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Getting to know Benedict XVI: A Pope to be ashamed of
by Helen & Harry Highwater, Unknown News April 26, 2005
Pope Benedict XVI
We've hesitated to write what follows, because we're not very good Christians. We're political, not religious, activists, and we try to be respectful and tolerant of other people's religious beliefs. But something has to be said.
Over the week since Joseph Alois Ratzinger was chosen as Pope, we've read many articles and researched some aspects of his background, and we have yet to find much of anything in Ratzinger's résumé that's worth respecting.
Growing up in Germany, Ratzinger was a member of the Nazi Youth. When we first heard that, we immediately started Googling around to see whether he would have had any choice in the matter, growing up in the Nazi homeland. And near as we can tell, if you were youth in Germany and not Jewish, you were in the Hitler Youth. Resisting was not really an option, unless you were looking for early martyrhood. And he was 14 when he joined, so give Ratzinger a break.
Some reports say Ratzinger "resisted" the Nazis, but in reading past the headlines it seems it was his father who resisted. Young Ratzinger's "resistance" involved little more than listening to Allied radio broadcasts with the volume turned low, when listening was forbidden. Sorry, that's
not resistance.
At 16, Ratzinger's seminary class was ordered to work in anti-aircraft batteries, defending a BMW plant. They were later ordered to defend an aircraft factory at Oberpfaffenhofen, where German jet fighters were produced. He served in the German Army, drafted in December 1944 and stationed near Traunstein. He helped dig anti-tank ditches on the Austrian-Hungarian border. And he deserted in the spring of 1945, as the end of the war was approaching.
When it's required by law and/or national hysteria, people will do strange things. Ratzinger never joined the Nazi Party, and he gets points for desertion, so we won't call him "The Nazi Pope." We're more worried about what he's said and done in the many years since World War II.
The new Pope's position on AIDS: As the AIDS epidemic swept across America and the world, and more and more scientific experts recommended the use of condoms, Ratzinger reiterated long-standing church doctrine against the use of condoms.
In Ratzinger's travels, we hope this Pope is greeted with protests, not with praise.
We hope he is seen for what he is -- a mean old man in a funny-looking hat, whose day-to-day work proves daily that the Pope is as fallible as anyone else, perhaps more so.
As he makes his Papal pronouncements, our sincere prayer is that Catholics and Christians who give a damn about the teachings of Christ won't be following this God-awfulleader.
There are more than a billion Catholics in the world. Assuming that some of them obey what the Vatican says, then people have died because of Ratzinger's statements.
Commingling church and state: Ratzinger strongly believes the church should be involved in politics. "The church must make claims and demands on public law," he wrote in 1988, "and cannot simply retreat into the private sphere." So we can expect Pope Ratzinger to be an activist Pope, not just a religious figure but a political leader.
And he has already taken political stands. Abortion? He's against it. Birth control: He's against it. Equal rights for everyone? He's against it. Of course, these are the long-time positions of his church, and everyone has the right to believe what they believe. But Ratzinger wants his church's positions to be enforced by law.
Anyone who knows the Catholic Church's loooong history of torture and inquisition should support the separation of church and state. And for those who believe in a separation of church and state, it's infuriating, and way, way out of line, for the Vatican to try swinging an American election.
And that's what Ratzinger did. In his pre-Pope Vatican position, he was responsible for enforcing church doctrine for the entire world. In this authority, he wrote a July 2004 memo reminding American bishops -- and only American bishops, as the U.S. election was heating up -- that communion should not be allowed for any politicians who support abortion rights, and that any Catholic who votes for a candidate who supports abortion rights is "guilty of formal cooperation in evil," and should not be eligible for communion. It was a very thinly-veiled endorsement of George Bush in the 2004 election, and an eternal threat to Catholics who might have voted for John Kerry.
Homosexuality: Put as simply but fairly as possible, the new Pope thinks gay people don't deserve human rights. As a friend said in an email, "If this Pope has his way, the only gays in the Catholic Church will be the priests. Ba-dum-bump."
In a 1986 letter to bishops, Ratzinger said homosexuality was an "intrinsic moral evil." In 1992, he wrote that civil liberties for gays and lesbians should be "legitimately limited." Most startlingly, he wrote that when homosexuals demand civil rights, "neither the Church nor society should be surprised when... irrational and violent reactions increase." If Ratzinger is Pope, why can't Fred Phelps be a cardinal?
Inquisition:
Until his recent promotion, Ratzinger ran the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Commonly called the Holy Office, it went by a different, more familiar name until 1965: The Office of the Inquisition. Yes, seriously.
In this office, Ratzinger routinely sent edicts ordering priests, bishops, and nuns to be "silenced" -- to stop outreach to gays and lesbians, to stop questioning church positions on condoms, abortion, and AIDS, etc.
Islam: Ratzinger argued that Turkey should not be allowed to join the European Union. Why? Because it has too many Muslims, which would "dilute the Christian nature" of Europe. Are those the words of a man of God? It sounds more like something Archie Bunker said in an old episode of All In the Family.
Judaism: "We wait for the instant in which Israel will say yes to Christ." We're not Jewish and not particularly thin-skinned, but we wouldn't be surprised if Jewish people found that statement pretty damned offensive.
Helen and Harry Highwater have published Unknown News since 1997. We're a married couple sharing a byline à la Lennon and McCartney, and "I" can be either of us, or both of us. If you're consumed by curiosity, it's safe to assume the more boisterous and aggressive bits come from Helen, and anything ladylike or demure is probably Harry's work.
Pedophile priests scandal: Ratzinger's office was responsible for handling the ongoing sex scandal, involving hundreds of priests who molested children under the cover of their clerical collars. So what did Ratzinger do?
In 2001, as the decades-long pattern of priests' abuse first started to be reported, he wrote a letter to bishops reminding them that church policy since 1962 mandated that the church itself would investigate, bypassing worldly police authorities, and required victims of priestly abuse to take an oath of secrecy.
In effect, Ratzinger ordered a cover-up.
According to an article in Britain's Observer, the letter, signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, "asserted the church's right to hold its inquiries behind closed doors and keep the evidence confidential for up to 10 years after the victims reached adulthood." What the hell would you call that, if not a plain and obvious obstruction of justice?
In 2002, Ratzinger publicly stated that "less than 1% of priests are guilty of acts of this type," which sounds curiously dismissive of the problem. More reliable sources indicate that about 4% of U.S. priests have been accused, but even that statistic begs the question of how many more cases might have been reported if the church had been cooperative in such investigations, instead of defensive.
He described American news coverage of the sex scandal had been "exaggerated," as "a campaign against the church" -- which, to my mind, is a remarkably obvious and quite uncaring way to somehow make the Catholic Church the victim in the pedophile priests scandal. In our opinion, apparently disputed by Pope Ratzinger, the victims were the children, and the perpetrators were the priests -- with the support of the church hierarchy all the way to the Vatican, which knew what was happening and did all they could do to cover it up.
On seemingly every issue that has come to his desk, Ratzinger has been responsible for enforcing the orthodoxy, and sweeping problems under the rug. It was Ratzinger, as Pope John Paul II's arch-right-hand man, who argued in John Paul's ear for the oldest of old-fashioned church doctrine.
And God knows, we were never big fans of Pope John Paul II. There were things to respect about the man, and whatever his faults he had moments of courage and offered occasional inspiration. But he usually echoed a dusty dogma indistinguishable from Catholicism of eons past, which never much appealed to us.
And this new pope was where the old Pope's dust came from.
In our church, we were taught that the notion behind Christianity is to try to be Christ-like. If that's the point, then Ratzinger is a charlatan. He's Benny Hinn, or Jerry Falwell, but
there's more of the spirit of Christ in any sincere Christian, any average Methodist or Catholic or Seventh Day Adventist who reads his Bible and tries to understand the will of God, than there will ever be in Joe Ratzinger.
He now calls himself Pope Benedict XVI, but Ratzinger just isn't Pope material. He's an embarrassment to Christianity, and he has no business leading any religious meeting where a cross isn't burning in the background.
In Ratzinger's travels, we hope this Pope is greeted with protests, not with praise. We hope he is seen for what he is -- a mean old man in a funny-looking hat, whose life work proves that the Pope is as fallible as anyone else, perhaps more so. As he makes his Papal pronouncements, our sincere prayer is that Catholics and Christians who give a damn about the teachings of Christ won't be following this God-awful leader.
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