ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, Jan. 24 2008

Pope becomes latest target of academic intolerance
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

The scene could have unfolded in any college town: Hordes of students and
free-speech supporters waved banners with such slogans as "Long Live Freedom of
Thought" and "The Truth Sets Us Free." Prominent politicians joined the rally,
with one calling it "a testimony against the barbarians." When exhorted to
defend the free exchange of ideas in academia, the throngs answered with
sustained applause and chants of "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!"

The only unusual feature of this demonstration, aside from the immensity of the
200,000-strong crowd, was the censorship target who inspired it: Pope Benedict
XVI.

Gathering in St. Peter's Square to hear the pope's weekly address on Sunday,
Benedict's backers were launching a counter-protest against a small band of
professors and students who had campaigned to stop the pope from speaking at
Rome's La Sapienza University today. The Vatican called off the speech after
several dozen professors signed a letter denouncing Benedict as "hostile to
science" and after their student supporters launched an "anti-cleric week,"
complete with a sit-in and threats to disrupt his speech.

The cancellation provoked a backlash among Italians and many Sapienza students.
The backlash was fueled partly by the professors' letter, which chided Benedict
for a 17-year-old academic lecture in which he quoted an agnostic philosopher
defending the Church's treatment of Galileo as "rational and just."

The professors' letter failed to mention that the future pope had criticized
the quote as "drastic" and cited it as an example of the loss of confidence in
reason that plagues academia in an age in which even science is doubted as a
means of discovering truth.

They also neglected to note that he had followed the quote with a resounding
endorsement of reason as consistent with genuine faith: "The faith does not
grow from resentment and the rejection of rationality, but from its fundamental
affirmation and from being inscribed in a still greater form of reason. . . ."

The professors' ploy — using an out-of-context academic quote to stir up angry
protests intended to silence the pope — bore an eerie resemblance to tactics
used by radical Muslim leaders in 2006 after Benedict lectured at Germany's
University of Regensburg and repeated a Byzantine emperor's critical quote
about Islam.

No one who read the Regensburg lecture could have mistaken it for a diatribe
against Islam. After inviting Muslims into peaceful, rational dialogue,
Benedict spent most of his speech critiquing the strident Western secularism
that declares faith and reason incompatible.

But the jihadists who firebombed churches and killed an elderly nun in
retaliation for Benedict's perceived offense were not interested in divining
his motives. Intolerant fanatics rarely are.

The uproar at Sapienza — a 700-year-old university founded by a pope and
spawned by the very convergence of faith and reason that Benedict defended at
Regensburg — was a jarring reminder that Muslim extremists are not the only
ones who resort to intimidation to silence their critics. And fanaticism is not
only a religious phenomenon.

The secular fundamentalists who would banish religious references from public
discourse and religious voices from the public square epitomize the intolerance
they condemn. They exemplify the "dictatorship of relativism" Benedict bemoans:
the tyrannical belief that anyone who defends claims of truth — particularly
religious ones — must be silenced. Their stranglehold on Western academia is
tragic, given that it was the synthesis of the Judeo-Christian and Hellenistic
traditions that inspired the confident search for truth now synonymous with
Western civilization.

Since Benedict called for dialogue in Regensburg, Muslim scholars have answered
with two open letters while secular intellectuals largely have ignored him.
Perhaps the swarms of students rallying to his defense are an indication that
tomorrow's academics will be more open-minded than today's.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television host and St. Louis-based
fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is
www.colleen-campbell.com.