in the Popular Party is now rather more right than centre-right”. – June 2008