[Vision2020] Pope Benedict XVI: One Giant Step Backwards for Humankind

[David M. Budge]

Andreas Schou wrote:

>For those of you keeping score, by the way, the former Cardinal
>Ratzinger was a member of the Hitler Youth.
>
>-- ACS
>  
>
and for those of you who have yet to be skeptical,  From the Jerusalem Post:

db

Ratzinger a Nazi? Don't believe it

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Sam Ser, THE JERUSALEM POST 	Apr. 18, 2005

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London's Sunday Times would have us believe that one of the leading 
contenders for the papacy is a closet Nazi. In if-only-they-knew tones, 
the newspaper informs readers that German-born Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger 
was a member of the Hitler Youth during World War II and suggests that, 
because of this, the "panzer cardinal" would be quite a contrast to his 
predecessor, John Paul II.

The article also classifies Ratzinger as a "theological anti-Semite" for 
believing in Jesus so strongly that - gasp! - he thinks that everyone, 
even Jews, should accept him as the messiah.

To all this we should say, "This is news?!"
As the Sunday Times article admits, Ratzinger's membership in the Hitler 
Youth was not voluntary but compulsory; also admitted are the facts that 
the cardinal - only a teenager during the period in question - was the 
son of an anti-Nazi policeman, that he was given a dispensation from 
Hitler Youth activities because of his religious studies, and that he 
deserted the German army.

Ratzinger has several times gone on record on his supposedly 
"problematic" past. In the 1997 book Salt of the Earth, Ratzinger is 
asked whether he was ever in the Hitler Youth.

"At first we weren't," he says, speaking of himself and his older 
brother, "but when the compulsory Hitler Youth was introduced in 1941, 
my brother was obliged to join. I was still too young, but later as a 
seminarian, I was registered in the Hitler Youth. As soon as I was out 
of the seminary, I never went back. And that was difficult because the 
tuition reduction, which I really needed, was tied to proof of 
attendance at the Hitler Youth.

"Thank goodness there was a very understanding mathematics professor. He 
himself was a Nazi, but an honest man, and said to me, 'Just go once to 
get the document so we have it...' When he saw that I simply didn't want 
to, he said, 'I understand, I'll take care of it' and so I was able to 
stay free of it."

Ratzinger says this again in his own memoirs, printed in 1998. In his 
2002 biography of the cardinal, John Allen, Jr. of the National Catholic 
Reporter wrote in detail about those events.

The only significant complaint that the Times makes against Ratzinger's 
wartime conduct is that he resisted quietly and passively, rather than 
having done something drastic enough to earn him a trip to a 
concentration camp. Of course, whenever it is said that a German failed 
the exceptional-resistance-to-the-Nazis test, it would behoove us all to 
recognize that too many Jews failed it, as well.

If he were truly a Nazi sympathizer, then it would undoubtedly have 
become evident during the past 60 years. Yet throughout his service in 
the church, Ratzinger has distinguished himself in the field of 
Jewish-Catholic relations.

As prefect of the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger played an 
instrumental role in the Vatican's revolutionary reconciliation with the 
Jews under John Paul II. He personally prepared Memory and 
Reconciliation, the 2000 document outlining the church's historical 
"errors" in its treatment of Jews. And as president of the Pontifical 
Biblical Commission, Ratzinger oversaw the preparation of The Jewish 
People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible, a milestone 
theological explanation for the Jews' rejection of Jesus.

If that's theological anti-Semitism, then we should only be so lucky to 
"suffer" more of the same.

As for the Hitler Youth issue, not even Yad Vashem has considered it 
worthy of further investigation. Why should we?


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