Pope Benedict XVI cancelled his trip to Rome’s historic La Sapienza University, which was planned on Thursday after three days of students and professors’ protests.

The Pontiff had been invited by the La Sapienza rector to speak at the annual ceremony to inaugurate the academic year. Over the weekend, students protested waving unwelcoming banners saying they were against the Pontiff’s visit. Moreover, the professors wrote a letter, which was published in the Rome daily La Repubblica, asking school officials to cancel the visit, which they said it was “incompatible” with the university’s secular mission.

The students and professors clearly referred to the Pontiff’s view on Galileo, expressed while he made a speech on the same university in 1990 by the time he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. During that speech, Benedict apparently justified 17-th-century astronomer Galileo Galilei’s persecution by the church. Galileo sustained that the Earth revolved around the Sun, a theory the church does not agree with. Furthermore, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1990, he sustained that Galileo’s trial for heresy was “reasonable and just.” In 1992, Pope John Paul II expressed regret for the church’s handling of the Galileo affair.

On a website managed by the students of the University, they wrote that the Pontiff “condemns centuries of scientific and cultural growth by affirming anachronistic dogmas such as Creationism, while attacking scientific free thought and promoting mandatory heterosexuality.”

“I thought, and I continue to think, that his visit was ambiguous and an attack on the independence of culture and the university,” Marcelo Cini, a prominent physicist at the university who led the protest, was quoted by Agence France-Presse, the New York Times reported.

Following the protests, the Vatican released a statement saying, “it seems opportune to delay the event.” However, a copy of the speech, which was to be given on Thursday, would still be sent to the University.