The Belfast Telegraph reports on a Pope in rough weather:
On Sunday Pope Benedict XVI travelled to Auschwitz on the last day of his first pastoral journey, and the speech he made there has provoked a storm of indignation, disappointment and bewilderment from Warsaw to Madrid, from Rome to Paris to Jerusalem, that continues to rumble.
What’s up? For one thing, Benedict XVI, a.k.a. Joseph Ratzinger, glossed over the shameful silence of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust, and he deserves rebuke for that. But there is more:
The only victims he mentioned by name were Christians. And in explaining why the Holocaust happened, he offered a metaphysical explanation according to which the true, intended victim of the genocide of the Jews was not actually the Jews but Christianity. For anyone seeking proof that Benedict is a man wedded to the abstruse conceits of theology at the expense of this flesh-and-blood world, his speech at Auschwitz offered confirmation. The occasion was a grand one, but he failed to rise to it.
It is amusing to see secular intellectuals acting shocked, shocked that the Pope interprets the Holocaust in metaphysical terms. Whatever did they expect? He is the Holy Father, not an editor at Die Zeit.
In Catholic doctrine, evil is not a principle unto itself but privatio boni, a lack of good. Yet it does exist as an active force, personified by the Devil, whom God holds morally accountable (Matt. 25:41). This is obviously paradoxical, but Christianity was never known for its logical coherence, a fact which theology is the attempt to conceal by unintelligible jargon.
Now, to the point. If Nazism is indeed an expression of absolute evil, then it must be of the Devil. If it is indeed of the Devil, then its objective must be to drive a wedge between God and his creation. Hence, indeed “the true, intended victim of the genocide of the Jews was not actually the Jews but Christianity.” Q.E.D.
Those who think this conclusion ridiculous, as I do, might consider simply shrugging at the elaborate creed in question. More distasteful to my mind at least are the operators who, by symbol-heavy obfuscation, try to weld the Holocaust into a kitsch spirituality of its own.
The writ against Ratzinger continues:
“I come here,” he said inside the camp, “as a son of the German people …” But not guilty on that account; rather “a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation’s honour, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation, with the result that our people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power.”
The German people, in other words - Ratzinger and his family and all the rest - were not to blame for Auschwitz. No wonder no apology was forthcoming: in their own way, they, too, were victims of the Nazis. To any ordinary Germans of his generation, he offered a form of consolation which historians no longer regard as remotely valid.
Is it not true that the Germans were themselves also victims of a criminal ring? The sanctimonious efforts to deny this are predicated upon the false dilemma that one cannot simultaneously be victim and perpetrator. But of course one can. It’s called the human condition.
If the hysterical hate-monger Daniel Goldhagen now corners the market on historiographic validity, I think that’s more disconcerting than the news that the Pope is Catholic.
