Remember that big kerfuffle in Rome a couple of weeks ago when Pope Benedict was scheduled to visit La Sapienza University? A bunch of professors and students protested the Pope, ostensibly for something he said in a speech years ago about faith and academia, but really we all know it was for the Church’s moral teachings.
We knew at the time that the quote they were hammering the Pope for was not actually his own words, but were actually of quote of someone else that he was disagreeing with in his speech. We all scratched our heads and wondered how they could be so wrong. Now we know. It turns out that professors relied on Wikipedia for their research and the article was inaccurate.
How ironic! They had accused the Pope of replacing reason with faith (when in fact the Holy Father would say they go hand in hand and are both necessary) and attacking academic study, when in fact they failed to do even the most primary source research, and let their “faith” in anti-Catholicism overcome the “reason” of actual intellectual discourse.
Hoist on their own petard!
“Each person is free to judge if this way of using reason is correct or if it is an act of disloyalty. The risk of reason folding to the pressure of interests and to the attractiveness of utility is exactly the risk which the Pope would have warned the staff of La Sapienza about had he been able to speak there,” the Vatican newspaper stated in conclusion.
Indeed.
A motto for the activists: “All I need to know about Pope Benedict I learned from a drunken reading of Wikipedia.”
“Now we know. It turns out that professors relied on Wikipedia for their research and the article was inaccurate.”
Ah! The educated elite…sometimes too smart for their own good.
The Wikipedia article is at http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papa_Benedetto_XVI. Since I don’t read Italian, I could not fully verify the article’s claims. There clearly is, however, a reference to Feyerabend and Galileo. No such reference occurs in the English article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Benedict_XVI.
Don’t forget that it is the nature of Wikipedia that it can be edited by anyone at any time. I’m sure someone has since gone back and changed the Italian entry to fix their mistakes.