The new Pope is Cardinal Ratzinger, now known as Pope Benedict XVI. I don't know much about the man, so I defer to my friend Joe, who is studying to be a Jesuit priest.
But please- don't call him a Nazi. He was forced into the Hitler Youth, later deserted, and has been pretty ambiguously anti-Nazi for the past six decades. But if you're gonna drop the Ratzinger-was-a-Nazi thing, you've also gotta drop the Klansman-Robert-Byrd meme, since that was a half-century ago, and long-denounced, too. Either accuse both or excuse both- either way, you can't have it both ways.
Posted by Stephen Silver at April 19, 2005 11:47 PMThere are many reasons for desertion. Did he desert because he came to oppose the Nazi government? Or because he (quite sensibly) didn't want to face the tender mercies of the Red Army? After all, thousands of German soldiers fled west in the hopes of being captured by the Americans or English, just like Ratzinger was.
We have only his word that it was out of protest, and considering the tremendous incentive to lie, I'm not buying it.
Posted by: Bill McCabe at April 20, 2005 12:02 AMSomething to consider: Mr. Pope was forced into the Nazis, while Mr. Byrd was not forced into the Klan.
Posted by: jordan at April 20, 2005 01:03 AMToo second jordan's comment, everything I have read concerning Benedict and the Nazis uses the word compulsory. I think there is a huge difference between being required to join the Hitler Youth and it being societally acceptable, the norm, to join the Clan.
Besides what should Benedict have done? The guy was 14.
Steve wrote:
"... But if you're gonna drop the Ratzinger-was-a-Nazi thing, you've also gotta drop the Klansman-Robert-Byrd meme, since that was a half-century ago, and long-denounced, too..."
The two are hardly comparable: compulsory membership of a 14 year old boy in the Hitler Youth and later, compulsory enlistment in the Wehrmacht at 17 or 18 (from which he deserted), can hardly be equated with an educated adult voluntarily joining a hategroup in the U.S. during the height of its days of lynchings and other domestic terrorism. Byrd is a national disgrace.