I just heard this on the Dennis Prager show and had to put it in my “A Future For Mankind?” section. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Pope Benedict has been censored by the Sapienza University of Rome.

American universities aren’t the only places where politically incorrect speakers are silenced nowadays. This week in Rome, of all places, Pope Benedict XVI found himself censored by scholars, of all people, at one of Europe’s most prestigious universities.

On Tuesday the pontiff canceled a speech scheduled for today at Sapienza University of Rome in the wake of a threat by students and 67 faculty members to disrupt his appearance. The scholars argued that it was inappropriate for a religious figure to speak at their university.

As Dennis remarked, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a welcomed speaker at universities, but the Pope is verboten. When you ask yourself why and get the answer, it’s even weirder.

This pope’s specific sin was a speech he gave nearly 20 years ago in which, they claimed, he indicated support for the 17th-century heresy trial against Galileo. The censoring scholars apparently failed to appreciate the irony that, in preventing the pope from speaking, they were doing to him what the Church once did to Galileo, stifling free speech and intellectual inquiry.

Strange world we live in, strange indeed. As Hugh Hewitt remarks:

This is nuts. The West is threatened by jihadists intent on sending civilization back more than a thousand years, and academics in Rome are gagging one of the West’s most skilled and respected defenders.

Hey, this deserves one of the rare Head Up The Wazzoo awards! Congratulations Sapienza University of Rome — hope you are enjoying the aroma up there!

Technorati Tags: Pope Benedict, Sapienza University of Rome, Head Up The Wazzoo

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