@those who said this couldn't be a history teacher: unfortunately, he is one, though his speciality is modern history and he is clearly a Christard apologist first and a historian dead last.
Cut and pasted from his Wikipedia entry:
Roberto de Mattei (born february 21, 1948, in Rome) is an Italian Roman Catholic historian and author.
Biography
Former student and assistant to the philosopher of politics Augusto del Noce and to the historian Armando Saitta at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Rome, he has extensively studied European history of the XVI and XX Century with particular focus on the history of religious and political ideas. Among other academic posts, he was Professor of Modern History at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Cassino and is currently Professor of Modern History and History of Christianity at the European University in Rome, where he is also Coordinator of the Degree Course in Historical Sciences.
He is vice-President of the National Research Council of Italy (since 2004). As a vice-President he has been higly criticized for his anti-scientific ideas, in particular for having organized and funded a meeting supporting antievolutionism. This fact led part of the italian scientific community to a request for his resignation.[1][2] The controversy upsurged again after some statements by de Mattei, e.g. that the tsunami in 2011 in Japan was a divine punishment. Furthermore he claimed gay people to be responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire.
He is member of the Board of Directors of the “Italian Historical Institute for the Modern and Contemporary Age” and of the "Italian Geographic Society". He is President of the Lepanto Foundation (Rome - Washington) and he is editor-in-chief of the monthly review “Radici Cristiane”, of the three-monthly historical review “Nova Historica” as well as of the weekly “Corrispondenza Romana”. From February 2002 to May 2006 he held the post of Adviser for International Affairs to the Italian Government. He furthermore cooperates with the Pontifical Council for Historical Sciences and has been awarded from the Holy See the Order of Knighthood of St. Gregory the Great, as acknowledgement to this service to the Church. Among his most recent publications, there is the history of the Vatican Council II (Il Concilio Vaticano II. Una storia mai scritta, Lindau, Turin 2010) wherein, without touching onto the theological debate on the hermeneutics of the Council, suggests an historical view on the event which is antithetical to that proposed by the School of Bologna.
@Just Some Guy:
Now, now, Kathy didn't say that all old people were bigots. And she's right, quite a few senior citizens say things that we consider insensitive, bigoted or moronic, it's part of the Grumpy Old Guy Syndrome (see #4): they were raised in less tolerant/politically-correct times to start with, their bodies, minds, looks and senses are betraying them, and the world is changing faster than ever around them.
All this leaves them confused, scared and angry, and yearning for the days of their prime, when they were strong, healthy and the world made sense, so it makes sense for their anger to target new things and ideas (such as the idea that gays are normal people who shouldn't suffer discrimination)
Of course, it only gets worse if they were already dicks when they were young. Negative people can't really be expected to age gracefully, can they?
