What was Pope Benedict Thinking?

Perhaps the Pope also thinks the Holocaust didn't happen, since he UN-excomunicated Richard Williamson - a priest who "believes there were no gas chambers" -- I find that odd (both what the Pope did and what Williamson believes), since there is tangible, concrete information readily available proving Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen really happened. Where has this guy Williamson been hiding? And why does the Pope think Williamson is ok? Is it because the Pope was a member of the "Hitler Youth?"  Is he trying to punish the Israelis for the Gaza bombardment?

Whatever the reason.  It seems like either Benedict has lost his reason; or he has a touch of evil in him.

link to photo

Pope stirs up Jewish fury over bishop

The Vatican is reinstating a British priest who denies millions died at the hands of the Nazis

* Tom Kington in Rome and Jamie Doward
* The Observer, Sunday 25 January 2009

Tension between the Vatican and Jewish groups looked set to explode yesterday after Pope Benedict XVI rehabilitated a British bishop who has claimed no Jews died in gas chambers during the second world war.

Benedict yesterday welcomed back into the Roman Catholic Church Richard Williamson and three other men who were excommunicated in 1988 after being ordained without Vatican permission. The three had been appointed by breakaway French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. The Vatican decree issued yesterday spoke of overcoming the "scandal of divisiveness" and seeking reconciliation with Lefebvre's conservative order, the Society of Saint Pius X, which opposes the modernisation of Catholic doctrine.

But Jewish groups have warned the Pope that the decision could damage Catholic-Jewish relations after Williamson claimed in an interview, broadcast last week, that historical evidence "is hugely against six million having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler ... I believe there were no gas chambers".

Shimon Samuels, of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris, said he understood the German-born pope's desire for Christian unity but said Benedict could have excluded Williamson, whose return to the church will "cost" the Vatican politically...more

What do you do if your father was a monster?

A new PBS documentary deals with this theme on Sunday night, December 10.

Many of us like to think our parents were perfect.  It is hard to see they have faults, sometimes abominable ones.  

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"Your father was a monster"

In the PBS documentary "Inheritance," the daughter of Nazi murderer Amon Goeth struggles to accept an unbearable legacy.

By Heather Havrilesky



Dec. 10, 2008 | Monika Hertwig knew very little about her father until she went to see Steven Spielberg's film "Schindler's List." According to Hertwig, no one in Germany talked about the Second World War. Her grandmother had told her, when she was 11, that her father was hanged for killing Jews as the head of the Plaszow concentration camp in Krakow, Poland. But she didn't fully grasp her father's unconscionable acts until 1993, when Spielberg's film came out. The moment Ralph Fiennes' character was introduced, Hertwig recognized him. Then she sat in the dark for hours, feeling, in her words, "sick with the truth."

In the POV documentary "Inheritance" (premieres 9 p.m. Dec. 10 on PBS), filmmaker James Moll unveils the story of how Hertwig, now in her 60s, discovered the unthinkable horrors of her father's legacy. She never knew her father, who died when she was 1 year old, and she'd never gotten along with her mother, who once told her in anger that she was just like her father and would die like him, too. But when Hertwig saw a German documentary about the Holocaust featuring a woman named Helen Jonas who'd been a servant in Amon Goeth's house, Hertwig became intent on meeting Jonas to learn more about her father and to understand why her mother had stayed by his side, as his mistress, during those years...more

The Blind Pope

Parable of the Blind, detail of three blind men, 1568
Pieter the Elder Bruegel (from the Bridgeman Art Library)


In the article below by James Carroll at the WP he discusses Pope Benedict's fuzzy position on the Holocaust. As previously stated, there are also other things to worry about when assessing Pope Benedict (see dreamacttexas post "A Plum Opportunity for the Pope" - April 14, 2008).

The Catholic Church is known for having ignored the existence of the Nazi death camps. By visiting a synagogue Benedict may have opened his eyes a bit, but he is still acting as though he is legally blind.


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What Benedict Hasn't Said About the Holocaust
James Carroll
Washington Post
April 17, 2008

Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to a synagogue in New York this week will evoke his visit to the oldest synagogue in Germany nearly three years ago. On that occasion, addressing leaders of Cologne’s Jewish community, Pope Benedict properly addressed the question of the Shoah. He deplored Hitler’s campaign to eliminate the Jewish people, and he condemned Nazi antisemitism – words which still need to be spoken. That this Catholic leader is himself a German, having had his own youthful glimpse of Hitler’s death-regime, made his remembrance of that history all the more compelling.

Yet there was something troubling in what Pope Benedict said on that occasion. As it happened, I was in Cologne while the pontiff was there. With the filmmaker Oren Jacoby, I was at work on a documentary film based on my book “Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews – A History.” We were filming in the Rhineland because so much of that history was centered there. Europe’s first pogroms occurred in the 11th century when mobs poured from the Cologne cathedral on Good Friday looking for “Christ-killers.” Blood libel charges arose there during the plagues of the 14th century. The Dreyfus family had its origins nearby, as did the German Catholic celebrations of the 1933 treaty between the Vatican and the Third Reich. Nazi antisemitism had its own diabolical character, but it built on the deep-seated contempt for Jews that had become second nature to Christians, and even a shallow acquaintance with German history (both Lutheran and Catholic) shows that.

But in condemning Nazi antisemitism before that Jewish congregation in Cologne, Pope Benedict defined it univocally as having been “born of neo-paganism.” That was true, a reference to the odd mysticism that underwrote the Teutonic myths on which claims for Aryan racial superiority rested. But Nazi hatred of Jews was born of two parents, and the other one – the long history of Christian anti-Judaism – the pope did not mention. This was not a slight omission. It is urgently important, in going forward into the 21st century, that the context out of which the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people grew, and within which it nearly succeeded, not be forgotten. The crimes of Hitler were not the crimes of Christianity, but the Final Solution depended, both for the recruitment of active perpetrators and for the passivity of a continent’s worth of bystanders, on the ingrained anti-Jewishness of Christian theology, liturgy, and tradition. You would not know that from what the pope said in the Synagogue in Cologne...


for complete WP article click here