Oh, that wacky Papa Ratzi. Always looking for someone else to piss off. Now he’s got a group of faculty members at an Italian university upset about him coming to speak there and he’s actually cancelled the visit rather than make the situation any worse.
What are the professors mad about? Their particular gripe is that back when he was just plain old Cardinal Ratzi, he made some remarks to the extent that Galileo got what he deserved when he was imprisoned by the Pope for claiming that the Earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa. Science, says the Vicar of Christ, should be serving the search for truth as it relates to “knowing God”, sounding more than a little like that Huckabee fellow. In his earlier speech, he even goes so far as to say that maybe Galileo was wrong and that the heliocentric view of the solar system isn’t really the way the solar system works, it’s just convenient for scientists to explain other phenomena. You know, the same way the Creationists like to say that evolution is “just a theory”.
Meanwhile, since aggravating a handful of cranky Italian science professors isn’t much more than an afternoon’s diversion at The Vatican, L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper (and home to one Father Guido Sarducci) felt the need to condemn the Harry Potter books for promoting witchcraft, superstition, and the occult. This from a religious organization that actively promotes such mumbo-jumbo as transubstantiation, the virgin birth, and the “miracles of the saints”. Maybe they just don’t like anyone horning in on their action.
