The Nazi Pope

MSNBC is reporting that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has been chosen as Pope Benedict XVI.

Swell. Now we have an ex-Nazi as pope. Now, I fail to understand why the Pope plays a larger role on the international scene than the heads of other small nation-states such as Monaco or Liechtenstein, but he does....which indicates that a fairly sizable portion of the world population, or at least its leaders, still filter the person with that title through the "DSL Line to God" meme.

But at a time when anti-Semitic incidents are on the rise worldwide, and radical Islamist leaders are invoking Israel and "the Jews" to justify terrorism, it seems to me that naming a pope with a Nazi past seems at the very least, insensitive.

As the Times of London reports:

Unknown to many members of the church, however, Ratzinger’s past includes brief membership of the Hitler Youth movement and wartime service with a German army anti- aircraft unit.

Although there is no suggestion that he was involved in any atrocities, his service may be contrasted by opponents with the attitude of John Paul II, who took part in anti-Nazi theatre performances in his native Poland and in 1986 became the first pope to visit Rome’s synagogue.

“John Paul was hugely appreciated for what he did for and with the Jewish people,” said Lord Janner, head of the Holocaust Education Trust, who is due to attend ceremonies today to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

“If they were to appoint someone who was on the other side in the war, he would start at a disadvantage, although it wouldn’t mean in the long run he wouldn’t be equally understanding of the concerns of the Jewish world.”

The son of a rural Bavarian police officer, Ratzinger was six when Hitler came to power in 1933. His father, also called Joseph, was an anti-Nazi whose attempts to rein in Hitler’s Brown Shirts forced the family to move home several times.

In 1937 Ratzinger’s father retired and the family moved to Traunstein, a staunchly Catholic town in Bavaria close to the Führer’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden. He joined the Hitler Youth aged 14, shortly after membership was made compulsory in 1941.

He quickly won a dispensation on account of his training at a seminary. “Ratzinger was only briefly a member of the Hitler Youth and not an enthusiastic one,” concluded John Allen, his biographer.

Two years later Ratzinger was enrolled in an anti-aircraft unit that protected a BMW factory making aircraft engines. The workforce included slaves from Dachau concentration camp.

Ratzinger has insisted he never took part in combat or fired a shot — adding that his gun was not even loaded — because of a badly infected finger. He was sent to Hungary, where he set up tank traps and saw Jews being herded to death camps. He deserted in April 1944 and spent a few weeks in a prisoner of war camp.

He has since said that although he was opposed to the Nazi regime, any open resistance would have been futile — comments echoed this weekend by his elder brother Georg, a retired priest ordained along with the cardinal in 1951.

“Resistance was truly impossible,” Georg Ratzinger said. “Before we were conscripted, one of our teachers said we should fight and become heroic Nazis and another told us not to worry as only one soldier in a thousand was killed. But neither of us ever used a rifle against the enemy.”

Some locals in Traunstein, like Elizabeth Lohner, 84, whose brother-in-law was sent to Dachau as a conscientious objector, dismiss such suggestions. “It was possible to resist, and those people set an example for others,” she said. “The Ratzingers were young and had made a different choice.”

[snip]

His condemnations are legion — of women priests, married priests, dissident theologians and homosexuals, whom he has declared to be suffering from an “objective disorder”.

He upset many Jews with a statement in 1987 that Jewish history and scripture reach fulfilment only in Christ — a position denounced by critics as “theological anti-semitism”. He made more enemies among other religions in 2000, when he signed a document, Dominus Jesus, in which he argued: “Only in the Catholic church is there eternal salvation”.

Some of his staunchest critics are in Germany. A recent poll in Der Spiegel, the news magazine, showed opponents of a Ratzinger papacy outnumbered supporters by 36% to 29%.

Now, I suppose it's possible to give this guy the benefit of the doubt; after all, being an active resister took a fair amount of balls in Hitler's Germany. However, when taken in combination with obviously insensitive and inflammatory remarks targeted at Jews, and his vile sentiments about women and gays, he seems to me to be a deliberately inflammatory choice.

A Nazi pope, hand-in-hand with Fundamentalist American Christians who advocate violence against liberal judges, and a U.S. President who's in ideological synch with both.

I have a bad feeling about this.

The reaction from Blogistan:

John Aravosis. UPDATE: Aravosis digs up Pope Ratso I saying essentially that gays essentially are asking for violence to be done against them. (But he says it in a NICE way. Oy.)

David Boyle thinks Ratzinger is the Roman Dick Cheney.

Tim Boucher tells us that Ratzinger is a modern-day Inquisitor.