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Pope Cancels Speech After Scientists Protest
Reservoir Hill writes "Pope Benedict XVI canceled a speech at Rome's La Sapienza university in the face of protests led by scientists opposed to a high-profile visit to a secular setting by the head of the Catholic Church. Sixty-seven professors and researchers of the university's physics department joined in the call for the pope to stay away protesting the planned visit recalled a 1990 speech in which the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, seemed to justify the Inquisition's verdict against Galileo in 1633. In the speech, Ratzinger quoted an Austrian philosopher who said the ruling was 'rational and just' and concluded with the remark: 'The faith does not grow from resentment and the rejection of rationality, but from its fundamental affirmation, and from being rooted in a still greater form of reason.' The protest against the visit was spearheaded by physicist Marcello Cini who wrote the rector complaining of an 'incredible violation" of the university's autonomy. Cini said of Benedict's cancellation: 'By canceling, he is playing the victim, which is very intelligent. It will be a pretext for accusing us of refusing dialogue.'"
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OWU5ZDk3NGY3OGI4NDY1OTdmNzc2NmEzYjUzZWQxNWE=
The story of Galileo is a tad more complicated than the simplistic version we're used to. I'm no Roman Catholic, but this meme needs to be corrected.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
It's not as simple as that. The pope wanted to come, make a speech and leave. No questions allowed, no debate. The physicists wanted to be able to respond and have a proper debate on his stance on scientific issues in general if he was to come at all. By backing off, the pope paints himself as the victim, avoiding a debate that would make him look like the medieval remain that he is.
This has cause a big stir because, in general, the Italian political system is completely captive to the Vatican. Every day the media reports any move of word of the pope no matter how minor. Any talk show always has at least a priest as a guest. The church has huge properties and pays no taxes. The church get 0.08% of the tax collected unless one goes to great lengths to direct it somewhere else et.c etc.
More than refusing dialogue it looks to many of us as the Pope was forced not to be present under the menace of riots: One of the students stated "THERE IS NO DIALOGUE WITH THAT INDIVIDUAL" and the leader in his speech claimed the presence of many other collective outsiders to participate in the event to make it as much inhospitable as possible to the Pope. Last image is the invasion of the rectorate and a meal served outside the premises.
I am disgusted to be italian in the same university as those.
I'm disgusted as well to be forced to post as AC because they are VIOLENT-RED-FASCISTS supported by squatters in the SanLorenzo suburb next to the university.
Some people, at the risk of their lives, defected. He stayed in the system. Many others did, like Nobel laureate Günther Grass, but Grass lived an entire life of anti-fascist political activity afterwards. Another Nobel laureate, Dario Fo, was drafted but defected at the first occasion to join the resistance. Note that Fo was born in 1927, less than one month before Benedict XVI, and Grass is only six months older.
And anyway, the point was to point the irony with the six-million figure indicated by the parent post, when Ratzinger was among those that helped establish that tally.
They are not allowed to torture people anymore with the comfy chair, but their main activity is still censorship and repression of free thought within the Church. He could have chosen to be a missionary like Mother Theresa, but preferred the activity of a censoring bureaucrat.
Man, I am Italian and I wish it were like that. He has far more authority in the country than politicians. He says what he wants, and politicians usually give it to him because too few dare to tell him to mind his business, even though the separation of state and church should be a principle in the agreements the Italian state has with the Vatican. Partly it's because being "catholic", over here, is like being "patriotic" in the US. He is currently attacking the Italian abortion law: instead of simply telling catholics not to have abortions, he wants to make it illegal for everybody. Some people still remember how it was before the abortion law: double as many abortions and all performed by untrained, shady figures, resulting in women dying every year.
I probably did not finish the thought in my original post. It is not just that the pope is actually dressed in clothes that would cover significant charity projects and probably save hundreds of lives from starvation, the Church as a whole is actually a quite greedy parasite. They get about 0.8% of the Italian income tax and all their activities (including the for-profit ones) are tax-exempt, which in the last 20 years has allowed them to amass a fortune. Weren't these the guys who should preach poverty?
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y