As readers of this blog will have noticed, I posted a note yesterday about calls by Italian intellectuals for Pope Benedict to break his supposed silence over Tibet. On Wednesday he did so at his weekly general audience, making a carefully worded appeal (here in Italian) for an end to the suffering of the people there.

Given the delicate nature of relations between the Vatican and China, the appeal seemed to strike a balance between his concern for the people and Vatican diplomacy. He mentioned the violence without mentioning China.

In fairness to the Pope, the accusations of “silence” made by some in Italy were perhaps, as was noted by his defenders in yesterday’s blog, a bit premature. Unless he is saying a Mass on a Church holy day or a similar occasion, the Pope only has set days in which he can make a public appeal that the Vatican believes is most effective — Sunday at the Angelus prayer from his window and Wednesday at the general audience.

The unrest in Tibet began last Friday. He did not mention the troubles on Palm Sunday. So the wait for the “silence” to be broken lasted only five days.

In a related development, the Rome-based Catholic agency Asianews published some pretty harrowing photos from Tibetan province of Amdo, which currently is part of the northern Chinese province of Sichuan. Asianews said the photos were sent from the monastery of Kirti to the Free Tibet Campaign and from there to Asianews. They speak for themselves.

Pope Benedict is just about the only world leader not to have said anything about the events in Tibet. This hasn’t gone unnoticed in Italy, where some commentators have been urging him to speak out — and others have been defending him for not doing so.

A story in the March 18 edition of Corriere della Sera quoted Antonio Socci, a Catholic writer and intellectual, as calling the Pope’s silence “the latest error by the Secretariat of State headed by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone“. In the same article, Giorgio Tonini, a member of the centre-left Democratic Party, said he was at first surprised that the Pope had not spoken out against the violence in Tibet during his Palm Sunday Mass. He said he later remembered reading a book by the the late Cardianl Agostino Casaroli, who was secretary of state for much of the reign of the late Pope John Paul. In the book, Casaroli spoke of the “martyrdom of patience” he had to go through when dealing with the communist countries of the former Soviet Bloc.

Not all commentators were critical. Andrea Riccardi, one of the founders of the Sant’ Egidio Community, said no one should expect the Vatican to “behave like a news agency” and react to every international crisis. Gian Maria Vian, editor-in-chief of the Vatican newspaper l’Osservatore Romano, defended the Vatican’s prudence and said it was “premature” to start a polemic. The Pope could speak out about Tibet in the coming days, perhaps at Wednesday’s general audience or one of the events during Holy Week, Vian said in an interview with the Italian newspaper Liberal.

The Osservatore itself has run news reports on the events in Tibet, as has Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops conference.

Given the delicate relations between the Vatican and Beijing, it is no surprise that the Pope has been waiting before making any comment. Last year, a Vatican official told reporters in October that the Pope had scheduled a meeting with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan leader living in exile, while he was on a visit to Italy. But on November 26, the Vatican did an about face and announced that “no audience is planned”. Between the time of the first announcement and the change of plans, Beijing had warned the Vatican that such a meeting would “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.”

Given the Vatican’s desire to improve its sometimes frosty relations with China, it’s a safe bet that when and if the Pope speaks out about Tibet, he will choose his words very carefully.

What do you think the Pope’s position on events on Tibet should be? Should there be an automatic solidarity among religious leaders in situations like this, or do other factors play into the decision about what to say?

When the head of the Catholic bishops’ conference in most countries speaks, he expects the specialist Church media to report on him and considers himself lucky if he makes it into the religion pages of the mainstream press. When the president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI) speaks, Italian media sit up and listen.

So when Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco (left) delivered his opening address to a regular meeting of the CEI’s permanent council last Monday, his speech (here in Italian) was all over the television and radio that night and in all mainstream newspapers the next morning.

Bagnasco, following up on recent economic surveys, opinion polls and media stories, said Italy was effectively in a state of malaise, if not outright decline. He said Italy appeared like a “frayed” country and at times seemed as torn apart as “confetti.” He cited a recent report by the social research organisation Censis that said Italy was suffering from “deep inertia” and seemed “incapable of building a common future”. A “dangerous lack of confidence” was widespread, he said.

Newspapers used the word “attack” to describe Bagnasco’s ctiticism of Italy’s current social and political situation. Most linked it to the fact that Pope Benedict had to scrap a visit to Rome’s La Sapienza University last week because of planned protests.
When the Vatican cancelled the visit, it said the reason was because the respectful climate it wanted at the university no longer existed. The interior ministry said security was not a problem, but Bagnasco said the visit was cancelled after “suggestions by Italian authorities”. The prime minister’s office denied that this was the case.

Last Sunday, a huge crowd, many of them students, turned out in St Peter’s Square to show their support for the Pope.

Bagnasco can speak more freely about the Italian political and social situation than Pope Benedict, but it is understood that he is reflecting the Vatican’s position. Italy’s powerful Catholic Church, with the backing of the Vatican, has been at odds with the the centre-left government over a number of issues, including a major clash last year over plans to give non-married heterosexual and homosexual couples more rights.

Ironically, a day after Bagnasco delivered his speech, Prime Minister Romano Prodi’s government itself started unravelling. Clemente Mastella, the justice minister who leads a small Catholic party, withdrew its support for the coalition. Mastella had earlier resigned as minister after he and wife became caught up in a corruption scandal in southern Italy. He says his family has done nothing wrong.

Mastella said one of straws that broke the camel’s back for him was his frustration, as a Catholic and a citizen, that the Pope could not even deliver an address at the main university in the Italian capital.

At the time of writing, the Italian government, a coalition that ranges from Catholics to hard-line communists, has asked for two confidence votes in parliament, on Wednesday and Thursday. If Prodi’s government does collapse and if the centre-right opposition led by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi eventually returns to power in one form or another, one man who probably won’t be crying is Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco.

For the first time since Pope Benedict’s election in 2005, the Vatican has issued a speech he did not read. The Pope was to have visited Rome’s La Sapienza University on January 17 but student demonstrations (the kind that would have made anyone who was alive in the 1960s nostalgic) forced him to change his plans.

A small number of students and professors accused the Pope of being against science, citing a speech he made in 1990 when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. The students and professors argued that that speech showed he would have supported the church’s heresy trial against the astronomer Galileo in the 17th century. The speech did not, in fact, state that and the Vatican promptly said the protesters had misunderstood it.

As pictures from the university showed, the protest appeared to be more against a man accused by some Italians of interfering in politics with his positions against gay marriage and abortion, and his opposition to proposed legislation that would give unmarried couples more rights. While many Italian students do not like Benedict, Italian media reports said most believed he had a right to speak, even if he would be booed. A large group of students turned up at the Pope’s weekly audience on Wednesday with banners saying “If Benedict doesn’t come to La Sapienza, La Sapienza will come to Benedict” and “Students with the Pope.” One held up an Italian flag with the slogan “Viva il Papa.”

Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarciscio Bertone wrote a letter to the rector of the university explaining that the the pope would not show up because he could not be assured “a dignified and tranquil welcome“.

On the eve of the event that was not to be, the Vatican decided to release the text — which in itself hardly deserved such controversy. The speech is a long philosophical discourse on faith, reason, the search for truth and the reasons why a pope should speak at a university. Benedict said he was speaking as Bishop of Rome rather than as a professor (which he said he was doing at Regensburg in 2006, where he made the famous speech that upset many Muslims).

He cited philosophers down the ages, from Socrates in ancient Greece, St Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages and contemporary thinkers John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas (as well as Jesus Christ and Pontius Pilate). Many professors might have had difficulty following such an erudite speech, let alone the students who were ready to throw eggs if he had come to deliver it.

One phrase they might perhaps have appreciated was his admission that his own intellectual family had not always got things right: “Various things said by theologians in the course of history or put into practice by Church authorities have been shown by history to be wrong.” If he had gone to the university despite the protests, he might have added an impromptu comment that students sometimes err too.

Pope Benedict’s decision to scrap his planned speech to Rome’s La Sapienza University after protests by professors and students there is the second time he has stumbled publicly because of his old professor’s habit of enlivening lectures with quotes from other sources that function as rhetorical straw men to be knocked down.

In this case, the protesters branded Benedict as anti-science because of comments he made in 1990 about Galileo. Discussing the famous case, he quoted a passage in which the unconventional philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend defended the Church for forcing the legendary Italian scientist to recant his view that Earth circled the sun. Benedict described Feyerabend as “agnostic-sceptic” (certainly not a compliment from the Vatican’s former doctrinal watchdog!). He characterised Feyerabend’s stand as “much more drastic” than another defence of the Church’s view offered by the “Romantic Marxist” Ernst Bloch. In fact, Benedict said he cited these two views to illustrate “the extent to which modernity’s doubts about itself have grown today in science and technology”.

In his ill-fated speech in September 2006 at the University of Regensburg in Germany, Benedict quoted Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus (1350-1425) as saying that Islam was a violent and irrational religion that had been spread by the sword. In this case, he did not make clear right away whether he agreed with these words or not. Many Muslims assumed he did and rioting — sometimes bloody — broke out in the Islamic world. The Pope later distanced himself from the quote, without apologising for using it.

The Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano has run a long front-page story explaining that the 1990 quote on Galileo was actually “a defence of Galilean rationality against the scepticism and relativism of post-modern culture”. John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter has provided an English translation of Benedict’s original text here.

The veteran theology professor Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict’s real name) often argues on a philosophical level where non-specialists can easily get lost. Given his liking for this style of academic argument and the long paper trail he built up before being elected Pope in 2005, one wonders how many other texts are out there that Benedict’s critics could use or misuse against him.

Italy’s far-right Northern League has come up with some provocative ways to protest against the construction of mosques. One of its members, Senator Roberto Calderoli, has called for a “Pig Day” to demonstrate against a planned mosque in Bologna. In December 2006, protesters left a severed pig’s head outside a mosque being built in Tuscany. Their latest idea was to parade a pig around the site of a planned mosque in Padua last weekend to “desecrate” the property.

Italy’s Sky TV has the video here. It’s in Italian but you’ll get the point.

The woman leading the protesters is former deputy Education Minister Mariella Mazzetto, a Northern League member. She told the journalist: “We have blessed the ground that the city of Padua wants to transfer for the mosque … It is a question of defending Italian identity.” Muslims and non-Muslims joined in denouncing the protest.

The rest of the video deals with a case that could be seen as the opposite of the Northern League’s approach. A priest in Treviso has been allowing local Muslims to use his parish hall for Friday prayers for three years. “For me, they are all children of God,” Father Aldo Danieli told Corriere della Sera. But his bishop told him on Saturday he would have to stop the practice, since Church law said Catholic places of worship could not be used by other religions.

This probably won’t be the last time that the Northern League uses pigs to try to provoke Muslims. How should they react?

Bioethical dilemmas know no boundaries. France found that out this weekend when the daily Libération revealed that a French couple that had used a surrogate mother in the United States had won a long legal battle to be recognised as the parents of the twin girls who resulted from the arrangement. Surrogacy is illegal in France. French officials refused to register the twins as the couple’s daughters, leaving them in a legal limbo for seven years. But an appeals court finally granted their wish, arguing it was in the children’s best interests to recognise the U.S. birth certificates that listed Dominique and Sylvie (their surname was not published) as the parents.

France banned surrogacy in 1994 in the hope of preventing a “rent-a-womb” market from developing. But this option is expressly banned by law only in France, Germany and Italy, according to the association CLARA which campaigns to change the French law. It is legal in other places, including Britain, Canada, Greece, New Zealand and some U.S. states. According to the twins’ father Dominique, between 20 to 40 French couples cross the Atlantic every year to have a child with a surrogate American mother.

Since Sylvie and Dominique were recognised as the twins’ parents in a state where surrogacy is legal, they could not be brought to court for breaking the law there. French courts tried to try them for aiding and abetting a case of surrogacy or violating the civil status of the children, but neither charge led to a conviction, Le Monde reported.

Sylvie, who could not conceive because she has no uterus, had her eggs fertilised in vitro by Dominique’s semen to create embryos that were genetically their own and carried to term by the “gestational carrier.” She told Europe 1 radio that the surrogate mother in California did not profit from the arrangement. Already a mother of four, she bore the child voluntarily for Sylvie and was only reimbursed for lost wages during the pregnancy. Rather than being poor and doing this for money, the surrogate mother and her husband actually had a combined annual income three times that of the French couple, their lawyer Nathalie Boudjerada told the radio.

Le Figaro called the decision “the first step towards the legalisation of surrogate mothers” in France. Paris plans to review its bioethics law in 2009.

An interesting little detail — since the French consulate in Los Angeles refused to register the twins as French citizens, Libération said, the couple simply applied for and got American passports for them to travel to France.

It’s one of those stories you can’t make up. Phil Stewart in our Rome bureau reports that one of Italy’s most infamous mobsters has become a father this week without ever consummating his marriage to his daughter’s mother. What’s more, his wife’s name is Immacolata (Immaculate)… But this is not some kind of bad Catholic joke.

Raffaele Cutolo, a former boss of the Naples-based Camorra crime network, got multiple life sentences on “hard time” — without conjugal visiting rights — on murder charges over two decades ago. He married Immacolata in prison in 1983 but was never allowed to be alone with her. In fact Cutolo, now 65, told the Rome daily La Repubblica last year that he had only kissed his wife once in 23 years. But he said: “I want so much to give her a child.”

According to Il Messaggero newspaper, the couple immediately asked for permission to try artificial insemination, but it wasn’t until 2001 that this was granted. They apparently needed several tries before their daughter was conceived.

Immacolata Cutolo said she wanted little Denise to grow up never hearing the word Camorra. “It is synonymous with pain for everybody,” she said.

Does Italy have its own “Terry Schiavo case“? Eluana Englaro has been in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) for the past 15 years and her father is trying to get legal permission to remove her feeding tube. Italy’s highest appeals court recently sent the case back to a lower court in Milan that had refused to let him do so. The local media have already dubbed Eluana “Italy’s Terry Schiavo” and the retrial (when it happens) looks set to spark off another major bioethics debate there.

Beppino Englaro has been caring for his daughter at home and says it’s time to free her from “the inhumane and degrading condition in which she is forced to exist”. The appeals court (Court of Cassation) said the lower court must determine whether her PVS is irreversible and whether she expressed the wish not to be kept alive if in a PVS. Her father said she had expressed that wish, but apparently has no living will or other tangible evidence to back that up.

Eluana’s case lacks the husband-vs-parents element that propelled the Schiavo case into the U.S. national headlines in 2005. But thorny cases of bioethics get into the national spotlight in Italy. A Roman judge is still investigating a doctor who last year removed the respirator of paralysed muscular dystrophy patient Piergiorgio Welby, 60, who had described his life as “torture” and asked for the right to die. Only Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and the U.S. state of Oregon permit assisted suicide for the terminally ill.

One Italian angle to the story is the traditional influence of the Roman Catholic Church, which just last month repeated its stand that it is morally wrong to remove artificial nutrition and hydration tubes from PVS patients, even if they will never regain consciousness. The Vatican daily Osservatore Romano has already denounced the Court of Cassation’s decision in the Eluana case as unacceptable because it would “lead legislators fatally towards euthanasia”.

There’s not much written in English about this case yet, but — a sign of the times — Eluana already has a sub-entry (under “euthanasia”) in the Italian Wikipedia.