Joseph Ratzinger has long been a man who has railed against a world succumbing to a "dictatorship of relativism."
Surely, dear Kossacks, you remember Joe Ratzinger? Surely you remember that, on June 4, 2004, George II made a campaign stop at the Vatican, where he complained that "not all the American bishops are with me." And that Ratzinger, then the head of the Inquisition, obligingly sent the next week a letter to all US bishops, in which he decreed that all Catholics pro-choice on abortion were committing a "grave sin," and must therefore be denied communion. That Ratzinger specifically condemned "the case of a Catholic politician consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws": to wit, John Kerry. That Ratzinger stated that any priest confronted with such a politician, seeking to receive the Host, must "refuse to distribute it." That any Catholic who voted for such a politician "would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion."
This same Joe Ratzinger, today berobed as Pope Benedict XVI, journeyed May 28 to Auschwitz-Birkenau. One might have expected that Ratzinger, given his commitment to refusing the host to those who would flush fetal tissue or harvest husks, would have there, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, declared that his Church was wrong in persistently proffering the host to those who, at that site, extinguished the lives of more than a million living, breathing Jews. One might have expected that Ratzinger would have there pronounced his Church wrong, in failing to excommunicate murderous Auschwitz-Birkenau communicants. One might have expected that Ratzinger there would have pronounced his Church wrong, in failing to place the state of Germany under interdict, as it slaughtered six million Jews . . . seeing as how his Church had, in the past, laid interdict upon nations for such sins as, say, the nation's king leaving his wife for a mistress.
But no. Such words at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ratzinger did not speak. For, truth be told, Ratzinger himself is a "dictator of relativism." In the world according to Ratzinger, those who place at risk fetal tissue and human husks must be denied Holy Communion. But, in the world according to Ratzinger, he who sanctions Holy Communion for those who extinguish the souls of more than six million Jews, is a man deserving of sainthood.
For Ratzinger has continued the jihad inaugurated by his predecessor, Pope John Paul Jones II, its goal the beatification of Pope Pius XII. Pope Pius XII the man who could not, in the years preceding and consumed by WWII, bring himself to lay interdict across the nation of Germany, to excommunicate Catholics cooperating with the regime of Adolph Hitler. The man who, in June 1941, according to Pius' female "aide," "joined [her] in joyful prayers," saying "novenas for the Nazis and ask[ing] God to intercede for their total victory in Russia."
Ratzinger routinely deploys the moral relativism he allegedly deplores to explain his own service to the Third Reich. Young Ratzinger, we are told, joined the Hitler Youth because it was "compulsory." Yet we do not hear that not all Germans joined this Hitler Youth that was "compulsory"; that some, non-good Germans, were willing to pay the price of Nazi non-adhesion. Similarly, we are told that Ratzinger deserted the German army; we are not told that Ratzinger deserted in May 1945, the month the war ended, the month after Hitler, by his own hand, had died.
It is interesting that Jane Fonda remains anathema to millions, for posing next to an anti-aircraft gun during the Vietnam War, while Joseph Ratzinger, who actually manned an anti-aircraft gun against allied aircraft during WWII, is today revered by millions as "Holy Father."
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ratzinger claimed to be "a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness." Ratzinger did not, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, admit that "the people over which a ring of criminals rose," had actually elected those criminals to govern them.
At Ratzinger's Sunday appearance at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Michael Schudrich was scheduled to say Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. But Schudrich was unable to attend the ceremony. He was unable to attend because he was beaten in the street in central Warsaw by men who pummeled him and doused him with pepper spray while shouting "Poland for Poles!" Ratzinger could have used this opportunity to, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, denounce anti-semitism. But he didn't.
More than 1.5 million people were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. All but a handful were Jews. Ratzinger could have met, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, with Jewish survivors. But he didn't. Instead, of the 32 survivors he invited and ritually blessed, nearly all were Catholic.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ratzinger framed the question this way: "In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can be only a dread silence, a silence which itself is a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?"
Ratzinger gets the question wrong. The question is framed more precisely by Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the camps, who asks: "Where was man? Where was the humanity of man?"
The answer to both questions is this: God was not silent--s/he screamed in the extinguishing of each soul burned into ash at Auschwitz-Birkenau; each of these souls, extinguished by man.
Joseph Ratzinger, it should next be noted, has sought to protect from the civil authorities the molesters of children. When chief of the Inquisition, Ratzinger determined that priests suspected of the sexual abuse of children should be secretly investigated within the church, rather than face civil justice. A butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker, accused of fondling a child, might properly be given up to the civil authorities, but a priest must be allowed to throw himself upon the bosom of Mary.
In a confidential letter sent to all Catholic bishops in May of 2001, Ratzinger pronounced the "right" of the church to investigate suspected child-abusing priests "behind closed doors," and to keep such inquiries secret, even from civil authorities, for up to ten years after a victim had reached adulthood.
"Preliminary investigations" into claims of abuse should be referred to Ratzinger, the good German wrote, so they might be referred to church tribunals, as the "functions of judge, promoter of justice, notary and legal representative can validly be performed for these cases only by priests."
Further, wrote Ratzinger, "cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret," meaning that leaking word of priestly attacks on a child could result in excommunication. (Note here that, in the world according to Ratzinger, burning Jews apparently did not deserve excommunication, but telling the world that a priest has diddled a child apparently does.)
Here, Ratzinger attempted to turn back the clock some 840 years, to before the 1164 Constitutions of Clarendon, wherein King Henry II stripped the church of the "right" to try its priests before clerical, rather than civil, courts. In the century preceding Clarendon, some 100 priests accused of crimes as gross as murder had been allowed to walk, "tried" only before church courts famously unable to convict a member of the order of much of anything. This was the principle--allowing priests to get away with murder--for which Thomas a Becket died.
Ratzinger's medieval sensibility surfaced again when his predecessor, Pope John Paul Jones II, apologized for the church's treatment of Galileo. Ratzinger here bucked his boss: as head of the same Inquisition that had more than 400 years before condemned Galileo, Ratzinger decreed that "at the time of Galileo the Church remained much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself," concluding that "the process against Galileo was reasonable and just."
That will be some task, facing future historians, explaining how it was that we were "evolved beings," here in the West, when, some 60 years after the death of Adolf Hitler, the most powerful nation on the globe was governed by a man who derived at least some of his inherited riches from his grandfather's business dealings with the Nazis, while the chief priest of the most powerful church on the globe was a veteran of Hitler's soldiery.
Like Karl Rove, Joe Ratzinger is a man rendered timid and fearful by the expansion of consciousness represented by the 1960s. Both men have dedicated their lives to "repealing" that decade. At this they shall fail. Though meantime they inflict such suffering.