The Pope stole the front page of many newspapers today, both in Italy and abroad, as he performed a deft PR sidestep leaving Academics and students at Rome’s La Sapienza university to celebrate a pyrrhic victory as they open the Academic year tomorrow without him.
The Pope had been invited by the university’s governing body to address the students on the occasion of the opening of the Academic year. At first Benedict was offered the keynote address – an honour not usually given to either political or religious leaders, but rather to Academics of merit. A number of teaching staff at the university protested this invitation. The Pope was bumped slightly further down the running order, but invited nonetheless. A large number of Academics wrote an open letter protesting the invitation to the infallible one, and various student organisations backed the protest. This in itself was enough to garner headlines during a week when no end is in sight to the rubbish ’emergency’ in the Campania region.
Yesterday evening Ratzinger pulled off the PR coup, as he decided to pull out of the event in the face of the (peaceful) protests. So this morning the papers were peppered with declarations from all the leading politicians about ‘shame’.
Prime minister (and former member of the Christian Democrat party DC)Romano Prodi had this to say: “I condemn the gestures, declarations and the attitudes that have produced an unacceptable tension and an atmosphere that does no honour to the tradition of civility and tollerance in Italy”. The gestures he refers to, and condemns, presumably include the open letter signed by over 60 Academics at the University, including many of Italy’s leading scientists. You have the democratic right to protest in Italy, unless it’s against the Pope – it would seem.
Berlusconi – no stranger to censorship, given his own treatment of journalists (not to mention his personal friendship with Vladimir Putin) – remarked: “It’s a wound that humiliates the University and Italy”.
The majority of television and newspaper reports covering the protests have framed the issue as one of secular intollerance and censorship. This despite the fact that it was the Pope’s decision (cynically) to decline the invitation (as pointed out by numerous blogs on the issue, the Pope chose to bravely go to Istanbul despite threats against his safety – the Academic staff of La Sapienza, and indeed the protesting students, did not issue any threats against Ratzy).
It’s been taken as a given, at least by the ‘clash-of-civilisations’ brigade that tend to use Ratzy as a rallying point, that the Pope has the ‘right’ to adress the students on this occasion. It is, thus, a question of ‘freedom of speech’. It is, in the same way that Richard Dawkins could lament that he has not been given the chance to read from The God Delusion from the balcony in St. Peter’s. The Pope can say what he likes, and to whom he likes. In fact, thanks to the efforts of various theo-cons, he can still, in Italy, legally incite hatred against persons on the basis of their sexual orientation, should he wish to do so. A platform for ones ideas is not a right, and one’s ideas can be called into question (at least outside of the Vatican city state).
Out of 8 articles on the theme in today’s Corriere della Sera five centre on the opinions of those who support the Pope’s ‘right’ to address the students. That gives you an idea about how ‘censored’ Pope Benedict XVI is in Italy.
That the Pope’s clever adoption of the victim’s mantle in this case has turned the world topsy turvy was demonstrated when the evening news quoted a catholic blogger (without citing the actual source) as declaring ‘today Italy ceased to be a civil country’. A snub to the Pope, rather than the fact that stomach and kidney cancer rates have increased dramatically in the Campania region due to fifteen years of failure on the part of the local administration to set in place the most basic of refuse collection systems (due, it would seem, to corruption and organised crime), and Italian civil society is in tilt.
Writing elegantly on the issue, Raffaele Carcano, secretary of the UAAR (Unione degli Atei e degli Agnostici Razionalisti), points out that no-one involved in the protest seeks to censor the Pope, or even to block him from adressing the students. “Rather, we invite the Pope to hold his ‘lesson’, so that at the end he can do as any good professor would, and ask those present ‘are there any questions’: and of questions to ask him there are actually many”.