Galileo was wrong.

By the sounds of it, when you make it to Rome, you will be a veritable innocent abroad.  The Romans have a sophisticated way of dealing with each other that they call Romanità.

The role of the Papacy and Church in Italy has been the source of controversy for centuries.  The current Pontifex Maximus is firmly asserting papal prerogatives, and not everyone likes it.  Rather than to reopen the tired debate about the relationship between the Italian state and the Vatican, these students and faculty are couching their displeasure in polite if somewhat disingenuous terms.  Every last Roman, with centuries of history in his or her bones, will understand the score.  Benedict XVI’s trip to La Sapienza was not primarily about teaching, but rather a societal occasion from which he was uninvited.

If you believe that homosexuality is not entirely uncommon in Muslim cultures where sexual relations between man and woman outside of marriage is an absolute taboo, you’re badly mistaken.  Just ask Ted Haggard or other Republicans of his type.

Feminist professors, to use the term loosely, of the caliber you describe, are largely the fruits of WASP societies and colleges having become degree mills and rites of passage.

As for Rocco Buttiglione, the controversy about his statements on homosexuality may have had much more to do with the fact that he was nominated to be the European Justice minister by Silvio Berlusconi, a man well known to have a rather complicated relationship with the judicial system.  Perhaps declaring his comments about homosexuality to be unacceptable were a fig leaf used by some who did not want to risk Europe’s enduring a flawed Justice minister.  Why did Buttiglione make the somewhat unusual statements he did about the Italian who eventually was chosen to succeed him?

Dismissing anticlerical college students as “wankers” is not a sign of serious discourse, particularly in this context with the Roman Church having had its own scandals.

I should have, of course, written “if you think ... is entirely uncommon...”

Fortunately, most of the rest of Italian society has denounced the leftists of La Sapienza, with public opinion strongly favoring Benedict XVI.

I think B16 actually cancelled his appearance citing the University being unable to provide security. This embarrased the University and made the moronic leftist looking like a bunch of whinging thugs and terrorists instead of the cool radical chic revolutionaries they thought themselves to be. Cardinal Ruini called for a show of support at the Papal Angelus and 200,000 showed instead of the normal 20,000. Amazingly well played by the Holy Father.

@Steve;
“The role of the Papacy and Church in Italy has been the source of controversy for centuries.”

I hops so. Christ brought a sword, did he not?

“...these students and faculty are couching their displeasure in polite if somewhat disingenuous terms.”

Polite? I quess if preventing speakers with whom you
disagree from speaking qualifies as cordiality, then
these bullying cowards are really quite genteel.

“Dismissing anticlerical college students as “wankers” is not a sign of serious discourse, particularly in this context with the Roman Church having had its own scandals.”

You’re right. Pack of flaccids was more appropriate.
You imply the Church’s right to be heard is
contigent on the spiritual state of all it’s members.
Which is another sophism for suppressing it’s voice.
While more clever than the student’s threat of
violence, your approach exists on the same moral
continuum.

John, I agree with Steven that this is another chapter
in the long tug-of-war between the Church and the
secular goverment in Italy. There is plenty of History
in Italy, and it tends to repeat itself (a good lesson
on how much it does is Luigi Barzini’s sketch of a
prominent political figure, who has you believing he’s
talking about Mussolini until, after he describes the
corpse hanging in a public place, he identifies the
man as Cola di Rienzo).

In a sense it involves modernity, because it all started
with the French Revolution and Napoleon, but as for the
more recent modernity, I think it is just the “excuse
du jour” for the latest skirmish.

Good to read on this site an attack on our ultimate enemy (or one of the two), Cultural Marxism, rather than just one of our penultimate, the Neocons. 

The Daily Telegraph is reporting today that the possible fall of the Italian “Center-Left” government is being blamed on the Vatican by the “Left”.

I’d like to hear more about Italy’s two Christian Democrat parties, whether they will re-unite, and how the Alleanza Nazionale stands in Church relations. I can’t depend on the press for this.

Isn’t the current socialist premier a devout Catholic?  Just curious.

Come now, just where would the Church be without its opponents? Would that they were a tad more foreboding than a bunch of Itralian Hipsters or dread-locked college layabouts but one must take what one gets.

After all, one of the principle reasons the west is stumbling is because it has seduced itself to notions of triumphalism while satisfying it’s definition of “culture” with an extractive consumerist treadmill that runs on “externalized costs” greased by a “hidden hand” that wears a boxing glove made by the Fed and sold by K Street. The West’s biggest antagonist, right now, is itself and any “Last Chance Armada” will land on shores jam-packed with Ennui Zombies who need an ever-increasing dose of fantasy methadone to keep facing the diminishing returns of an empty life.

Not that religion will help either. The flourishing trade in the rhetoric of “you can have big hooters and a nice car too” has many of the adherents to Televangelism swooning while the Catholic Church is auto-reduced by sybaritic priests in the suburbs buying Florida Condos with the congregation’s money or finnochio brothers preying on Cub Scouts. A liturgy that demands a lot of repeated standing and kneeling wears thin on the Barcalounger generation.

At least the mad rabid dogs of the Wahabbi Assassins retain a little passion about them as they go to their deaths for intercontinental power plays because thats a better “Life Plan” by their “Life Coach” Osama than the one consigned to them by the Arabian Satraps of Gout.

If People of Reason stopped petulantly arguing with People of Faith, both of whom are getting ever more belligerent as they weaken, we might get somewhere but don’t count on that anytime soon because all eyes are on the Rapture Convoy, brought to you by The Association of Global Arms Merchants who sponser that fine “professional grade” diorama of dinosaurs cavorting behind cavemen children at an “Intelligent Design” Museum near you.

No wonder ennui is so fashionable. No wonder rehashing of the Gallileo farrago seems relevant. No wonder this way-too-long campaign for the Presidency of this lapsed Republic seems more like a fist-fight at the corner gas station near the Elementary School than it does reasoned and productive debate within a Republic that has pretensions of greatness.

But , big deal, life is rich and do not miss, Mr. Zmirak, after your inventory of the bones in that little cabinet off the Veneto ......a stroll along the mint-scented alleyway up the hill to the piazza near the Church of Santa Sabina....where you can sit and eat an alfresco lunch beneath a copse of Orange Trees as you look out over the river valley toward the Vatican.  Rome was built, sacked , rebuilt, sacked again, abandoned, rebuilt , bombed and rebuilt again and has gone from Helios to the Pope and now to Distracted Relativism and still....there is passion.

@Keith,

The strife between the secular government and the church in Italy has been about more than Christ and his teachings, google the Medicis.

Heckling a Pontiff is rude, and not something of which I approve.  In this case, the threat of heckling Pope Benedict sufficed to get the speech rescheduled, an outcome the protesters almost certainly foresaw.  It’s not as if such strife is new; protesters tried to throw the coffin of the controversial but now blessed Pius IX into the Tiber.

The monks who taught me, taught me that a good essayist should be able to make his point without disparaging the anatomy or proclivities of those with whom he disagrees, which are arguments ad hominem.  And when the institution the essayist seeks to defend has regrettably amassed a lamentable track record on these very issues in recent years, it adds a comic note.  Pointing this out in no way *suppresses the Roman Church’s voice,” and may even help it find a more persuasive and forceful voice in the future.

Alabamans have the University of Alabama and Auburn University and their pigskin chasers to keep them amused; the citizens of the Eternal City have Don Camillo and Peppone and their bosses to provide the same service.

@Steve;
“The strife between the secular government and the
church in Italy has been about more than Christ and
his teachings, google the Medicis.”

The outcry this time was over a man of faith
addressing an institution of reason, the students
should, especially if they have reason on their side,
possess the courage to hear a speaker with another
viewpoint. I don’t think they would greet Christ any
differently, than they do the Vicar of His Church.

Does your point on ad hominem attacks apply to
your raising the sacndals within the priesthood in
this discussion?

At any rate, The Poe will speak. Much to the chagrin
of the Church’s eternal Enemy.

Anyone who doubts the Left is the perpetual enemy of free speech need only look at the universities of the western world. In the past four decades, the fashionably shabby partisans of the New Left took their self-congratulatory subversiveness to the classrooms – and the grizzled veterans of all those comparatively benign protest “riots” that shook campuses from Paris to New York became the professors and administrators who design the components of “higher education.”

Now, what at one time seemed an innovative, far-out, experimental, radical, hip vanguard has moldered into a very tiresome – and very oppressive – mainstream. This is the standard of the modern university education: Students and faculty shall be multicultural, tolerant, omnisexual, communal, anti-racist, anti-anti-Semitic (pro-Semitic?) and blah, blah, blah. The administrations of the New Academe are just as censorious and expulsive as right-wing culture in the brief, hysterically exaggerated and distorted “McCarthy Era.” Unlike the victims of those ancient purges, I doubt there will be reconciliations and career comebacks for Norman Finkelstein, David Yeagley and dozens of others whose tenure shattered under the rough stones of Political Correctness.

At today’s universities, there’s little room for free and open discussion. Debate has been all but replaced by indoctrination. The smug hypocrites so riled by Galileo and his persecution by the Church of four centuries ago have little patience for any worldview that does not excruciating track their own, one based on an ideology that has proven itself a miserable flop.

The long-ago monks and friars who created – out of whole cloth – the model for the modern university system must be appalled – and ashamed – that His Holiness was treated so shabbily.

Kevin, it seems that not only is Romanità lost on you, but so are discussions of Romanità.

If you read my contribution carefully, you’ll note that I didn’t criticize the Roman Church, nor did I deny it a right to opine on what the Romans called “rei publicae.” I noted that the rhetorical device of accusing university students of masturbation in public, especially without referencing any evidence, - does Mr. Zmirak honestly believe that the university’s library tolerates such antics? - is particularly unfortunate in light of the Roman Church’s less than glorious track record in the recent past.

A note to the humor challenged: “Wanker” used literally means masturbator. Used figuratively, esp. in the UK, it connotes a dilettante. I can’t think of a better way to characterize leftist students who consider the current pope a threat to intellectual freedom, rather than the minions of Eurabia arriving daily in their midst. I stand by my policy suggestion: Porn filters for the library. It will at least diminish the threat of electrocution. Cheers!

Steve,
Perhaps the subtlety of your comments eluded me, but
I believe you are missing John Z.’s points about the
student protestors.

His conclusion that they prefer porn to elevated
discourse and “solitaire” to female companionship
seems well-founded. I don’t know if all their
“performances” are public, but this one was
most certainly obscene, unmanly and unlikely to
to attract most women, let alone the fine flowers of
Italia.

In any case, Steve has a point that this has less to
do with the ideology of the protesters than with the
ancestral feud between the Roman authorities and the
Pope.

We must not forget that the Pope was, on top of the
Head of Christendom, the temporal rule of Rome, and as
such, subject to the complaints of his subject who did
not approve of they way he governed (as most subjects
usually think of their own government).

So these protesters are just one more arrow in the
quiver of the temporal authorities who do not want the
Pope to take power from them… Of course, he says he
does not, that he will abide by the Lateran Treaty, but
you cannot be too careful…

“Of course, he says he does not, that he will abide by the Lateran Treaty, but
you cannot be too careful… “

You’re rght. The secret motto of the Swiss Guard is;
“First the lecture hall, then the State.”

Such paranoid scenarios must be drawn-out to
rationalize thuggish intolerance and to
maintain the fiction that late modernity is really
interested in providing a fair hearing to all parties.

I can’t imagine these hapless chaps confronting an Islamic spokesman. Nor can I see them putting their own world-view to any serious
intellectual challenge. They lack energy, confidence
and courage. God help the women of Italy if this is
the pool of men from which they must draw their
protectors.

“God help the women of Italy if this is
the pool of men from which they must draw their
protectors.”

(Impersonating Chico Marx):  “Tootsie-Fruitsie!  Get’chyor Tootsie-Fruitsie ice-a cream here!”

So these protesters are just one more arrow in the quiver of the temporal authorities who do not want the Pope to take power from them… Of course, he says he does not, that he will abide by the Lateran Treaty, but you cannot be too careful…

Since you have returned, I have learned from you that pro life protestors give you the creeps, that the Catholic Church was the cause of abortion, and that the Pope might break the Lateran Treaty.

Interesting…

@Kevin

Just because I describe a state of mind does not mean
that I share it. I just explain.

Think of it this way, if a member of a Hatfield family
was suddenly denounced by a group of radicals, wouldn’t
you at least wonder if there was a McCoy lending them
support?

Radicals with wild ideas have always existed. There is
a lunatic fringe everywhere, whose theories are too
numerous to mention. It is when one of those groups
gets a serious hearing that we must pay attention. If
we do, we might find out that they are being aided and
abetted by some established, respectable group who thinks
of using them against other established, respectable
group with which it shares a grudge.

On occasion the fringe group gets control of the
situation and it is bad news for everyone. It was what
happened with the Nazis, who the Right thought would
be useful to them, and ended up being the ones used
(By the way, Hitler was just anohter version of
Reverend Jim Jones, but with a whole country to play
with. And unlike the Good Rev., he did not get to
take everyone with him). 

Another example was when the German Government shipped
a radical fringe group to Russia to get hr out of ht
war. Unfortunately that fringe group (the Bolsheviks)
turned out to be more powerful in the general disarray
that Russia had become.

If I understand correctly, Muslims are allowed four wives but an unlimited number of concubines (i.e., sex outside of marriage is not forbidden). This monopolization of women by the powerful likely explains the ubiquity of buggey amonst the Umma.

@John,

The Italians have a complicated relationship with the clergy, clericalism, and the Roman Church, that is not comparable to the outright dismissal, and dare one say loathing, that one can encounter among American liberals.  It’s more of a love / hate relationship.  Excuse remarks on the subject, which were more strident than they needed to be.

Giovanni Guareschi was an author who wrote some delightful books which describe human frailty, but also the relationship between Church and State in Italy, which I can only recommend.

Here’s a link to one of them:

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/doncamillo/Christmas/HolidayJoys.html

Don Camillo is the parish priest, Peppone the Communist mayor.