Does everyone remember how two years ago this month, a group of 60-something physics professors managed improbably to prevent Benedict XVI from addressing the opening of the academic year at Rome's La Sapienza University?
Entirely on the basis of an extremely prejudiced and manifestly ignorant objection to a statement on Galileo that they attributed to him from something they misread in a Wikipedia entry, for God's sake! Though Cardinal Ratzinger was merely quoting a 20th-century philosopher of science, and the speech they were quoting from was actually, in part, a defense of Galileo. The worst irony - and the height of the bigoted professors' ignominy and ignorance - is that the cardinal had delivered that speech in La Sapienza itself some time in the early 1990s!
One must ask just how and why this group of 60-odd maneged to impose their patently minority opinion on the university officials, because they all belonged to just one faculty out of 30 faculties in a university which has more than 2000 professors and 145,000 students (largest university in Europe)! I find that the university officials who caved in to the protestors were just as dastardly!
La Sapienza invites the Pope again
Translated from
January 22, 2010
ROME - Two years ago, the 'great rejection' by La Sapienza University to a visit by Benedict XVI. Yesterday, a new invitation from the rector, Luigi Frati, for a visit some time soon, extended through the Holy Father's Vicar in Rome, Cardinal Agostino Vallini.
The Cardinal listened with a smile, and after a Mass celebrated at the University Chapel, spoke to journalists about it.
"Of course, the decision is not mine, but I know that the Holy Father, as a pastor, loves Rome and all its entities. When he receives the invitation, he will evaluate it".
On January 17, 2008, Papa Ratzinger had been scheduled to give an address at the university - founded by Pope Boniface VIII in 1303, it became a public university in 1870 after Italian reunification - at rites to open the academic year.
But he decided to cancel the visit for security reasons, after those who protested his visit enlisted labor unions and other leftist elements to join them on campus to protest the Pope's presence. The Pope decided that not going would avoid clashes between protestors and police that could also involve innocent bystanders.
Cardinal Vallini recalled: "The speech that the Pope had prepared for the occasion was a speech on the role of the Papacy with respect to the university that could only unite everyone, as the words of the Pope do."
[The Pope sent a copy of the speech to the university on the day he was supposed to deliver it and it was read at the ceremony. The rector at the time (not Frati) had already capitulated to the protestors earlier by 'downgrading' the Pope's participation in order not to make him the main speaker, inviting the mayor of Rome to speak as well, and one of the professors to deliver the main address. That seemed to me insulting - and weak-hearted - enough on the part of the rector! The media of course thrived on the controversy and, as usual, gave full play to the protestors' objections.]
In his remarks greeting Cardinal Vallini before the Mass to inaugurate a new gate and public square in front of the University Chapel, rector Frati invited the Pope "to come to this chapel and say Mass and then meet with our researchers and students in the Aula Magna".
But the same troublemakers will make trouble again - nitwits so bigoted they betray the very function of a university and so arrogant as to challenge the right of a Pope to speak wherever he is invited.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/01/2010 12:48]