Is That Legal?

Could we have a show of hands for everybody who is willing to hold 14 year-olds to adult moral & legal standards?

That post comparing Ratzinger to the leftist revolutionary Archbishop Romero provides a good contrast. A 14 year old boy in 1942 Germany might not have had much choice, or much in the way of sophisticated thinking, regarding being forced into the Hitler Youth or being conscripted into the Wehrmacht at 16. An adult archbishop in the Catholic Church, who embraced Marxist totalitarianism and preached it from the pulpit, should have known better.

In college psych classes we actually studied the reasoning process of adolescents, and as I recall, it is generally pretty sorry compared to adult standards. Boosting Marxist totalitarianism because it purports on its face to be “fair” is precisely the kind of thing I would find understandable in a high school freshman but unforgivable in an archbishop. Likewise, a failure on the part of a 14 year old to choose the death camps or summary firing squad in order to achieve a nice, principled martyrdom, is also fairly understandable to me. I judge the adult church leaders and membership in WWII era Germany by a higher standard. What exactly is Ratzinger’s fault here – that as a 14 year old boy, he failed to act as a highly principled adult would have? That he hasn’t sufficiently critiqued how he viewed the world as a 14 year-old?

The rigorous moral standards we’re so glad to apply to anybody, ex post facto, sometimes amaze me. For a people who have supposedly grown well beyond old fashioned morals, we sure spend a lot of time moralizing about what people did 50 or 100 or 300 years ago, even as kids… Yeah, I guess it was possible for Ratzinger to avoid conscription… all he had to do was stand up, say “no,” and get shot. It would have been very simple, I’m sure we all would have done it, so our stone-throwing is quite justified. It begs the question, however, why so few Jews stood up for themselves, and why so many Germans, and French, and Belgians, and Hungarians, and Croats, and Ukranians, all went along with the Nazis. All they needed to do was stand up and say “no.”

Could we have a show of hands for everybody who is willing to hold 14 year-olds to adult moral & legal standards?

Only if we can also have a show of hands for everybody who HAS held 14 year-olds to adult moral & legal standards. I certainly have not; Eric certainly has not. I haven't seen anything in either the posts or the comments on this blog that would suggest anyone was holding a 14 (or 15 or 16 or 17) year-old Ratzinger to such standards.

If you're really so concerned about defending the 14 year-old Ratzinger from unfair condemnation, perhaps you should find someplace where he is actually being condemned instead of wasting everyone's time by attacking Eric for things he never said.

Jeanne and some of her commenters are clearly doing so, however.

So... do we execute teen-agers, or not? I'm confused.

We do not execute teenagers who committed their crimes under the age of 18, per Roper v. Simmons.

FWIW Beth, what Eric has argued strikes me as a bit disingenuous. His argument runs along the lines of "I don't condemn him for what he did at age 14, I'd never do that, but it's highly suspicious that he doesn't condemn himself for not having a far more nuanced approach to what he could have done at age 14 to resist Hitler."

This isn't far removed from the equally spurious political argument, "I'm not saying that my opponent is a depraved, inhuman racist monster who hates minorities, just that his record on welfare reform raises serious questions."

"I don't condemn him for what he did at age 14, I'd never do that, but it's highly suspicious that he doesn't condemn himself for not having a far more nuanced approach to what he could have done at age 14 to resist Hitler."

Wow, that's quite a sentence. I prefer a much simpler one: "It's not the crime; it's the coverup." The crime -- Ratzinger's behavior under the Nazi regime -- is not the problem (it wasn't even a crime), but the coverup -- Ratzinger's incomplete account of his own past and the way he has apparently glossed over larger historical and moral issues -- is a matter of concern.

"I'm not saying that my opponent is a depraved, inhuman racist monster who hates minorities, just that his record on welfare reform raises serious questions."

I'm not sure how this could be analogous to even your interpretation of Eric's position. It would certainly be easy to talk about welfare reform without raising questions about "depraved, inhuman racist monsters", but I don't see how it would be possible to talk about someone's interpretation of past events without discussing the events themselves. If you're arguing that Eric shouldn't have brought up the subject at all because it involves some uncomfortable facts, then I disagree completely. Intellectual freedom is too important to be confined only to 'safe' subjects.

The implication is that because he was not highly introspective about his lack of insight and lack of unusual moral courage at age 14, that somehow there is a coverup going on. That you state there is a coverup, indicates you think there is something to cover up.

Have you ever been through a really bad experience in a really bad place? I'm not talking about the barista failing to put cinnamon in your double decaf mocha latte. I'm talking about life and death. A lot of people have been in that kind of situation, in combat, in the rougher sections of some of our cities, and in much of the developing world. I have noticed that most people who get through a time like that, don't like to revisit it with a lot of reminisces. I believe this is a normal reaction, and a way of dealing with the pain. In fact, I've known a few holocaust survivors who wouldn't talk about it - is their coverup, probably based in survivor guilt, worse than the crime, presumably the things they had to do just to survive? Absent strong evidence to the contrary, I presume the relative innocence of people who have gone through tough times, and don't ask them to engage in scab picking for the sake of my peace of mind.

Your comment about the coverup is worse than the crime, is a bad application of a blanket rule, which is only meant to be applied when there was an actual crime. I'm not sure that a minor's conscription into the paramilitary or even military organization of an evil regime, is a crime or a moral failure. Is the coverup of a non-crime, worse than the non-crime?

Your comment about the coverup is worse than the crime, is a bad application of a blanket rule, which is only meant to be applied when there was an actual crime.

I don't think that's necessarily true. It may be that the act of covering up is in itself criminal or immoral. There need not have been a crime at all, or maybe there was a crime, just not one committed by cover-upper.

Say that you saw a brutal murder. There was nothing you could do to stop it (maybe there were things you could have tried, but they seemed too futile and dangerous or they simply didn't occur to you at the time). Now at this point you've committed no crime. We could debate whether you should have tried harder to prevent the murder, but there's no doubt that you're essentially innocent. But what if instead of going to the police, you simply keep silent? The murderer's still out there and may kill again, and the evidence you could provide could help to prevent that, but you do nothing. I don't know if the law would call you a criminal, but by keeping silent, you're certainly doing wrong.

Hitler is long dead, and most of the original Nazis either are dead or will be by the end of the decade, but in a more abstract sense, the 'criminals' still roam the earth. Bigotry, hatred, totalitarianism, these have all survived. They were around long before the first Nazi was born and will be with us long after the last one is dead. There's one more 'criminal,' one who didn't participate like the others, but who aided and abetted their work: the spirit of noninvolvement. It's difficult to blame Ratzinger or any other individual German for not standing up against Nazism. That would have taken a courage and commitment that most people lack. But the spirit of noninvolvement, that's another story. Without it, individual Germans could have spoken up, confident that their fellow citizens would join them. Without it, the terrible crimes of Nazism could never have occurred.

This is why Benedict's "coverup" is, in a sense, criminal. He witnessed the spirit of noninvolvement up close, and even if he wasn't conscious of the scope of its criminality at the time, he certainly is now. He is in a unique position to witness against it, to teach people to recognize and avoid it. He doesn't have the power to defeat it utterly, no one does, but he could perhaps weaken it. At the very least, he could certainly try.

As a teenager in Nazi Germany his options were limited. Any action he could have taken would have been mostly symbolic and would have come at the risk of his life. Today the situation is very different. He isn't some anonymous young man anymore, and while reflecting on and talking about that time would be painful, it would not be dangerous. I can't really blame him for his silence then, but I have trouble forgiving his silence now.

He witnessed the spirit of noninvolvement up close, and even if he wasn't conscious of the scope of its criminality at the time, he certainly is now.

But he witnessed it as a child. If you give him a pass for that, I don't see how one can demand he process those experiences-as-a-child as an adult.
It makes about as much sense as getting car safety tips from a child who survived his parents' car wreck.

As a German, he can and perhaps should have a historical interest, and he can insert some reminiscences here and there if he discusses those times. But as a child of that time, he really only has childish impressions of that time. Those are of human interest, but they can't be the basis of some kind of special insight that he must share with the world, lest he be judged as 'in a sense, criminal.'

Now there's a phrase. Make up your mind. If you think it's criminal, say so. If not, don't.

The charge that Archbishop Romero "embraced Marxist totalitarianism and preached it from the pulpit" is the slander that his murderers used. One might suppose that even men who burst into a cancer hospital chalice to fire into its altar where the sacred Host is being concecrated by an Archbishop of the Lord's Church deserve the benefit of the doubt. But prudence dictates that before we accept *their* disparagement wholesale as (forgive the phrase) "Gospel Truth," that we investigate these charges ourselves to probe their veracity. Unfortunately, the necessary work of translating Archbishop Romero's sermons into English has not been finished. But, full texts in Spanish are available at http://servicioskoinonia.org/romero/homilias/indice.htm and in Italian at http://www.italiacattolica.net/romero/pagine/scritti.htm.

I challenge anyone who thinks they can PROVE or argue based on concrete foundations rather than repeating libel that Archbishop Romero "embraced Marxist totalitarianism" or much less "preached it from the pulpit." Hint: in November 2004, a Vatican commission appointed by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith -- then headed by Cardinal Joseph A. Ratzinger -- concluded that Romero's preaching was not Marxist influenced.