Where have all the academics gone?

By now you've probably heard that the Holy Father has postponed his scheduled visit to Rome's La Sapienza University because of the protestations by those who claim to be academics and intellectuals and their students.

Why does the Holy Father's visit receive such outcries? Because of a quotation he used in one of his addresses in 1990 (this whole thing harkens back to the outcries over the quotation he cited in his Regensburg address).

From the Vatican information service:

The signatories of the petition take exception to a talk given by the then Cardinal Ratzinger in 1990, and in particular to a phrase he used on that occasion to the effect that "in Galileo's time the Church remained much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself. The trial against Galileo was reasonable and just". The future Pope's remarks, a quote from a work by the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, were made in the context of a talk on the crisis of confidence in science, in which he used the example of changing attitudes towards the case of Galileo.

Whatever happened to academia? How is that co-called academics, intellectuals and professor cannot recognize a quotation? Where, back in Regensburg, were the cries for the burning of effigies of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and where, in Rome, are the protestations against Paul Feyerabend, whose words the then-Cardinal cited?

The self-proclaimed enlightened ones take the use of this quote as evidence that the Holy Father is against science and what not. What this shows is that these professors and academics are incapable or true intellectual pursuits.