Sixty one Italian scientists have signed a letter protesting against a planned visit this week by Pope Benedict XVI to Rome's Sapienza University because of his stated views on Galileo.

In a letter to Renato Guarini, the university rector, the scientists said the visit was "incongruous". The signatories include distinguished physicists such as Andrea Frova, author of a study of Galileo's persecution by the Church, and Carlo Maiani, the recently appointed head of the Italian National Council for Research or CNR.

The letter said scientists felt "offended and humiliated" by a statement made in 1990 by the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - the modern descendant of the Inquisition - suggesting that the trial of Galileo for heresy because of his support for the Copernican system was justified in the context of the time.

The scientists said they hoped the visit by the Pope on Thursday would be cancelled out of respect for the "secular nature of science" and the fact that the university was open to "students of every belief and ideology". Students at the university said they were preparing to welcome the Pope with banners of protest and loud disco music. As a cardinal, Benedict once attacked rock and pop music as the "work of the devil."

However Bruno Dalla Piccola, professor of genetic medicine at the university, said the protests were "a shameful episode which do no credit to a great and important university". Both professors and students should be ashamed of themselves for trying to prevent someone who "enjoys respect at a world level" from speaking, Professor Dalla Piccola said, adding "Perhaps they are afraid of what the Pope has to say".

Benedict's predecessor Pope John Paul II acknowledged that the Roman Catholic Church had erred in condemning Galileo in 1633 for asserting that the Earth revolves around the Sun. He told the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that those who condemned Galileo - who was forced to recant and spent the remaining eight years of his life under house arrest - had failed to recognise the distinction between the text of the Bible and its interpretation.

This had led them "unduly to transpose into the realm of the doctrine of the faith" a matter which had to do with scientific investigation, John Paul said. But he added that the Inquisition had acted correctly in the sense that it was working within knowledge available at the time and had therefore been consistent in guarding the integrity of the Catholic Faith.

The then Cardinal Ratzinger also observed that "At the time of Galileo the Church remained much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself. The process against Galileo was reasonable and just". The Italian Catholic writer Vittorio Messori agreed, saying Galileo "was not condemned for the things he said, but for the way he said them. He made statements with sectarian intolerance....Anyone who would not immediately accept the entire Copernican system was 'an imbecile with his head in the clouds,' 'a stain upon mankind,' 'a child who never grew up,' and so on."

Last month it was disclosed that the Pope had asked the Vatican's astronomers to move out of Castelgandolfo, his summer residence in the Alban Hills, into new premises in a disused convent. However Vatican officials said this was not because the pontiff was "anti science" but because the space used by the Vatican Observatory was needed for diplomatic meetings.

The Observatory's Jesuit director, Father Jose Funes, agreed there was "no downgrading of science in the Vatican." Last year Benedict told the observatory's summer school: "The Vatican Observatory has sought to demonstrate the Church's desire to embrace, encourage, and promote scientific study, on the basis of her conviction that 'faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth'."