Pope Cancels University Visit in Wake of Protests Over Old Galileo Lecture
Pope Benedict XVI, who got a firsthand look at sometimes-violent student activism as a German university professor in the late 1960s, evidently has no wish to repeat the experience.
After some 50 students at the University of Rome La Sapienza briefly occupied the rector’s office today to protest the pope’s scheduled appearance at the university, the Vatican announced that Benedict would not be coming after all.
“Following the widely noted vicissitudes of recent days … it was considered opportune to postpone the event,” the Vatican said in a statement quoted by the Italian news agency ANSA. The statement added that the pope would send the text of the speech that he had planned to deliver in person.
The pope had been scheduled to address a gathering of faculty members and students this Thursday at ceremonies marking the opening of the university’s academic year.
But over the weekend, a group of more than 60 La Sapienza faculty members wrote to the university’s rector objecting to Benedict’s presence, citing words from a 1990 lecture in which he seemed to justify the Vatican’s condemnation of the astronomer Galileo Galilei in the 17th century.
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Ed
After some 50 students at the University of Rome La Sapienza briefly occupied the rector’s office today to protest the pope’s scheduled appearance at the university, the Vatican announced that Benedict would not be coming after all.
“Following the widely noted vicissitudes of recent days … it was considered opportune to postpone the event,” the Vatican said in a statement quoted by the Italian news agency ANSA. The statement added that the pope would send the text of the speech that he had planned to deliver in person.
The pope had been scheduled to address a gathering of faculty members and students this Thursday at ceremonies marking the opening of the university’s academic year.
But over the weekend, a group of more than 60 La Sapienza faculty members wrote to the university’s rector objecting to Benedict’s presence, citing words from a 1990 lecture in which he seemed to justify the Vatican’s condemnation of the astronomer Galileo Galilei in the 17th century.