The Abomination of Desolation Seated in the High Place
There has been a lot of criticism of the new pope already, but none yet of as high a caliber as the following, written by Roz Kaveny. The following extract says exactly what needs to be said about Ratzinger’s past in the Hitlerjugend:
Let us start with the business of his membership of the Hitler Youth. Apologists are rightly saying that membership was compulsory at the time and to have refused would have been to condemn himself at thirteen to serious consequences. No-one can retrospectively ask that of a person, his apologists say.
And the simple answer is, of course not. And the more complicated answer is that, when you let someone off the hook like this, you have to ask certain other questions about what that implies. Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict, is a man with a lot of intransigent positions about faith and morals which he believes to be absolute and non-negotiable truths. Many of those positions have real world consequences which condemn a lot of thirteen-year-olds male and female to various sorts of misery and death. If, say, the use of condoms or the absolute wrongness of homosexuality or quietism in the face of oppressive fascist regimes, rather than forming political alliances with Communists, are non-negotiable positions, then so is giving passive consent to the rule of the Nazi party at a point when it was engaged in the Holocaust. As he is so fond of pointing out to the rest of us, we cannot pick and choose and the duty to bear witness to absolute truth is incumbent on all of us at all times.