MUNICH (LifeSiteNews) — The Jesuit university in Munich, Germany, has canceled the talk of a Catholic philosopher after leftist students expressed their outrage.
The Munich School of Philosophy (HFPH), run by the Jesuits, informed Dr. Sebastian Ostritsch two days before his scheduled talk that it was canceling the event. The HFPH told Catholic Newspaper Die Tagespost: “In view of the circumstances both inside and outside the university, open academic dialogue no longer seemed possible.”
Ostritsch is a philosopher, author, and editor for the German Catholic newspaper Die Tagespost, who teaches as a private lecturer at Heidelberg University. He was supposed to give a talk on the five proofs of the existence of God by St. Thomas Aquinas, titled “Is God’s existence a matter of rational knowledge? Thomas Aquinas vs. Immanuel Kant.” The occasion was the publication of his latest book on the topic called “Serpentines: Thomas Aquinas’ Proofs of God after the Age of Enlightenment.”
According to Christian magazine Corrigenda, far-left students had applied pressure to the university’s leadership, threatening to disrupt the lecture if it was not cancelled.
First, the university administration removed the official announcement and advertising for the lecture from its website and inside the building. “In order to preserve academic freedom, however, the invitation to the lecture remains valid!” the administration said in an internal message.
A far-left student group accused Ostritsch of being a “right-wing extremist fundamentalist” on social media and announced they would hold a protest and disrupt the lecture if it were to take place.
Corrigenda cites a report of a participant of an internal meeting between professors, administrators, and students, in which leftist students accused Ostritsch of being a “misanthrope,” a “right-wing extremist,” a “Nazi,” who worked for “right-wing newspapers.”
One student compared Ostritsch to the recently assassinated Charlie Kirk: “Mr. Ostritsch wants to be like Charlie Kirk, but we can reassure you: we won’t shoot him.”
However, another student announced that if the event were not canceled, it would not go ahead “undisturbed.”
“I think it’s a great pity that I was disinvited; it shows the deplorable state of German universities,” Ostritsch told LifeSiteNews. “This state of affairs is characterized by hostility toward intellectualism and limited by left-wing ideology. This is, of course, sad for the German academic world.”
Large media echo in support of the canceled philosopher
Numerous journalists, publicists, university professors, and Christians in a wide variety of positions have publicly expressed their support for Ostritsch after the university scrubbed his lecture. Catholic journalist Marco Gallina wrote in Tichys Einblick that Ostritsch was not canceled because of the content, but because of the person giving the lecture. According to Gallina, Ostritsch’s “thought crime” is “merely his adherence to Catholic doctrine.”
The story was picked up by the German mainstream press, which predominantly criticized the Jesuit university for cancelling the lecture.
Matthias Heine, arts and culture editor at WELT, wrote:
The Jesuit order has long been considered the left wing of the Catholic Church. That is why what happened in Munich is only logical: members of a university that still sees itself as a philosophical training ground are acting like shallow thinkers who have earned their bachelor’s degrees in cultural studies, gender studies, or postcolonial studies somewhere with more left-wing piety than intellectual brilliance…. Humanities scholars without spirit, linguists without language, theologians who are not interested in God, and – as has now become apparent in Munich – philosophers without wisdom and without any desire to philosophize.
Alexander Cammann from the newspaper ZEIT noted how alarming it was that a Catholic philosopher was canceled not by a secular organization, but by a Catholic university.
“The irony that a Catholic thinker with widely held Catholic views is not being canceled by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, but by a Catholic institution, is what makes this story so interesting,” Cammann wrote.
“Because even if one rejects or criticizes Ostritsch’s positions, whether religious, political, or intellectual, their banishment is disastrous for intellectual debate in this country. Moreover, Thursday should have been about Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant, central figures in our thinking, and not about migration and Islam.”
Ostritsch: The scandal will hopefully bring ‘greater glory to God’
The cancelation of the Catholic philosopher’s lecture may have backfired for his detractors, as his book and the proves for the existence of God were more widely discussed than they would have likely ever been without the scandal.
“We know that God can bring something good out of even the worst situations that He allows to happen,” Ostritsch told LifeSiteNews. “In my case, it’s not just that everyone is talking about the book, but also about the proofs of God’s existence, and hopefully that will bring greater glory to God.”
“I also prayed beforehand and called on St. Thomas to intercede so that the book would be a success and serve the faith, and he seems to have actually done so.”
On short notice, the philosopher was able to give his talk at a new venue in Munich on Thursday, the Carlsbad Institute for Social Thought.
Ostritsch told LifeSiteNews that he will travel to the United States soon, where he will give his lecture on “Thomas Aquinas vs. Immanuel Kant” in English at the University of Notre Dame on December 5.
