No Apology from the Pope?!
When a German, who served as a Hitler Youth and Anti-Aircraft-support, becomes pope and travels to Israel, his Jewish contempories hold their breath, waiting to hear what he has to say there. He spoke moving words at the Holocaust Memorial, Yad Vashem. But a central point was left out: an apology for the crimes of the Church against the Jews. When this was criticised, a Vatican spokesman said that the pope had already taken a position and said everything concerning the relationship of the Church to the Holocaust.
For example during his speech at the Youth Day in Cologne. However, anyone who rereads the speech has to realize that Josef Ratzinger left out the ecclesiastical roots of anti-Semitism. He describes the Holocaust as a result of “neo-pagan racial ideology,” that is, Hitler’s ideology of purebred Germans and inferior Semites.
So, the pope assumes that the Holocaust could not be blamed on his Church, but solely on Hitler.
However, the latest historical research, as, for example, by the American historian David Kertzer, shows that Benedict is committing an irresponsible falsification of history when he claims that the extermination of European Jews can be traced back solely to the “neo-pagan ideology” of the Nazis. The historian literally writes in his book “The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism”: The idea that the Catholic Church merely reinforced the religious rejection of Judaism, but did not spread any of the negative judgments attributed to modern anti-Semitism regarding the allegedly damaging social, economic, cultural and political role of the Jews, has been reduced to absurdity by historical reality.
Pages: 1 2