In a scene straight from the nineteenth century, some leftist intellectuals declared a “settimana anticlericale” in protest of Pope Benedict’s proposed visit to La Sapienza university. Seemingly unaware of any anachronism, the proponents of this “anticlerical week” resorted to tired agitprop tactics, trotting out the same rhetoric against ecclesiastical tyranny that is so woefully out of touch with the benign papacy of Benedict XVI.
As the extreme left has been reduced to fabricating controversy in order to justify their anti-Catholic prejudice, the putative cause of outrage in this instance is an earlier comment by the Pope, dredged up from years earlier, to the effect that the Galileo trial was “reasonable and just.” These men of science, mostly physicists, who claim to advocate critical thinking, neglected to note that then-Cardinal Ratzinger was quoting an agnostic philosopher, the Austrian Paul Feyerband, in the context of examining several different philosopher’s perspectives on Galileo. The erudite Ratzinger is capable of far more sophisticated treatment of differing opinions than these self-appointed apostles of enlightenment, who react with knee-jerk advocacy, and laughably still espouse a “warfare hypothesis” interpretation of the Galileo trial that all serious historians have long abandoned.
The Enlightenment exhausted its philosophical possibilities decades ago, as evidenced by the strange paradox of eminent scientists immersed in nineteenth-century materialist philosophy, anticlericalism, and a puerile understanding of history as a conflict between “religion” and “science,” as though these were discrete, exclusive entities. How ironic that this ignorance should manifest itself in a university founded by a pope seven hundred years ago, when the Church was the sole institution that took any interest in fostering science. Aside from preserving practically everything we know of our classical heritage, and supporting most scholarly endeavors in Europe through the seventeenth century, the Church did nothing for science. The leftist faculty and students at La Sapienza could hardly be more decrepit if they called themselves Marxists and wore unkempt beards, as they are still fighting battles of a hundred years ago, apparently unaware of how the Church has long since risen above them. I have always found it curious how the term “reactionary” is reserved for conservative elements, when it is abundantly clear that much of the thinking on the far left is purely a reaction out of knee-jerk antipathy toward ecclesiastical institutions. The Enlightenment was supposed to raise mankind to adulthood, but instead it has yielded a culture that is thoroughly adolescent.