Italians side with Pope Benedict in the controversy on intellectual freedom

Last week Pope Benedict XVI cancelled a vistit to La
Sapienza, Rome’s biggest university. The pope had been scheduled to speak at
the opening ceremony of the academic year on January 17^th. However,
in the run-up to the event a number of professors and students announced
protests and asked the university’s rector to disinvite the pontiff. Citing
security concerns the pope decided to cancel the visit. In the following days,
Italians displayed an enormous level of solidarity with Pope Benedict,
including a gathering of 200,000 people at his weekly Angelus address.

The controversy about the pope’s visit to La Sapienza began
in November when Marcello Cini, an emeritus professor of physics wrote an open
letter to the rector of the university. The letter was published by the
communist newspaper Il Manifesto. Cini claimed that the pope’s right to speak
at La Sapienza would mark “an incredible violation of the traditional autonomy
of the university”. He maintained that there is no place for the teaching of
theology at modern public universities including at the opening ceremony of the
academic year. He also attacked the pope’s conviction that faith and reason are
compatible as explained in his speech at Regensburg university in 2006. Cini
maintained that the idea to draw a link between reason and faith was no more
than an attempt to impose religious dogma and pseudo-scientific ideology.

In early January, 67 university professors and lecturers of
the university signed a petition against the visit of the pope. They endorsed
Cini’s letter and added that Pope Benedict’s anti-rational outlook was
demonstrated at a speech which he gave in Parma in 1990. On that occasion, Pope
Benedict (then still cardinal) cited the philosopher Paul Feyerabend who had
written that at the time of the trial of Galileo Galilei the church had
remained more faithful to reason than Galileo and that his trial was rational
and just. In reality, the pope had not defended Feyerabend’s remarks.
Feyerabend made these deliberately provocative comments to underline his
extreme opposition against rationality and contempt for the pursuit of truth
and called his own philosophy “epistemological anarchism”. Pope Benedict has%0D
spent a great amount of time and energy to warn against exactly this kind of
relativism.

However, the signatories of the petition managed to spread
the idea that the pope is an enemy of science and student groups declared that
they would organize sit-ins and marches against the scheduled visit. They also
announced they were ready to make “extraordinary gestures” as part of “the
battle against the pope’s interference with Italian institutions”. Given the
rising tension and the unpredictable escalation in the run-up to his visit, the
pontiff cancelled his participation at the ceremony as the security of the
event was not guaranteed.

Pope Benedict’s announcement was received with great regret
by the majority of Italians. Declarations of solidarity with the pontiff were made
by nearly all sides of the political spectrum. At the same time, public figures
criticized the intolerance of those who had organized the anti-pope campaign.
The solidarity with Pope Bendict grew even further when he released the speech
he would have delivered at La Sapienza. It is an emphatic pledge for academic
freedom and a defense of the autonomy of the university, an “autonomy which,
on the basis of its founding principles, has always been part of the nature of
the university, which must always be exclusively bound to the authority of the
truth. In its freedom from political and ecclesiastical authorities, the
university finds its special role, and in modern society as well, which needs
institutions of this nature.” Given that his opponents had attacked him on the
grounds of his alleged anti-scientific attitude and censorship of academic
freedom, the speech further undermined their position in the eyes of the
public.

It therefore came as no surprise when the crowd which came to listen to
his weekly Angelus address on Sunday was larger than usual. In response to the
great support he received, the pope thanked “professors, students and everyone
else who has come to join the prayer and express their solidarity with me”. He
also stressed his great respect for La Sapienza and encouraged all students and
academics to show respect for the opinions of others. His conciliatory way of
managing the tensions has led to a strong and unexpected rise in his
popularity. Renato Mannheimer, a leading Italian pollster, estimates that his
level of support among ordinary people is now at 90 percent or even higher.