Is That Legal?

Muller, why limit yourself to this speech? The Pope is a defender of orthodox morality and Christianity. As a secularist law professor, surely you understand that this quibble over whether the Pope has the same level of understanding as "respectable scholars" is ridiculous (do you assume that ALL the world's moral leaders must have the same knowledge of something as a "respectable scholar?" The Pope isn't a scholar, but a moral leader.)

Your real ire is the Church itself, and its moral stance on things. Stop beating around the bush. Just denounce Christianity, Catholicism, the Papacy, and be done with it. Your measily attack makes you look weak.

Sincerely,
Screwtape.

ELM: Heaven forfend! Weak? What a scathing attack! I know that He would wish that all men be strong, and that weakness is shameful in a man.

The truth: I don't know enough about the Catholic Church (or any church) to denounce it or its moral positions. (Can you point out the spot in all of this dialogue where I say one word about any church's "moral positions?") I'm talking about something I do know something about, which is the Pope's comments about the supposed innocence of the German Volk in the 1930s.

By the way, Screwtape, it's "measly."

And one more thing: why won't any of these defenders of the pope on this blog use their real names? Is there something to be ashamed of?

Yes, there were many Germans during the 1930's and 1940's that were not coerced into commiting atrocities. But, in your eyes, are all Germans equally guilty? What percentage would have liked to act, but were too scared, or thought that their actions wouldn't make a difference?

When have you stood up and received physical harm, or put yourself in harms way to defend someone? It is not easy, and most people will not risk their own well being to defend someone else, especially someone they are not close to. But as the saying goes, "first they came for...finally they came for me."

The message I, as an American and a Catholic, got from Benedict's speech was totally different from what you heard. I heard a call to stand up to evil, wherever it may be. I heard a call to defend others. Christians are called to do God's work, to be His hands on Earth. When Benedict says, "Where were you God?" what I hear is "Where were you Jim? Why didn't you stand up for them? Why did you just watch that happening?"

I wasn't alive in the 30's and 40's, but Benedict goes on to relate the message to today, when there is still genocide happening. And what are we doing now?

ELM: Thanks for the thoughtful response, Jim. I think the reason we heard it differently, in part, is that you're an American Catholic and I'm an American Jew (some of whose relatives perished). When you go to Auschwitz and speak about the Holocaust and the Nazi regime, you have recognize that the eyes not just of Catholics but especially of Jews are going to be upon you. This is doubly true for a pope such as this one, whose childhood and teenage years were in Nazi Germany. If nothing else, it was, at the very least, staggeringly naive for the pope to deliver a speech written for Catholic ears at a spot where the not just Catholics but the whole world, and especially the Jewish world, would be listening intently.

I was born into a boer family during the 'rise' of apartheid, and continue to marvel at how those who collectively maintained the system are becoming more and more difficult to find! My family is creating a form of collective amnesia.
It is in this light that Daniel Goldhagen's analysis is so pertinent:
an ideology that manufactures such an environment of general participation in specific stereotypes; a communion around common prejudices making it so convenient for the average person to be active in their passive (or not so passive) participation.
How can anyone who has lived through such horrors say that there is or was nothing that they could have done - no matter what their age? For whatever reason, I was clear about apartheid in my early teens: if the pope did not have such a moral imperative then he should deal with that, and not try to deny the fact.

Screwtape seems an especially odd choice for a pseudonym in this discussion. Perhaps he is a demon trying to keep us from the Enemy's clutches!

Eric,
It seems like Benedict's message on the Holocaust has been consistent:
http://www.adl.org/PresRele/VaticanJewish_96/44698_96.htm
and the ADL seems to be praising him, "The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today welcomed the election of German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as the new Pope, Benedict XVI."

What I would have said is that German Catholics, and Catholics all around the world did not do our part to protect our Jewish brothers and sisters during the Nazi regime. In that memory, we are called to stand up to those that promote violence and mass murder.

That message is not mine, many others are saying it, but how many are truly listening?

You're reading selectively, Jim.

Are you seriously quoting a year old ADL press release from the pope's election to imply that the ADL is pleased with the pope's current actions?

So what was ADL's official statement ON the Pope's Auschwitz speech?

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today said it is deeply troubled by Pope Benedict XVI's failure to explicitly address the vicious anti-Semitism that led to the murder of more than 1.5 million Jews on the ground where he stood in Auschwitz.

If he'd said the right thing in the first place, he wouldn't've needed to do that. [Therefore, the fact that he did shows there was validity to the criticism.]

Eric Muller -- you should really check out the link to the ADL press release. You can't accuse the ADL of being insufficiently sensitive to Jewish concerns. And, if I might dare say so, I think you're perhaps taking this all very personally -- with good reason, mind you -- but that this causes you to magnify every perceive fault in Benedict's words, strain to read between the lines to critique what he might have meant, and to ignore all of the good aspects of Benedict's statement (e.g., his insistence that "as a German," he was forced to seek "reconciliation" from God, i.e., forgiveness).

ELM: I readily confess my personal interest in German history. I don't conceal it.

If I'm taking the issue personally, I hardly think I'm alone on this thread.

I don't use my real name on this blog because I work at a wall street law firm and do not want to be fired for being a practicing Catholic (a threat I perceive enough to be real).

I don't happen to believe you when you say you don't know enough about the Church to know its moral positions. I think you know them pretty well, dislike them, and want to discredit the Church. Of course you haven't mentioned them at all in your discussions regarding the Pope's words. That's my point, though: it's a roundabout way of smearing the Church. That way, you need not go through the rigor of attacking the Church's morality directly, and can easily say that the Pope minimizes the holocaust and hence can be ignored on everything else.

Screwtape, if you're not aware, was C.S. Lewis's demon tempter in the Screwtape letters who gave advice to Wormwood on how to best corrupt mankind. To me, it's clear you want to attack the Church. So, as your demon temptor, my advice to you was to drop the charade.

ELM: Screwtape, unlike you, I'm an open book here. Look back over the archives and look for the evidence of an effort to attack the Catholic Church. Hint: you won't find it. The only writing I've done about the church at all is about the new pope and his background. And that's interesting to me mostly because of my background, not because of anything about the church.

The fact that you see many things as being about the Church doesn't mean I do.

I'll repeat myself: I don't know enough about Catholic doctrine even to have an opinion about it.

Lis - I just did a google search on Ratzinger and holocaust and the link I gave was the #1. Didn't search hard enough I guess. Thanks for the link. It is sad that it took reflections 3 days afterward to recognize what a trip to Auschewitz means.

I still stand by my idea that those who were not anti-Semites, but did nothing to protect Jews, those who watched as Jews were taken and killed, those are the type of people Benedict was speaking to. Those are the people that today can make a difference. We need to try to reduce their numbers, but there will always be hateful people out there. However, those guided by love and respect cannot sit idly and allow evil to happen.

There is no better way to express one’s views then by quoting views of opponents as Benjamin Franklin said, “The sting in rebuke is The Truth”

"The Pope's Disastrous Speech at Auschwitz"

One can read the this blog and go through whole argument why Benedict XVI should not have gone to Auschwitz and why he should not have said what he said as it is totally irrelevant.

The truth of the fact remains; Hitler almost succeeded in his plans, he almost killed Christian Faith as mass killing of the Jews was carried out by almost all Christians; those that did the actual killing, those that stood by watching, those that refused help, those that denied them safe harbour.

As a punishment God have left Catholic Church and send avengers that created Liberalism a Church without God.

Eventually God relented and set conditions for his own return; Thou shall name a Pope from nation of murderers, thou shall have him travel to Auschwitz, thou shall have him speak to me and if I listen to him I shall give him a sign, thou shall have him make peace with the Jews, then I shall return.

Here goes:

Someone who says "The Nazi regime was not simply a "ring of criminals [who] rose to power by false promises of future greatness…"" is saying that the Nazi regime was a ring of criminals who rose to power by false promises of future greatness.

Saying that is antisemitic and, additionally, contrary to good scholarship.

Therefore, the ADL, which said such things, is antisemitic.

Now, don't start telling me I'm taking things out of context, or blowing this up to make some point. Oh, no, this is simply straightforward internet interpretation (with no translation issues!). No, Eric, the only thing to do is to condemn the ADL for the same sins Benedict has shown.

ELM: Thomas, you're right: what you've given us is "straightforward internet interpretation" -- in the sense that you're believing something because you read it on the internet (apparently here, in somebody else's comments).

Please head over to the ADL homepage, as I've just done, and find the place where the ADL expresses the view about the relationship of the Nazi leadership to the German Volk that pope expressed at Auschwitz: "It is a duty before the truth and the just due of all who suffered here, a duty before God, for me to come here as the successor of Pope John Paul II and as a son of the German people -- a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation's honor, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation, with the result that our people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power."

"our people" ... used and abused ... "their thirst.

If you find the ADL suggesting the innocence and coercion of the German Volk in that way, I'll condemn that in a heartbeat.

May I first say, hopefully this one gets accepted, as the last one seems to been lost - might be a Mozilla problem.

Living near Karlsruhe, I can also add a certain extra note or two about German attitudes. One of our neighbors is an older woman, who still finds the bombings of the winter/spring 1945 simply beyond the pale, using as an example a raid on a Mercedes factory in Gaggenau/Rastatt. The several hundred of slave laborers who also died in the raid, at least as I recall from the news accounts remembering it 5 decades later, didn't concern her in the least.

My sister-in-law is East German, and when we visited her grandparents in 1991 or so, her grandfather, who had been a soldier in France, found it very unfair that East Germany had been subjected to such clearly undeserved deprivation.

Germans are capable of a style of blind self-pity which is almost sickening at times.

On the other hand, this question about coercion, which does reflect back to the Browning/Goldhagen point, is very, very difficult.

And it is a quote like '...while other non-coerced neighbors stood and watched' which makes me wonder whether Americans are still absolutely clueless about what sort of state people like Hitler or Stalin or Mao built, with what seems to be impunity - or at least, lots and lots of corpses, generally after being worked to death in labor camps (the Nazis' often borrowed from American sources racial fantasies did put them into a special league, but only as a detail in a very broad canvas of death and destruction).

Neither you nor I have any idea what was in the hearts of the watching neighbors, though we would likely agree that all the neighbors, by 1938, would have agreed on the futility of opposing the state at that point, unless they wished to share the fate of the people being taken away in front of them. (And yes, I know there are cases where concerted opposition to Nazi policy did lead to the Nazis being stopped in such cases - obviously, the neighbors were average people, not heroes.)

The Germans were not the deceived victims of the Pope's comforting illusions, but neither were the 'Germans' somehow as 'uncoerced' as you seem to think. (Of course, more were enthusiastic than they would admit afterwards - how large a number is likely unknowable, but it is certainly not insignficant.)

Have you tried to recently exercise 'the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances' (say, against torture as American government policy, breaking both national and international laws and treaties) in such public spaces as the sidewalks of New York, during the Republican Convention? I keeping wondering where all those uncoerced police officers (especially the documented provocateurs) came from, violating their oath, as it would seem - especially the uncoerced lying about what they did against their own fellow citizens.

This is actually meant more to question some very comfortable stereotypes people have about evil, where it happens, and why.

I have yet to dive into the comments, some of which are likely better filling sewage pipes, but in ten or twenty years time, after those 'new programs' requiring a set of new American camps to be built are part of old history, you may see your ideas about uncoerced members of a state gone insane in a very different light.

And yes, that America is building camps for some reason which doesn't seem to actually be able to be clearly explained in one or two sentences, should give anyone discussing these themes real pause. These camps are being built by uncoerced workers, and if people are put in them (if it happens - let's just hope it is another 385 million dollar boondoggle, and not a middling effective program), they will pass by uncoerced fellow citizens who will just passively watch them go by to their fate, guarded then by uncoerced people with guns. And yet, somehow, most of those uncoerced Americans are unlikely to have agreed to what was going on if it had been made clear to them beforehand how it would turn out. Some would, of course - personally, I have my doubts that Americans are more than a touch more moral than Germans in 1931 - ask a Muslim or Arabic looking American about what life is like in the U.S. these days - better, ask the NSA, since they likely have a much better handle on those citizens true thoughts expressed in private conversation. That Goldhagen had at least a touch of truth is undisputed - the problem is, in my eyes, it was just a touch. Humans do this to other humans, not merely Nazis or Germans to Jews or Slavs or Gypsies or gay, or people with genetic 'flaws,' or enemies of the state. The story of the Holocaust tends to be a refuge, strangely, for those who insist it is somehow a unique occurence. It wasn't, it isn't, it will never be. Welcome to the human race.

The Pope was a disaster long before he just 'lucked' into the job, like Cheney did. That should say enough about his moral authority right there.

Eric, that's not a fair response. The quote I used is straight from the ADL website, not from the comments here. Now, you might suggest that I'm blowing up one small part of it, taking it out of context to make an unrelated point, and interpreting it uncharitably to boot. But, really, you're not the one to make that point. By your standards--not reasonable ones, to be sure, but they're yours--you must condemn the ADL for the statement, or else admit to a double standard.

ELM: Thomas, you've lost me. What was the ADL quote?

The ADL quote: "The Nazi regime was not simply a'ring of criminals [who] rose to power by false promises of future greatness…'"

As I said, this clearly suggests that, whatever else the Nazi regime was, it was a "ring of criminals [who] rose to power by false promises of future greatness." If saying that is objectionable, as you have said repeatedly and at great length, then the ADL should be criticized.

ELM: I'm sorry, Thomas; I'm not trying to be cute or dense here, but I just don't understand what you're saying.

Is this some sort of LSAT-type logic game, in which you're claiming that because the ADL says the Nazi regime was not "merely" a ring of criminals, that means that the ADL thinks the Nazi regime was indeed "a ring of criminals, and also something else on top of that?

Here is what Abe Foxman of the ADL actually said:

While Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Auschwitz represents a vital link with the historic breakthroughs in Catholic-Jewish relations achieved by Pope John Paul II, we are deeply troubled by the Pontiff's failure to explicitly address the vicious anti-Semitism that led to the murder of more than 1.5 million Jews on the ground where he stood.

Standing at the crematoria, the world's largest Jewish cemetery, the Pope uttered not one word about anti-Semitism; not one explicit acknowledgement of Jewish lives vanquished simply because they were Jews. He chose rather to single out Father Maximilian Kolbe, who edited an anti-Semitic Catholic publication and Edith Stein, a Jew who converted to Catholicism, both of whom died at Auschwitz.

What the Pope did at Auschwitz was to marginalize the distinctly Jewish character of what took place at Auschwitz. While we recognize the tragedy that millions of Christians and others died at the hands of the Nazis, the Shoah cannot be universalized. Hitler's goal was to destroy European Jewry.

The Nazi regime was not simply a "ring of criminals [who] rose to power by false promises of future greatness…" but part of a people whose attitude and treatment of the Jews was shaped by centuries of Christian anti-Judaism which became political anti-Semitism.

By going to Poland, the Pope sought to recognize what the Nazis did on Polish soil. But Auschwitz was the place for the Pope to unequivocally recognize what the Nazis did to European Jewry. We had hoped for more, and the world deserved a simpler and more direct lesson from this Pastor and Preacher.Before I condemn Abe Foxman for his statement, you'll have to show me how there's even an inch of breathing room between his criticism of the pope's address and mine.

Well, yes, that is what the ADL's statement means, isn't it? So, where's the condemnation? You offer lots of context for the ADL statement, but you aren't much interested in context, etc., when it comes to Benedict's. To the contrary, you insist on acontextual and eccentric interpretation of the text. What is that, but bad faith? If you can't use the same standards for both, then something else, some other standard, is at work. Do you care to share what it is?

Your latest is typical of the rest of the string. You say Benedict made "not one explicit acknowledgement of Jewish lives vanquished simply because they were Jews." What is this: "The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the earth." Is that not explicit? Which part of that sentence isn't clear?

The entire address, in context, has an entirely different meaning from the one you've attempted to read into it. Read the address again. Why does Benedict say that going to Auschwitz as a Christian and as a Pope from Germany is "difficult and troubling"? Why is the visit an occasion to plead for forgiveness? What does Benedict mean, as a Catholic, when he refers to "purification of memory"? Why, if he means to ignore or somehow Christianize the Holocaust, does he not quote Christian scriptures? Is he unfamiliar with those texts, or is there some other motivation for the scriptural references in the address? Who is it in the "mire of selfishness, pusillanimity, indifference or opportunism", and what reference does this have to that place? I can continue in this manner for quite some time--there is much to the address, for those who care to consider it. You'd rather invent some debate, but for some reason you don't want to do that for others. As I said, I'm not sure what the motivating difference is.

So now you're hearing about people who lived it and even died it, Tony.

I'm actually hearing second hand, unverifiable anecdotes from a faceless guy in the internet. I find it interesting that you use the term "non-coerced" 6 times in the above missive, which leads me to believe that the people you mention must have mystic powers to be able to read the hearts of people who were not wearing brown shirts (I'm assuming they weren't wearing brown shirts because that would have made them members of the Nazis, that gang of criminals).

However devout a Catholic you are, do you really wish to defend the pope's characterization of the Germans as an innocent people bullied by a gang of criminals? When no respectable scholar maintains such a thing?

I'm sure the Holy Father, who is one of the premier scholars in the world today, will forgive you for not including him in the cadre of "respectable scholars". I'm going to counter with: "At least one respectable scholar" maintains this. His name is Pope Benedict XVI, the former Joseph (not Josef) Ratzinger.

Why?

Because I believe the Holy Father. I don't paint him with the same disrespecting brush that you do. I believe the word of the Vicar of Christ, over the anecdotal evidence of a guy with an obvious axe to grind.

Sorry.

(PS: Thanks for the link. I'm unworthy. ;))