It is a measure of Aldo Maria Valli's disenchantment with Pope Francis that instead of focusing his reportage on this pope's visit to a Rome university yesterday, Valli devotes the major part of this post to recalling a visit Benedict XVI was prohibited from making to another Roman state university in 2008. And the account he makes of the papal visit yesterday could not be less flattering by comparison...
Two popes, two universities,
two different climates
And a sensational revelation about the truth
behind the protest against Benedict XVI in 2008
Translated from
February 17, 2017
Pope Francis’s visit today to the University of Rome-III, in an atmosphere of festivity and great affection, took me back to a very different occasion.
As many may recall, in January 2008, Pope Benedict XVI was invited to give an address at the La Sapienza (Wisdom) University of Rome. Scheduled for January 17, it was cancelled the day before.
He had been invited by the then rector of the university, Renato Guarini, with the assent of the academic Senate, to address the university at the openign of its academic year. Guarini said who said he was very happy to welcome the Bishop of Rome, as the university had welcomed Paul VI in 1964 and John Paul II in 2002.
But some professors protested Benedict XVI’s visit, first with a letter published in
Manifesto [the organ of the Italian Communist Party] and signed by Prof. Marcello Fini, and then with a letter signed by members of the university’s Faculty of Physics (of which Fini was chairman) (to be precise, by 77 professors out of a total 4500 members of the university faculty).
This letter was also signed by some 700 Italian and foreign professors from other Roman universities.
[I am learning this for the first time, despite the multiple items I saw and posted about this episode during that unfortunate time. What business did these other protestors have to say anything about this at all???? It was obviously ideological. The crowds mobilized at La Sapienza on the day of the cancelled address were professional demonstrators bussed into Rome by the labor unions…
And by the way, the reason given for the professors’ protest was what today would be called ‘fake news’ – an erroneous report picked up uncritically and unscientifically by the physics professors from Wikipedia about a speech given by Cardinal Ratzinger in 1990, not in Parma, as Wikipedia had it, but at La Sapienza itself, claiming that the cardinal had said he condoned the 1633 trial and conviction of Galileo for heresy. It was with some irony that I discovered tonight that the best account of this willful ideological mistake by the physics professors was written in 2008 by Andrea Tornielli – and I shall post that account after this.]
In the letter, academics -- pointing to a speech the pope gave at the same university as a cardinal in 1990 -- claimed he condones the 1633 trial and conviction of the scientist Galileo for heresy.
The case caught fire on January 10 when
La Repubblica published the protest letter. In such a climate of controversy, Benedict XVI communicated his decision not to go to La Sapienza in order to avoid fueling a fire that threatened serious security consequences not just for the students of La Sapienza but for the protestors who had been mobilized.
[Italy’s Interior Ministry advised the Vatican that the situation was touchy and better to stay clear of it.]
On the eve of the scheduled address, there were student protests at La Sapienza that culminated with their occupation of the academic Senate and Rectorate offices.
[See, even these university students simply took the professors’ erroneous letter as gospel truth when they could have checked the facts directly themselves – by consulting the archives of La Sapienza for the text of Cardinal Ratzinger’s address.]
I experienced those days as a newsman, interviewing the professors and students who were protesting the visit of Benedict XVI, starting with Prof. Cini (who died in 2012 at the age of 89) whom I interviewed in his home. Thus I was able to touch at first hand
the mixture of prejudice, ideological furor, and I am sorry to say, of ignorance which led to the protests and the cancellation of the visit.
To justify the demand to prohibit Benedict XVI from speaking at La Sapienza, the protesters cited a distorted account of the Regensburg Lecture and reported wrongly on his 1990 address at La Sapienza.
The whole episode - recounted in a book, (
«Sapienza e libertà. Come e perché papa Ratzinger non parlò all’Università di Roma» (WisdoM and freedom: How and why Papa Ratzinger did not speak at the University of Rome), written by newsman Pier Luigi De Lauro, and published by Donzelli), was very sad all around.
The Bishop of Rome was kept from addressing the largest and most important university in his diocese, a university founded by a pope, Boniface VIII. Even if Rector Guarini, who must be credited for this, later had the Pope’s undelivered address read at the academic ceremony, it was a sadly missed opportunity, a loss for everyone. In that ugly story, the Italian mass media played a decisive role. It was largely they who fomented the students to protest and to amplify the controversy.
The first to admit it now is Gianluca Senatore, who was then the leader of the student protests. He says today that the opposition of Cini and his colleagues was not really out of concern to defend the secularity of the university as an institution, but
their fear of having to contend with a theologian-pope who seriously questioned the claim of the natural and empirical sciences to possess absolute knowledge.
Senatore also admits that at the time, he had read nothing that Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI had written, but that afterwards, when he sought to familiarize himself with it, he discovered many points of contact between the concerns of Cini and Ratzinger – for example, regarding the terrible tendencies taken on by science and technology since the second half of the 20th century,
U&nfortunately, Senatore says,
intolerance won out, but for him at least, there was a positive effect: He began to study Ratzinger seriously and came to the conclusion, which he confirms today, that
the German pope represented one of the highest moments in the cultural tradition of the Church.
But what would Benedict XVI have said if he had been allowed to speak? One cannot recall a text by him that is as humble in its form as it is elevated in its content – a contribution which deserves to be remembered, if only to show how unfounded were the fears of his opponents, but also to demonstrate the refinement of that pope.
[I always maintained in the PAPA RATZINGER FORUM that the Sapienza address should be ranked with his four better-known addresses to the secular world (Regensburg, Paris, London and Berlin.]
It began this way: “It is a profound joy for me to meet the community of La Sapienza Unviversity fo Rome on the occasion of the inauguration of your academic year. For centuries, this university has marked the way and the life of the City of Rome, enabling the fruition of the best intellectual energies in every field of knowledge”.
The Church, he underscored, had always looked “with sympathy and admiration at this university center, recognizing its commitment – often arduous and demanding – to research and to the formation of the new generations”.
Then reaffirming the absolute autonomy of any university, and asking himself what could a pope say to a state university located in his diocese, addressed two questions:
“What is the nature and mission of the papacy? And what is the nature and mission of a university?”
To the first question, Benedict XVI answered that certainly,
a pope “should not seek to impose the faith on others in an authoritarian manner, because faith can only be bestowed in freedom” But beyond the pope’s pastoral ministry, it is nevertheless his task, he said, “to keep alive the sensitivity for truth’ and ‘to always invite reason to be employed in the quest for truth, for goodness, for God”.
And here, he did not shirk from reaffirming the ‘patrimony of wisdom’ of which the community of believers is the repository, being the custodians of “a treasury of knowledge and ethical experiences which are important for all of mankind”.
In short, he explained, conceding that this was a point of provocation,
“the wisdom of the great religious traditions must be valued as a reality that cannot just be tossed with impunity into the dustbin of the history of ideas”.
As for the second question, this was his answer:
“I think we can say that the true intimate origin of the university is in that thirst for knowledge that is inherently human. Man wants to know what it is that surrounds him. He wants the truth… Man wants to know... But the truth is something more than knowing: the objective of knowledge of the truth is knowledge of goodness. This is also the sense of the Socratic self-questioning: What is that good that makes us true?”
As we can see, on the part of Benedict XVI, there was no invasion of other’s territory, no presumption, On the contrary, this was a profound contribution from a man, a professor, a theologian, who was always sincere in expressing his own opinions (always in the light of truth), and frank in calling on others to meditate that we would do well to question ourselves on the great questions that concern all men, believer or not, and which must especially concern those who live in a university which is a sanctuary of knowledge.
But that man, that professor, that theologian, that pope, was barred from entering a university by an act of Jacobin prevarication.
Now, the fact that another pope, Francis, was invited by another state university in Rome, Roma-III, where not only was he able to speak but was also received with great sympathy and affection, can only be welcomed by all those who believe in the free confrontation of ideas.
But there is a certain bitter aftertaste in that
this pope, responding to some student questions, never touched any of the great issues about truth and the relationship between reason and faith. In effect, Francis chose to speak not as a pope, not as a bishop, not as a religious but as a sociologist and economist [neither of which he is!]
He answered questions on youth unemployment, on immigration, on globalization. He also called on his audience to seek unity, safeguarding differences but not uniformity. Important things, of course. But it was striking that
not once did he mention God or faith in a speech he chose to deliver off-the cuff, by answering questions from the audience, and discarding a prepared text.
It is true that in the prepared text, there is a beautiful passage in which he says: “I profess myself Christian, and the transcendence to which I am open and which I look upon has a name: Jesus. I am convinced thathis Gospel is a force for true personal and social renewal. In saying this, I am not proposing illusions to you nor philosophical and theological theories, nor do I want to proselytize. I speak of a Person
who came to encounter me when I was more or less your age, who opened horizons to me and changed my life”.
It is also true that the written texts will be in the university’s official archives, Nonetheless, in his direct encounter with the students, and therefore, in all the news reports of the event, there are no references to transcendence and to Jesus.
It would be foolish to think that the pope censored himself. And surely, in choosing to discard his written text, he simply wished to be closer to his audience and to better demonsrate to them, with greater emotional intensity, his participation in their problems and concerns.
But I am also convinced that the professors and students at Rome-III would have applauded him if he had made any reference to religious experience.
Nonetheless,
observing the praise and sympathy demonstrated for Francis, and thinking back on the prohibition of Benedict XVI in 2008, it is difficult not to think that a man of faith, even if he is the pope himself, is more appreciated today in public discourse when he avoids the question of God and truth, that is, when the pope is not too much a pope, and not too Catholic.
Here's the lookback to 2008 - from my January 14, 2008 post in PAPA RATZINGER FORUM/NEWS ABOUT BENEDICT:
Those scientists who would censor the Pope
without having read him at all
by Andrea Tornielli
Translated from
Jan. 14, 2008
Some student organizations at La Sapienza have decided to greet the Pope with, among other things, a '
frocessione' (a procession 'venerating' homosexuals - '
frocci' in Italian), and starting today to Thursday, will 'prepare' the university with anti-clerical demonstrations to make known how unwelcome this illustrious visitor is. To them.
But the
most disturbing aspect of the protests against the Pope's visit to the university is not in these pre-announced student demonstrations - though they always pose a threat to public order - but in their ideological motivators, a group of 63 professors, said to be mostly physicists.
These professors, in the past few days, have vented their bile against Benedict XVI - frantically signalling Stop! to the Pope's visit - in the pages of
La Repubblica.
They claim that Benedict XVI, as Cardinal Ratzinger, is 'guilty' of having advocated in a lecture given on March 15, 1990, the words of scientific philosopher Paul Feyerabend that the Church hearings against Galileo had been 'just and reasonable'.
Those words, claim these 63 scientists, are 'offensive and humiliating' to science and therefore demand that the Pope should not be allowed to come to La Sapienza.
One might suppose that these scientists are capable of reading that March 1990 lecture first, of looking up the entire text, and to check out what Cardinal Ratzinger actually said and the context in which he said it. Alas, one would be wrong.
It appears
the scientists have based their militant stand on a citation they found in Wikipedia which they uncritically - and most unscientifically - picked up because it would attribute 'obscurantist' thinking to the future Pope.
Who, in fact, had expressed the opposite position, distancing himself from some modern rethinking about the Galileo case, and certainly not adapting it as his.
Regensburg once again! even if this time, the distortion comes after 18 years.
Readers of this newspaper can judge for themselves, from the excerpt of Ratzinger's lecture published herewith. Particularly, the words of the cardinal - who was a university professor for a quarter century and no stranger to dialog and confrontation with scientists and philosophers - in concluding the citations he gave, among them Feyerabend's:
"It would be absurd to construct on the basis of these statements a hurried apologetics [on the Galileo case]. Faith does not grow out of resentment and rejection of rationality, but from its fundamental affirmation and inscription in a much greater reasonableness."
The words of the persons he cited were obviously
not Ratzinger's, who precisely said
it would be 'absurd' to use them in order to claim that the Church was right in the Galileo case, and who reiterated that faith does not grow by rejecting rationality.
This is the person for whom the faith-reason relationship and the reasonableness of the Christian faith have become the identifying pillars of his Pontificate.
And yet, it isn't as if that 1990 Ratzinger text has remained unpublished and unavailable to newsmen, least of all to any researcher. It was published in Italy in 1992 in a book of writings by the Cardinal about the crisis of Europe.
And the protest letter of the 63 scientists is shown up to be a hardly-edifying example of 'scientific method'!
That protest, however, already gained something: The Pope will not be giving the
lectio magistralis to mark this academic year opening - his speech has been labelled merely another 'intervention' [following 'interventions' by the Minister of Universities and by the mayor of Rome].
[NB: 'Intervention' in the European sense simply means participation in a program, usually by speaking.]
Here is a translation of the excerpt published by Il Giornale today:
WHAT CARDINAL RATZINGER
SAID ABOUT THE GALILEO CASE
From a lecture at the
University of La Sapienza, Rome
March 15, 1990
In the past decade, the resistance of nature to manipulation by man has emerged as a new element in the overall cultural landscape. The question about the limits to science and the criteria to which it must be held has become inevitable.
Particularly significant in this change of intellectual climate, it seems to me, is a different way of looking today at the case of Galileo.
This event, which was considered hardly worthy of attention in the 17th century, was elevated to myth during the Enlightenment of the next century. Galileo was seen as the victim of the 'medieval obscurantism which persists in the Church'.
Good and evil were separated by a clearcut line. On the one hand, the Inquisition - as the power which incarnated superstition, the enemy of freedom and of knowledge. On the other, natural science, represented by Galileo - here was the force for progress and for human liberation from the chains of ignorance which kept man impotent before the forces of nature. The star of Modernity now shone over the dark night of the Middle Ages.
According to Ernst Bloch, the heliocentric system [the sun as the center of the universe, as Galileo believed], as well as the geocentric system [the earth as the center], were both based on undemonstrable premises. Among these, principally the premise of the existence of absolute space - something which was later refuted by the theory of relativity.
Curiously, it was Bloch himself, with his romantic Marxism, who was one of the very first in our time to contradict the Enlightenment myth, offering a new interpretation of what happened [with Galileo].
Bloch represents just one of the modern concepts of natural science. But the judgment he draws from it is surprising:
"Once the relativity of motion was accepted as certain, the ancient human and Christian reference system has no right whatsoever to interfere in astronomical calculations and their heliocentric simplifications. Nevertheless, it has the right to remain faithful to its own concept of the earth in relation to human dignity,and to conceive of the earth in terms of what has happened and will happen in this world itself."
If in Bloch's statement, two spheres of knowledge are still clearly differentiated with respect to their methodology - recognizing the limits as well as the rights for both - the synthetic [summarizing] judgment of the agnostic-skeptical philosopher Paul Feyerabend appears much more drastic.
He wrote: "The Church in the time of Galileo held to reason more than Galileo himself, by taking into consideration the ethical and social consequences as well of Galileo's doctrine. Its verdict on Galileo was rational and just, and only reasons of political opportunism would legitimize changing it."
From the viewpoint of the concrete consequences of Galileo's revolutionary thought, C. F. von Weizsacker went one step further, seeing the 'straightest line' leading from Galileo to the atomic bomb.
It would be absurd to construct on the basis of such statements a hurried apologetics [of the Church's action with respect to Galileo]. Faith does not grow out of resentment and rejection of rationality, but from its fundamental affirmation and inscription in a much greater reasonableness.
With this, I wanted to illustrate an emblematic case which proves to what point modernity's doubts about itself now involve even science and technology.
From «Svolta per l’Europa? Chiesa e modernità nell’Europa dei rivolgimenti», Edizioni Paoline, Roma 1992, pp. 76-79.
And now, a word from one of the dissenters, translated here from from La Stampa today. The arrogance and self-blinding stupidity are stunningly pathetic:
"There is no place for the Pope
among men of science"
By FLAVIA AMABILE
Translated from
January 14, 2008
There were 10 of them - some of Italy's most authoritative contemporary names in physics. They met that day in November to write down clearly and unequivocally that the presence of Benedict XVI at their university was objectionable.
Two months later, that letter has led to a wave of protest with an Anti-Clerical Week that starts today at the University of La
Sapienza - four days of films, meetings and social gatherings which will culminate Thursday when Pope Benedict XVI will visit the university for the inauguration of the academic year.
"The first version of the letter was much harsher. We have since softened it," says Andrea Frova, one of the 10 original great minds
[the reporter actually uses the term 'grandi menti'] motivated by the belief that the Pope on this occasion is 'out of place', in the letter they sent to the university rector, Renato Guarini.
Frova, 71, a lecturer on general physics, and a lifelong scholar on Galileo, says he had absolutely no doubt on what to do:
"We felt humiliated and offended [that the he university should have invited the Pope]. This is a Pope who has turned us back by four centuries."
He claims that the Church's 'rehabilitation' of Galileo under John Paul II was simply an operation of political opportunism.
"For persons like us who have dedicated our life to Galileo and to science, it is unacceptable to even think that the Pope could enter our world, our sphere of activity," he said.
The first version of the letter was circulated among other professors, out of which emerged the second 'softer' version.
"Much softer," Frova said. "But many chose to agree with having the Pope here, starting with our friend Veltroni
[the mayor of Rome, who is a professor at La Sapienza?] But the second letter was signed by 67 professors and was sent on to the rector.
[What does it say that only 67 out of more than 5,000 professors signed the letter - something the reporter does not mention?]
Thus, professor Frova and a handful of other eminent physicists and scientists find themselves at the head of an anti-clerical protest organized by some student organizations and gay movements. Including marches on Thursday which they have called '
frocessione' and speeches accompanied by loud music which they call an 'attack of sound'.
Not to mention the political byplay from all this. One deputy has called for possible charges of 'instigating violence'.
"We did nothing to feed all this," Prova claims. "We sent our letter through internal channels to the rector.
We told him we expected the visit to be cancelled in order to avoid any dust-up. Instead, the rector chose a cosmetic compromise.
Originally, the Pope was supposed to give the
lectio magistralis, but Guarini decided to give that honor to one of the university professors and just have the Pope deliver a regular address. It doesn't change anything as far as we are concerned, but at the same time, we only intended our letter to be an internal question, and it should have remained so."
[But that is so disingenuous! The Pope's lectio magistralis was announced by the university in November to take place December 13, and then one week later, it had to announce a postponement and gave the reason for the postponement. What other reason could it have given? That the Pope would be indisposed? A university does not just postpone the formal inauguration of its academic year arbitrarily!]
But who invited the Pope to begin with? Prova says, "As far as I know, it was first intended to be simply a visit to the chapel of the University which had been recently restored. Then there appeared to have been pressure from the Vatican for a more official nature, and so the rector invited him to inaugurate the academic year." [
Initial reports about this said Guarini had extended an invitation to the Pope for such a lectio magistralis shortly after the Conclave of 2005, and evidently, this happened to be the occasion convenient to both sides.]
"However," Frova continued, "we maintain that it is offensive to our dignity that in this university, someone should set foot who had reiterated in a speech Feyerabend's unacceptable statement that the Church proceedings against Galileo had been 'reasonable and just'. [A statement completely based on mis-reporting about a speech of Cardinal Ratzinger in Wikipedia. The whole pretext for the outrage and protests was FALSE.
Not only have these supposedly 'great minds' of science condemned the Pope of obscurantism and hostility to science on the basis of one statement that was not even his own - but they have obviously failed, nor even bothered, to read anything else that Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has written and said about science constantly and consistently all these decades.
They may not even be aware of the fact that he is so far ahead of them that his annual Schuelerkreise has discussed evolution two years in a row - and come out with a book that reflects the state of knowledge and discussion today about evolution, which impacts on all the natural sciences!
But why hasn't one Italian scientist come out so far to write or say something in public to set the record straight about this Pope?
