A German Lesson: the Fallacy of One True Path
Since Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, I have received many inquiries about the believability of his account of his and his family's life in Nazi Germany. Coming from an anti-Nazi family, at 14 he nevertheless joined the Hitler Youth, a commonplace occurrence in Nazi Germany. Many Germans who after the war served democratic Germany nobly -- including the great liberal democratic thinker Jurgen Habermas -- had been in the Hitler Youth. Ratzinger was later conscripted into military service, which, in the last month of the war, he deserted at the age of 18.
Ratzinger's story is plausible and by no means disqualifies someone from distinguished religious or political service after the war and today. Barring new information contradicting his story, the focus on the truthfulness of his account bypasses more important questions.
These questions revolve around what Benedict learned from this formative period of his life, and how it influenced his later service, theology and, potentially, his papacy. He was a witness to Nazi Germany's all-consuming racism, brutal conquest of other peoples and mass murder. Unlike John Paul II, whose papacy and capacious heart for Jews was marked by his living through the Holocaust in Poland, Benedict curiously has spoken little about the horrors publicly. Instead, he has pointed to both Nazism's and modern civilization's rejection of Christianity and its truth to justify his insistence that Catholicism ought to resist many aspects of modernity, including "relativism" -- by which he centrally means the false notion that other religions are valid paths to God. As an account of the sources of Nazism and its horrors, this is selective and false; as a lesson learned from Nazism, it is selective and deeply troubling.
Benedict's conflation, under the rubric of "relativism," of the horrors of Nazism, a creed of extreme intolerance, with modernity and pluralism today is self-evidently bizarre. It also ignores several facts: Contrary to Benedict's explicit claim in his memoirs, the church hardly "stood firm" against Nazism. Although dissenting from Nazism in many matters, the church, in the name of its true God, willingly collaborated with Nazism and fascism on others. Christian intolerance -- its anti-Semitism -- was the sine qua non for the emergence of Nazi racial anti-Semitism and for the Nazis' capacity to enlist so many Christians in their war against the Jews. And although the Catholic Church was not responsible for the Holocaust, it is also a fact that, in many ways, substantial parts of the church avidly aided various aspects of the Nazis' persecution of the Jews. The church, for example, supported the Nazis' and fascists' anti-Semitic race laws, and the Slovakian episcopate explained to the Slovakian nation why its government, headed by a priest, must deport the country's Jews. With regard to Jews, the church was not the fundamental antidote to the problem, but part of it.
