Breaking: the Pope is Catholic!
The Belfast Telegraph reports on a Pope in rough weather:
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:
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:
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.
