Benedict's sin of omission
CERTAIN RARE moments provide politicians and religious leaders the setting to etch emblematic statements or gestures in historical consciousness. At a commemoration ceremony in 1970, German Chancellor Willy Brandt dropped spontaneously to his knees with evident emotion and contrition (even though he himself had been an enemy of Nazism) at the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. John Paul II, upon becoming in 1986 the first pope ever to visit Rome's synagogue, unforgettably referred to the assembled Jews, humbly, as "our elder brothers."
Pope Benedict XVI had such a moment before him on Sunday at Auschwitz. In this time of resurgent Holocaust denial by the president of Iran and others, Benedict's visit was historically and politically important. This German pope reaffirmed with his presence and words the falsity and mendacity of Holocaust denial. He came, he said, as "a duty before the truth."
Yet the good he did by visiting Auschwitz was overshadowed by the address he delivered there, which offered none of Brandt's genuine emotion nor John Paul's humility and which failed to heed his own self-proclaimed duty to truth. Instead, Benedict clouded historical understanding, evaded moral responsibility and shirked political duty.
Benedict falsely exonerated Germans from their responsibility for the Holocaust by blaming only a "ring of criminals" who "used and abused" the duped and dragooned German people as an "instrument" of destruction. In truth, Germans by and large supported the Jews' persecution, and many of the hundreds of thousands of perpetrators were ordinary Germans who acted willingly. It is false to attribute culpability for the Holocaust wholly or even primarily to a "criminal ring." No German scholar or mainstream politician would today dare put forth Benedict's mythologized account of the past.
Benedict did say correctly that the "rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people." But he then turned the Holocaust into an assault most fundamentally not on Jews but on Christianity itself, by falsely asserting that the ultimate reason the Nazis wanted to kill Jews was "to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith" -- meaning that their motivation to kill Jews was because Judaism was the parent religion of Christianity.
As every historian, and even the casual student, knows -- and as the church's historians ordinarily take pains to emphasize -- the German perpetrators saw the Jews as a malevolent and powerful "race," not a religious group. Their desire to annihilate Jews had nothing to do with anti-Christianity.
