NEWS ABOUT BENEDICT

Some excellent commentary today in the Italian MSM on the absurd but very real hostility to the Pope by a dissident minority in Rome's largest and oldest university.

First, this editorial in Corriere della Sera, signed by one of its deputy editors, Pier Luigi Battista, translated here:


Elementary particles:
Voltaire's words apply
to the Pope as well
By Pierluigi Battista
Corriere della Sera
Jan. 14, 2008

Is it true freedom to prevent Benedict XVI from speaking at La Sapienza University?

And how can it be a manifestation of freedom to dissent by keeping anyone from speaking and expressing himself in a university? To drown him in whistles, intimidate, wish him silenced - all to demonstrate 'polemical freedom', as leftist politician Enrico Boselli said, exploiting this tempest of protest against the Pope's visit to La Sapienza?

What if a group of clerical bigots interrupted, say, a speech by the mathematician Piergiorgio Odifreddi [militant atheist, anti-Catholic and anti-Pope]? Or if a squad of militant papal supporters prevented, say, a socialist meeting? Would they not be denounced by the anti-clericals and anti-Papists for going beyond bounds, for benighted intolerance and overweening arrogance?

Well then, how would that be any different from from the protests at La Sapienza now against the Pope?

They would say 'freedom to boo in a free state'. Fine, but it should be valid for all. Better still, that it was not valid at all.

If a hundred persons do not wish to see the Pope at the university and would seek to prevent the visit by their clamorous methods, then they are violating the right of those who wish to listen to the Pope.

Is it too much to ask that they keep their protests back until after they have heard what he has to say? Even in the theater, the most unruly claques wait until the singer has finished his song before letting loose their displeasure. After, not before.

Otherwise, it is not dissent but prejudice. Not reasonable opposition to an argument, but preventive deafness against any argument that may be against the dissident position. An attack against the person, not against his thesis.

In short, sheer intolerance.

How is it that so-called liberals and libertarians, and even politicians who are normally open and mild-mannered like Boselli, cannot understand such a simple thing?

They claim the Pope should not set foot in a secular university. They would object to the Pope in any circumstance!

What if a group of neo-fascist ultras physically block an entrance to the university to keep someone like Dario Fo from speaking. I doubt that Mr. Boselli would then simply put that down to 'freedom of polemics'.

They object further that if the Church aspires to a public role, to exercise a political role, then it should not be surprised if hostility is expressed, not to a faith but to a political position.

But organized hostility is something else, with the advocates of secularism set to stage an irreverent 'frocessione' during the event.
An a priori hostility, regardless of what the Pope will actually say or how he will say it.

Speaking out is not a crime. If it is not for dissidents, it is not for the Church. To carry out a political role, within the limits of the law, is a constitutional right to which the Church is not exempt.

Democracy is an arena, and if opposing thoughts are not allowed full ventilation, then what you have is a one-thought state, where the thought is dictated by who can whistle and boo the loudest.

Don't these supposed champions of liberty and tolerance always cite Voltaire on the unsuppressible right of anyone to express an opinion even if contrary to one's own?

Does Voltaire's lesson apply to everyone but not to the Pope?

Unfortunately, the dissidents of La Sapienza will not give up their disruptive plans. But at least, the champions of secularity could start by renouncing them. In the name of secularity as it should be properly understood.

Corriere della sera, 14 gennaio 2008



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Those scientists who would censor the Pope
without having read him at all
By Andrea Tornielli
Il Giornale
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. For 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's 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 would 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.]

Il Giornale, 14 gennaio 2008


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 Parma
March 15, 1990

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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 hardly considered 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 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 around 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.

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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


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. [Is the mayor of Rome 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 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 Unviersity 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'.

La Stampa, 14 gennaio 2008

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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 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?