Benedict Silenced in Rome

The students of Rome’s La Sapienza University have apparently embarrassed themselves by forcing Pope Benedict XVI to cancel a planned speech. They planned to shout down the speech, Fascist-fashion, with loud rock music had he appeared. The speech was to be on the death penalty and the case to abolish it.

The students don't want to hear about the death penalty? No, that was not the problem. This was pure ad hominem—it was because it was the Pope who was saying it. Sadly, it seems their expensive education has not managed to get so far as to show that ad hominem arguments are worthless.

More: they have apparently not yet grasped the principle of academic freedom; nor of the free exchange of ideas as the essence of the university; nor of free enquiry. But no surprise here; many of their professors joined in the protest. If they too do not know these things, they are surely not capable, ever, of teaching them. Perhaps Adam Smith was right, when he argued, over two hundred years ago, that the real purpose of a university was not to promote and protect knowledge, as claimed, but to promote and protect the class interests of the faculty and staff. There be pharisees.

So much, too, for any smug claims that modern Western culture is any less inclined to censor than are Islamists—a point Iran’s President Ahmadinejad archly demonstrated by holding a competition for cartoons on the theme of the Holocaust. The postmodernist, politically correct left is at least as eager to censor as any Islamofascist. The two are natural and actual allies, and work eagerly together through Canada’s Orwellian-titled “Human Rights Commissions.” Everything we are now blaming the Islamists for, the “new left” did first.

Benedict cannot be permitted to speak, according to the radical students and faculty, because he "condemns centuries of scientific and cultural growth by affirming anachronistic dogmas such as Creationism, while attacking scientific free-thought and promoting mandatory heterosexuality."

The obvious example, I suppose, of the church’s attempt to prevent scientific and cultural growth was its founding of La Sapienza University back in 1303. At least, its current students seem determined to demonstrate that this is the ultimate result of that initiative.

These thoroughly modern academics are determined to demonstrate to the whole world that they do not want to learn any unfamiliar thoughts or ideas. And they demonstrate that they are currently quite ignorant of the key thoughts and ideas of Western culture. They do not even know, and cannot be bothered to check, that the Catholic Church has no dogma of Creationism. “Creationism,” as that term is commonly used, has never been the position of the Catholic Church, which has had no quarrel with Darwin.

Sadly, this general ignorance of our own religious heritage is everywhere; it is a testament to the failure of our entire education system. According to The Economist, less than half of Americans can name the first book of the Bible, and only a third know who delivered the Sermon on the Mount. Yet what could be more fundamental to Western culture?

The students, supposedly Italy’s intellectual elite, also claim that Benedict is against “scientific free-thought,” apparently on the basis of a speech he made in 1990 in which he quoted philosopher Paul Feyerabend’s opinion that the conviction of Galileo for heresy was “rational and just.”

But the students are displaying themselves to the world in dunce caps: can they not grasp that they are demonstrating exactly the dogmatism today of which they dubiously accuse the church four hundred years ago?

And have they never learned the difference between quoting and expressing one’s own views? This bodes ill for Italian scholarship; it is one scholarship’s most basic rule. One wonders how much plagiarism there must be at La Sapienza U.

Ironically, the one thing that might save universities from such sophistry is a return to their original religious sense of mission.