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Pope Cancels Speech To Italian University After Protests By Scientists

By Howard Friedman

In Italy yesterday, protests by scientists and students at Rome's La Sapienza University led Pope Benedict XVI to cancel his planned speech there. It would have been his first speech at a university. Yesterday's Globe and Mail reports that the protesters believe that the Pope is hostile to scientific thought and secular issues. They especially criticize a speech he made in 1990 defending the Church's historic persecution of Galileo because he argued that the Earth revolved around the sun. Prime Minister Romano Prodi criticized both the protesters and the decision to cancel the speech, saying the developments threatened freedom of speech. After the cancellation, the Vatican released the full text of the speech the Pope had planned to deliver. Here are excerpts:

... "La Sapienza" was once the pope's university, but today it is a secular university with that autonomy which, on the basis of its founding principles, has always been part of the nature of the university, which must always be exclusively bound to the authority of the truth. In its freedom from political and ecclesiastical authorities, the university finds its special role ....

In the face of an a-historical form of reason that seeks to construct itself in an exclusively a-historical rationality, the wisdom of humanity as such?the wisdom of the great religious traditions?should be viewed as a reality that cannot be cast with impunity into the trash bin of the history of ideas....

... [M]an?s journey can never be said to be over and the danger of falling into inhumanity is never just warded off as we can see in today?s history. The danger faced by the Western world ... is that mankind, given its great knowledge and power, might give up on the question of the truth.

Full post as published by Religion Clause on January 17, 2008 (boomark / email).