"Pope Benedict XVI canceled a speech at Rome's La Sapienza university in the face of protests led by scientists opposed to a high-profile visit to a secular setting by the head of the Catholic Church. Sixty-seven professors and researchers of the university's physics department joined in the call for the pope to stay away protesting the planned visit recalled a 1990 speech in which the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, seemed to justify the Inquisition's verdict against Galileo in 1633. In the speech, Ratzinger quoted an Austrian philosopher who said the ruling was 'rational and just' and concluded with the remark: 'The faith does not grow from resentment and the rejection of rationality, but from its fundamental affirmation, and from being rooted in a still greater form of reason.' The protest against the visit was spearheaded by physicist Marcello Cini who wrote the rector complaining of an 'incredible violation" of the university's autonomy. Cini said of Benedict's cancellation: 'By canceling, he is playing the victim, which is very intelligent. It will be a pretext for accusing us of refusing dialogue.'"
so Cini doesn't want the pope to come, but then when he doesn't show up, says that he is just 'playing the victim'... geez...
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eh, what can you do? It doesn't help that this Pope has said that none of us (Protestants) are Christians, so I'm not sure that I really about his image.
I'd like a credible citation for that....
I'd be happy to oblige. Key points, this is the second such document from this new Pope, and they both stemmed as "clarifications" of a document that he wrote earlier.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,288841,00.html
Here's the important part:
"The new document -- formulated as five questions and answers -- restates key sections of a 2000 text the pope wrote when he was prefect of the congregation, "Dominus Iesus," which riled Protestant, Lutheran and other Christian denominations because it said they were not true churches but merely ecclesial communities and therefore did not have the "means of salvation."
"Christ 'established here on earth' only one Church," said the document released as the pope vacations at a villa in Lorenzago di Cadore, in Italy's Dolomite mountains.
The other communities "cannot be called 'churches' in the proper sense" because they do not have apostolic succession -- the ability to trace their bishops back to Christ's original apostles -- and therefore their priestly ordinations are not valid, it said."
Matt's right: I remember reading about this in the news a few months ago.
I'm really not sure why the Pope felt the need to encourage division between Catholics and Protestants (as if history isn't full of enough of this already), but for whatever reason he thought it wise to declare that only Catholics have the "means of salvation."
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