The Dog Wagging the Tail January 16, 2008
Posted by Webmaster in Education, Italy, Left-Wing Extremism.trackback
Avoiding scientists’ protests, pope cancels university speech
Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday cancelled a speech at Rome’s La Sapienza university in the face of protests led by scientists opposed to a high-profile visit by the head of the Catholic Church to a secular setting.
“Following the well-noted controversy of recent days … it was considered appropriate to postpone the event,” which had been set for Thursday, a Vatican communique said, in the first such cancellation in the face of hostility since the pope’s election in April 2005.
Many scientists fault the intellectual, conservative and tradition-minded pope for a series of positions he has taken that they say subordinate science and reason to faith.
The protest against the visit was spearheaded by physicist Marcello Cini, a professor emeritus of La Sapienza, who wrote to rector Renato Guarini complaining of an “incredible violation” of the university’s autonomy.
Sixty-seven professors and researchers of the sprawling university’s physics department, as well as radical students, joined in the call for the pope to stay away on Thursday, the start of the university’s academic year.
Students opposed to the visit kicked off “an anti-clergy week” on Monday by showing a film on Galileo, the 17th-century physicist who ran afoul of Church doctrine by insisting that the Earth orbits the Sun.
This is more evidence that whenever young left-wingers (e.g. anarchists) act up, there’s always one or more college professors behind it.
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