Pope Benedict XVI Christianizes the Holocaust

Pope John Paul II was very sensitive towards Jewish feelings about Christianity's historical anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in particular. He did several things which improved relations between the Vatican and Judaism; unfortunately, Pope Benedict XVI is either tone deaf to these issues or just doesn't care as much. His attitudes suggest a failure to appreciate the perspectives of others.

The LA Times reports on Benedict’s recent trip to Auschwitz where he acted as though the Holocaust was the product of just a few “bad” Germans, rather than a product of the Germany as a whole:

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.

Perhaps even worse, Pope Benedict XVI suggested that the Holocaust was not just an assault on Jews, but in fact an assault on Christianity as well — thus “Christianizing” the Holocaust. Somehow, the Christians who ran the gas chambers and ovens were the ultimate targets, not the Jews who died in the gas chambers and who were cremated in the ovens.

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.

So we have two monumental failures here: a failure to acknowledge the overall responsibility of Germany for the Holocaust by attributing the crimes to a small group of criminals and a failure to acknowledge that the Jews were specific targets by pretending that Christianity was the ultimate target of the Holocaust. These are historical and factual errors, because the falsehood of these positions is — or at least should be — obvious to anyone who examines the issues.

These are also a significant moral failures, however, because they serve to exonerate or at mitigate the crimes of German Christians involved in the Holocaust. First Pope Benedict XVI denies that they were responsible for the crimes committed against the Jews and then he pretends that they, in fact, were the ultimate victims — not the Jews who were slaughtered in the millions. Thus we are presented with an image of the leader of the largest Christian denomination in the world acting as an apologist for mass murderers.

We must also not forget the fact that Catholic churches throughout Germany and occupied territories actively participated in the Holocaust. Some resisted and helped Jews, that is true, but it is immoral to focus just on them and ignore the degree to which both Catholic and Protestant churches, institutions, and individuals made the Holocaust possible — without their active, willing participation, the Holocaust wouldn’t have been possible.

Benedict’s failure to say that Auschwitz was overwhelmingly a death factory designed for Jews, or that the Germans slaughtered Jews because they hated Jews, is part of his overall failure to confront the centrality of the Holocaust in the Germans’ mass murdering. It is of course laudable to acknowledge and remember that the Germans murdered other peoples, but 1 million of Auschwitz’s 1.1 million victims were Jews. Yet Benedict, not even mentioning this, devoted fewer than 200 of almost 2,300 words explicitly to the slaughter of the Jews.

Benedict’s historical fabrication to Christianize the Holocaust is also a moral scandal because it obscures the troubling truth about the Catholic Church: Its churches across Europe tacitly and actively participated in the Jews’ persecution. Pope Pius XII, the German bishops, French bishops, Polish church leaders and many others, animated by anti-Semitism, supported or called for the persecution of the Jews (though not their slaughter). Some, such as Slovakian church leaders and Croatian priests, actively endorsed or participated in the mass murder.

Benedict doesn’t condone the slaughter of the Jews, that is true, but he minimizes the crime when he exonerates the criminals and then, even worse, portrays the criminals as the “real” victims. This, I believe, is arguably worse than condoning the Holocaust. At least Holocaust Deniers refuse to admit that the slaughter occurred; Benedict, however, is advancing the believe that what occurred was something very different than what history tells us.

 

Read More:

• Roman Catholicism
• Catholicism News
• Pope Benedict XVI
• Antisemitism