Benedict XVI: Intent on uprooting
remaining traces of Nazism
by SALVATORE IZZO
VATICAN CITY, Aug. 9 (Translated from AGI) - Just as Papa Wojtyla saw his ascent to the papacy as an opportunity to call on Poles to recover their dignity that had been trampled on by the Communist regime, so it seems the German Pope feels called on to uproot any remaining traces of Nazism.
He confirmed this again today at the Angelus by linking the Nazi concentration camps to the nihilism in contemporary society - reinforcing at the same time the new alarm he sounded last Wednesday at the General Audience against the 'dictatorship of relativism' which exalts individual freedom as the ultimate right and does not respect the sacredness of life.
"The Nazi camps, like very extermination camp, can be considered extreme symbols of evil, of the hell which opens on earth when man forgets God and substitutes himself, usurping God's right to decide what is good and bad, the right over life and death," Benedict XVI said today, remembering the two Auschwitz martyrs canonized by his predecessor, Edith Stein and Maximilian Kolbe.
"Unfortunately," he continued, "this sad phenomenon is not limited to the concentration camps. These camps are rather the culminating point of an ample and widespread reality, often without fixed boundaries".
[Izzo quotes more from the Pope's Angelus discourse today, translated in full two posts above.]
In the past several months, Benedict XVI has had many occasions to denounce the ideology that resulted in the Shoah and the Second World War, but also caused so much suffering for the German nation.
"The Shoah leads mankind to reflect on the unforeseeable power of evil when it conquers the heart of man", he said at the General Audience of Jan. 28, 2009.
"The cry of the Holocaust victims still echoes in our hearts, a cry that rises against every act of injustice and violence. It is the cry of Abel which rises to the Almighty", he said during his visit to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem on May 11.
And to indicate how dehumanizing was the folly of Nazism, he exclaimed, "Try as one might, one can never take away the name of a fellow human being".
All this, of course, Benedict had previously acknowledged lucidly during his trip to Poland in May 2006, when at Auschwitz-Birkenau, he reiterated the Psalmist's cry to a God who appeared 'silent and absent'.
Three years later, on leaving Israel after his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he recalled the emotion of "that visit three years ago to the death camp of Auschwitz, where so many Jews - mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, friends - were brutally exterminated under a Godless regime which propagated an ideology of anti-Semitism and hate".
"That horrifying chapter of history," he said, "should never be forgotten nor denied".
The Pope has also spoken of Nazism from his personal experience. "Our life was marked by suffering under Nazism and the war", he said on January 17, during a concert honoring his brother Georg on his 85th birthday.
The Ratzingers were victims, like many others in Germany, of the Nazi death machine against "the sick and the defective". A cousin, who was about the age of Joseph and Georg, but born with Downs syndrome, was taken away from his parents' house - on the basis of a Nazi law that prohibited handicapped children from living with their parents - and never seen again. Despite the vigorous protests of his family, the Nazi agents were inflexible. Much later, the family was simply informed that the boy had died.
Barely a month after the January concert, meeting with the Pontifical Academy for Life which had held a symposium on the new frontiers in genetics, the Pope forcefully denounced any return to forms of eugenics and euthanasia that the world had known since the days of ancient Rome, where handicapped babies were tossed to their death from the Tarpe rocks, down to the infamous annals of Nazi Germany.
In today's society, he said to the scientists then, "there is a tendency to favor a person's operational capacity, his efficiency, perfection and physical beauty, to the detriment of other dimensions of existence which are considered unworthy of life".
"This weakens the respect that is due to every human being, even in the presence of a developmental defect or a genetic deformity that may manifest itself during his lifetime, while penalizing, sometimes from their conception, those children whose lives are deemed not worthy to be lived".
The Pope likewise recalled German suffering during the Nazi regime during his trip to Africa in March.
Arriving in Angola, which is only a few years away from the end of a 27-year-long civil war, he said, "I come from a country where peace and brotherhood are dear to the hearts of all citizens, particularly those, like me, who have known war and the division of brothers belonging to the same nation because of a devastating and inhuman ideology which, under the guise of dreams and illusions, imposed a yoke of oppression on human beings".
In his homily at the Chrismal Mass of Maundy Thursday this year, the Pontiff revealed his apprehensions about the return of the specter of Nazism in other forms: such as the exaltation of individual freedom which dominates contemporary culture, with its roots in a dangerous vision of man, that of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophy inspired Nazism.
The Pope's denunciation drew from the observation that 'prevailing opinion' is often "the criterion against which we measure ourselves" and asks "Do we not perhaps remain, when all is said and done, mired in the superficiality in which people today are generally caught up?"
Thus any cultural abomination, starting with the justification of eugenics, risks 'passing' into today's mentality without anyone trying to impede it.
"Nietzsche scoffed at humility and obedience as the virtues of slaves, a source of repression," he pointed out. "He replaced them with pride and man’s absolute freedom".
Finally, he returned to warn against 'evil teachers' in his homily at the Easter Vigil - "people who spread around themselves an atmosphere like a stagnant pool of stale or even poisoned water".
Italian Jewish organization
welcomes Pope's words
against Nazism
ROME, Aug. 9 (Translated from ANSA) - "The Pope's words today appear as an even more unequivocal and conclusive condemnation of the Shoah and any other form of genocide and persecution", said Renzo Gattegna, president of the Unione delle Comunita Ebraiche Italiana (UCEI) (Union of Italian Jewish Communities).
"The words take on a particular significance because they were not said, as on other occasions, because of contingent facts, but rather as a profound historical and theological reflection," he added.
[He is saying in other words that the Pope was not speaking 'defensively' but 'unprovoked' - as though the Pope needs any provocation to share his reflections on fundamental questions. And as though Benedict XVI/Joseph Ratzinger had been any less unequivocal and conclusive in his views about Nazism and the Jews!]
"Benedict XVI has already expressed himself last spring with clarity and firmness - reiterated with his visit to Israel and his commitment to visit teh Rome Synagogue - when he spoke to belie and delegitimize the positions expressed by those who want to deny the Shoah or minimize the gravity of the attempt to totally exterminate the Jewish people," Gattegna said.
He concluded: "His statements today should put an end to various theories or interpretations
[presumably about Benedict XVI's personal beliefs about Nazism, anti-Semitism and the Jews].
I suppose we must welcome Mr. Gattegna's unsolicited commendation, and trust he made it in good faith, while dismissing the least suspicion that he is in any way patronizing of the Pope. But I fear that other Jews may not share his conclusion that this should close the book about the doubts they express at every possible occasion on the Pope's own good faith with respect to the Jews.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 10/08/2009 15:00]