A few weeks ago, I posted an entry about a protest at an Italian university over the impending appearance of Pope Benedict XVI on campus. The protesters were concerned about the Pope’s apparent hostility to science, supposedly voiced in a lecture he gave in 1990.

Well, it turns out that the protesters didn’t do such a thorough job of researching Benedict XVI’s writings. According to a February 6 story from the Catholic news agency Zenit, the protest letter signed by 67 professors at La Sapienza University, in which it was claimed that Benedict XVI was hostile to science, contained erroneous information that was copied and pasted directly from the Italian-language Wikipedia entry about Benedict XVI.

The errors reported in the February 6 article aren’t particularly grave when viewed on their own. The original speech that then Cardinal Ratzinger gave in 1990, in which he supposedly voiced his hostility to science, was given on February 15, and not on March 15, as the Wikipedia entry (and thus the letter) supposedly stated. Further, the speech was given in Rome – at La Sapienza University (the site of the recent protest, no less) – and not in the city of Parma.

As the Vatican’s own newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, writes, “In the name of liberty and the investigation of science, they [the protesters] have taken as true a falsehood, accepting an affirmation without proving its credibility.”

Couldn’t at least one of the 67 professors have checked the original sources? It is positively laughable that university faculty used Wikipedia to obtain incorrect information about their subject.

However, a matter of significant concern is raised at the end of the following quote, taken from a January 17 story in Zenit:

“The rector of Sapienza University had invited the Holy Father to speak, but a small protest that eventually reached the point of several students occupying the rector’s offices motivated the Holy See to cancel the visit. The protesters accused the Pope of being “hostile” to science and took issue with a 1990 speech by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on the Galileo case.

The 1990 speech in its entirety showed the protesters to have taken Cardinal Ratzinger’s words out of context."

In the 1990 speech, Cardinal Ratzinger apparently quoted philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend’s views on Galileo and the Inquisition. As the latest Zenit article states, quoting L’Osservatore Romano:

“What’s surprising is that the person who took the Feyerabend citation could not have read the complete Wikipedia entry, which enables one to realize that the meaning of Ratzinger’s phrase is exactly the contrary to what the 67 professors have aimed to attribute to the Pope.”

According to an article in the Guardian, "The newspaper Il Giornale, which republished his [Cardinal Ratzinger’s] 1990 speech, said the Pope had “expressed a different position” from that of the Austrian scholar Paul Feyerabend, “absolutely not adopting it as his own”.

It is a serious matter indeed if the protesters took Cardinal Ratzinger’s words out of context to provide ammunition for their own agenda. It’s hard enough to have real conversations with those whose worldviews are different from our own; we do ourselves (and our conversation partners) no favors if we resort to prooftexting and smear campaigns in an attempt to completely exclude them from the conversation. Whether Benedict XVI is hostile to science or not, he deserves the courtesy of not having his words taken out of context and used against him.