ITALY:Italian politicians joined an estimated 200,000-strong crowd that gathered in St Peter's Square, Rome yesterday in an act of solidarity with Pope Benedict XVI. Deputy prime minister Francesco Rutelli, veteran Christian Democrat Giulio Andreotti, former president Francesco Cossiga and senior opposition figures all came together in an unusual, multi-party demonstration.
At issue was the pope's cancelled visit last week to Rome's mega-university, La Sapienza. Invited to attend the opening of the academic year, Benedict in the end opted not to go when faced with virulent protests from sections of both the staff and students. For the pope and his advisers, the idea that a visit by him to a university in his own city might prompt scenes of urban warfare was simply too awful to contemplate.
For many sections of Italian public opinion, the idea that the pope should be so insulted was too much. Yesterday's huge turnout in St Peter's Square marked the response of those who indignantly rejected the idea that the pope should be "silenced" - and what is more in his own back yard.
In the end, that which had once looked like a major setback for Pope Benedict turned into a considerable triumph. Dealing head on with the issue of his "censorship" last week and addressing both students and professors, the pope said: "For many years the academic world was my world and I am linked to it by a love of the search for truth, a love of dialogue and confrontation, based on mutual respect for different positions.
"As a former professor I would therefore encourage you all to always respect the opinions of others and to search for truth and goodness with a free and responsible spirit."
So what was this all about? How come the pope is manifestly not welcome (to some) in his own parish? Was this rejection of Benedict just another example of the tensions prompted by the complex interface between faith and science? After all, this particular row has been brewing since 1633, when Galileo Galilei was summoned to Rome, tried and imprisoned for having the temerity to suggest that the planets do not revolve around a stationary earth.
Indeed the 67 professors who had originally objected to Benedict's visit two months ago were at least partly influenced by remarks made by Pope Benedict back in 1990 on the Galileo affair.
Quoting philosopher Paul Feyerabend, the then Cardinal Ratzinger had suggested that, by the standards of the time, the treatment of Galileo had been "reasonable and just".
For the protesting professors, however, Pope Benedict was not an appropriate figure to open the academic year. Indignant at the affront, Church figures and sympathisers rushed in, pointing out that he was merely contextualising the Galileo affair.
After all, the Catholic Church, back in 1992 and admittedly 359 years after the event, had issued its own definitive mea culpa when Pope John Paul II expressed regret for the way the Galileo issue had been handled.
For all that, many felt that in the Sapienza affair the pope had been the victim of an intolerant minority and that he had been denied the fundamental right of freedom of speech.
Yet to some it seemed there was something faintly ridiculous about all of this. Were we not, after all, talking about a world figure, a spiritual leader who commands an audience in every corner of the globe with just about his every statement?
Far from being gagged, Pope Benedict has a high-tech megaphone trained on the entire world. (In Italy, for example, over the last three years, he has appeared more often and for longer on prime time news bulletins than either prime minister Romano Prodi or president Giorgio Napolitano.)
So what was going on here? Perhaps, as many commentators have suggested, the row at La Sapienza was linked less to Galileo and more to contemporary Italian politics. For three years, Benedict, in his quietly militant way, has been down there in the bear pit of Italian politics, berating (usually centre-left) politicians on issues such as unmarried couples, abortion and stem-cell research.
A year ago, he almost indirectly brought down the current centre-left government when Catholic loyalist Giulio Andreotti voted against the government in the Senate because of legislative proposals on unmarried couples. Just two weeks ago, he complained about the degradation of parts of Rome during an audience granted to the city's mayor, Walter Veltroni, who is also leader designate of the new centre-left Democratic Party (PD).
Was Benedict meddling in politics again, or was he just badly advised? There are those who have no doubts about the answer to that one. As former newspaper editor Eugenio Scalfari put it last week: "We really ought to ask ourselves just how this whole climate came about. In my opinion, it has been caused by the Church invading Italian politics too much."