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April 19, 2005
Men of Faith.
I don't give religion a lot of thought, but the liberal media has been shoving a certain lifestyle in my face for the last few weeks, so I've been taking a new look.
The new Pope is Joseph Ratzinger, the first German to hold the office in several hundred years, I'm told. As a teenager, he was a member of Hitler Youth and later helped guard a factory that used slave labor.
Research indicates that membership in Hitler Youth was compulsory after a certain point. Also in Ratzinger's defense, he did desert in 1944, spending the end of the war in a POW camp.
So much for that "a fat pope follows a thin pope" crap. The last pope was a writer/actor who endured the Nazi occupation of Poland by penning and appearing in anti-fascist productions. Perhaps appropriately, Ratzinger was JP II's Tom DeLay -- an enforcer with nicknames like "the Panzer cardinal" and "God's Own Rottweiler."
I'm not trying to pull the new guy down. But I can't believe that in an organization the size of the Roman Catholic church, they couldn't find someone who (however young) didn't literally wear a brown shirt or receive orders to smack down Nazi prisoners who stepped out of line.
I had my problems with John Paul II, but he was the first Pope to visit a Roman synagogue or to acknowledge that the church could have done a mitzvah for European Jewry, and instead chose not to. All things are relative, including my praise for religious figures.
I shouldn't be so rough on Benedictus XVI, considering the story of Argentine Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio. He's alleged to have had two priests kidnapped. Don't get me started on Cardinal Law.
I think of myself as a somewhat moral person. I'm certainly not doctrinaire enough to play spiritual leader to Robert Novak and Mel Gibson, but I've never had to deny a kidnapping beef, either.
If asked, I would have stuck it out for a few months while they found a more acceptable choice. If they were seeking a truly transitional pope, I just think they missed an opportunity.
Posted by Your Protagonist at April 19, 2005 11:29 AM