While listening today to the off-camera emcee at Yad Vashem introducing the 'numbers' on the program for the ceremony, I was impressed in a number of ways by the insistent message in what should otherwise be straightforward announcement (along the lines of "Now we wil hear from Pope Benedict") - almost every introduction mentioned the unspeakable outrage committed by "the German Nazi crminals and their collaborators.... who murdered six million Jews" in World War II (only, the language was consistently stronger than my paraphrase, and declaimed with the requisite emotion).
But instead of being annoyed by the relentless repetition, it struck me that it was a measure of the overriding passion felt by most Jews - certainly by the authorities of Yad Vashem - about the Holocaust.
(Even if I am nagged by the thought that perhaps there was undue emphasis on 'German' - he could simply have said Nazi - and on 'their collaborators' - was it, I am thinking paranoically, a dig at Pius XIII?]
But now comes the reactions of some of those who sat there with the Pope, who, as expected, fault him for not saying enough. HE WILL NEVER SAY ENOUGH AS FAR AS THEY ARE CONCERNED, and I find their absolute faultfinding and perpetual rancor truly sickening.
Everyone with a cause to advocate - Jordanian radicals, Palestinian extremists, the high priests of Shoah-as-sacrosanct-quasi-religion, homosexual-pandering liberal Eurocrats, bleeding-heart condom-pushing liberals - have discovered, as Italy's B-class entertainers know too well, that the fastest, surest way to get themselves into the headlines is to criticize/denounce/deride/oppose/contradict the Pope.
And MSM is only too ready to accomodate them.
Pope, in Israel, honors Holocaust dead
By Philip Pullella and Ari Rabinovitch
JERUSALEM, May 11 (Reuters) – German-born Pope Benedict on Monday made an emotional visit to Israel's memorial to victims of the Holocaust and said their suffering could not be denied, but some Jewish leaders said his comments did not go far enough.
Benedict visited the somber Hall of Remembrance of the Yad Vashem memorial, spoke to survivors, rekindled an eternal flame and laid a wreath of yellow and white flowers over a slab of stone covering victims' ashes.
He spoke of the "horrific tragedy of the Shoah," the Hebrew term for the Holocaust, and called it an atrocity that had disgraced mankind and must never be repeated.
"May the names of these victims never perish. May their suffering never be denied, belittled or forgotten," he said.
Catholic-Jewish relations soured in January when Benedict lifted the excommunication of four traditionalist bishops, including one who had denied the Holocaust.
Israel's former chief rabbi Israel Meir Lau, who attended Monday's service, expressed disappointment that the Pope was not more explicit in his comments.
"There certainly was no apology expressed here," he said. There was no "expression of empathy with the sorrow."
[Apology for what? And in behalf of whom? His only relation to the Holocaust is that he is German and the Nazis were German. What did they expect him to do at Yad Vashem? Tell the world he is ashamed to be German because the Nazis were German? And what 'empathy for the sorrow'? Was not the entire address empathy of the most sincere kind?]
The Pope had made a moving speech, Lau said, but "something was missing.
There was no mention of the Germans or the Nazis who participated in the butchery, nor a word of regret."
[He did not have to mention the Nazis and the Germans - the emcee took care of that, everytime he spoke. And is there anyone who does not know that the Nazis were responsible for the Holocaust and that they were Germans? As for regret, when someone says This should never be allowed to happen again', is that not stronger than mere regret?]
Yad Vashem director Avner Shalev-Yad said the Pope should have spoken of his own German background at the memorial.
[Why? He is not there to promote himself. He is there as the Vicar of Christ and head of the Catholic Church.]
"He stood here as a Pope, but on the other hand he is a human being, and he had that experience, and I think the world expected he would have shared part of that awful experience in his address," he said.
[SHOULDA, WOULDA, COULDA - this carping will never stop. Is there anything in Judaism that precludes against the exercise of what Christians call charity? Apparently, militant Jews like these critics of the Pope are stuck at the Mosaic law of 'an eye for an eye', but I doubt that they would be satisfied even if the Pope gouged out his own eyes in 'symbolic atonement'.]
Born Joseph Ratzinger in Bavaria in 1927, Pope Benedict was a member of the Hitler Youth when enrolment was compulsory, although
biographers say he was never a Nazi party member or a supporter of Hitler.
[As if without what 'biographers say', Pulella would consider that Ratzinger could have been a Nazi party member or a supporter of Hitler. Dear Lord, what does it take for people like Pulella to show some moral fiber once in a whiule?]
During the service in the hall, whose floor is inscribed with the names of 22 of the most infamous of the Nazi camps, the stone walls echoed with the voice of a cantor chanting a Jewish prayer for the dead. Benedict chatted with six elderly Holocaust survivors.
"I told the Pope he was born in Germany but I don't look at him as a German but as a human being and head of the Catholic Church," said survivor Ed Mosberg, a Jew who was born in Poland and now lives in the United States.
"But I told him that he knows that the Holocaust happened and I asked him to condemn all the deniers," Mosberg said.
Since the affair of Holocaust-denying bishop Richard Williamson exploded in January, the Pope has several times said there is no room for Holocaust deniers in the Church.
After the outcry over the lifting of Williamson's excommunication, the Vatican said it had not known enough about the British bishop's past.
Israel's President Shimon Peres, who also attended the Yad Vashem service, told the Pope earlier at the airport arrival ceremony that he could contribute to peace in the Middle East.
At the airport, the Pope called for a "just resolution" of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict "so that both peoples may live in peace in a homeland of their own, within secure and internationally recognized borders."
The call highlighted differences with Israel's new, right-leaning government. Since becoming prime minister six weeks ago, Benjamin Netanyahu has not endorsed creation of a Palestinian state, a U.S. and Arab priority. Netanyahu says he puts Israel's security first.
At the Pope's last event on Monday night, a senior Palestinian Muslim cleric fiercely denounced Israeli policy in Jerusalem in the presence of the pope and appealed to the Pope to help end what he called the "crimes" of the Jewish state.
The speech, at the end of a meeting between the Pope and Christian, Muslim and Jewish clergy engaged in contacts among the three main religions in Jerusalem, angered both the Vatican and Israel's chief rabbinate, which said it would boycott the dialogue forum until the Palestinians barred the cleric.
(Additional reporting by Reuters Jerusalem bureau staff; editing by Andrew Roche)
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 11/05/2009 23:59]