Subordinate science and reason to faith

Nobody wants the Inquisition!

Pope Benedict XVI, a.k.a. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is not a wanted man in Italy.

Sixty-seven professors and researchers at Rome's La Sapienza university's physics department, as well as (free) radical students, joined in the call for the pope to stay away on Thursday, the start of the university's academic year. They fault the intellectual, conservative and tradition-minded pope for a series of positions he has taken that they say "subordinate science and reason to faith."

Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi condemned the professors and students for "intolerance" towards the pontiff, who has said that Galileo had it coming: "The concrete consequences of the turning point Galileo represents... a very direct path that leads from Galileo to the atomic bomb."

“Once the relativity of movement is taken for granted, an ancient human and Christian system of reference has no right to interference in astronomic calculations and their heliocentric simplification; however, it has the right to remain faithful to its method of preserving the earth in relation to human dignity, and to order the world with regard to what will happen and what has happened in the world.”

I'm not sure how this bit of enlightenment jibes with the words of papal legate Arnaud-Amaury, Abbot of Cîteaux, who learnedly counseled “Kill them all, the Lord will recognise His own.”