Pope Benedict XVI was a conservative pope, who pushed the Catholic Church backwards in his eight years as the pope. He will be mostly known for being the first pontiff to step down in 600 years, but I hope he will also be remembered for the evils that he stood for, and never had to face the consequences of.
Pope Benedict XVI was involved in covering up the massive child abuse happening in the Catholic Church, both as the Pope, and before then, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Archbishop of Munich and Freising. He also fought against women’s right to choose, and against same-sex marriage.
He followed Karol Wojtyła, Pope John Paul II, who also was deeply conservative, and was lucky enough to die before the Catholic Churches organized cover-ups of child abuse was widely known. He helped Pope John Paul II implement/confirm the conservative politics that the Catholic Church is known for today. As the Guardian writes:
In doctrinal terms, Benedict spent his time in charge tweaking the legacy of the 27 years of the Polish pontiff. The conservative settlement that John Paul had imposed, with Cardinal Ratzinger’s able and unswerving assistance, on the great theological battles that had followed the reforming second Vatican council of the 1960s remained fundamentally undisturbed during Benedict’s reign. The victories already achieved in the last decades of the 20th century over more liberal Catholic voices over questions of sexual morality, clerical celibacy, the place of women and religious freedom were, as far as Benedict was concerned, secure. His pontificate, then, is best seen as an extended postscript to the one that had gone before.
My only regret about his death, is that he never had to answer for his actions in the past.
The good news is that Tim Minchin’s Pope Song will probably get a revival.
@ ^ moarscienceplz : Truth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB958pxquj0
WARNING :Swearing. Just a little..
Good that he’s dead. Shame he never faced justice.
Not sure if I hope Pell convicted by a jury beyond reasobnable doubt & still sheltered by the Vatican follows soon or not..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtHOmforqxk
Oh & yeah Benedict was literally a member of the Hitler Youth too..
https://abcnews.go.com/International/pope-benedict-dogged-nazi-past-achievements-jewish-relations/story?id=18469350
I mean, yeah, he was young then and it was compulsory but still.. standards for Pope should maybe be higher if we talk of ethics and not what’s their ideological dogma?
Uh, just what the hell is it supposed to mean that “great theological battles … remained fundamentally undisturbed”?
Stevor @ # 2: … Benedict was literally a member of the Hitler Youth too.
In which role Ratzinger served in anti-aircraft batteries, making him the only Pope known to have fired high explosives against US & British troops.
He also helped guard POW camps, which raises a number of obvious further questions. When the Wehrmacht dissolved, young Ratzinger was among the last to desert. The promised SS scholarship to a Catholic seminary which may have motivated him to join the Hitlerjungen in the first place was long moot, as everybody but the fanatics could see.
Clearly, our young priest-to-be could not possibly have joined the Bavarian antifa/resistance, such as it was: they included girls…
@ ^ Pierce R. Butler : Wow. Did not know that. That does make it a lot worse. Not just reluctant support role because mandatory and would’ve been punished as excused away by some Catholics & apologists but actual combat against anti-fascists and guarding POW camps so knowing what was happening there. Thanks. Do you have a source for that please?
StevoR @ # 5 – Fair question, but so far I’m coming up blank. I read up on Frau Ratzinger’s little boy Josef throughout and after his reign, and feel fairly confident I’d seen what I relayed here confirmed – but so far have struck out with email archives, web, file storage, & bookshelf searches.
Ah, hold on: just found an email relaying an item from a long-gone but (I thought) intelligent blog called bigbrassblog.com – apparently still present online though unupdated since 2011, but lacking the 4/18/05 article in question. Per bbb:
So that, if correct, zaps my false recall of Josef R as a hardcore dead-ender. He turned 18 shortly before the Reich fell, and had no good choices open.
For the “Bavarian antifa/resistance, such as it was” see Edelweiss Pirates & related links.
John Hopkins prof Vicente Navarro in CounterPunch:
Per (uh-oh) False Noise,
StevoR @ # 5 – My reply included three links, apparently enough to throw it into moderation. With luck, our esteemed host will let it out mañana, blockquote blunder and all…
Hmm – well hell.
Slightly reorganized, the first part of my earlier reply:
StevoR @ # 5 – Fair question, but so far I’m coming up blank. I read up on Frau Ratzinger’s little boy Josef throughout and after his reign, and feel fairly confident I’d seen what I relayed here confirmed – but so far have struck out with email archives, web, file storage, & bookshelf searches.
Ah, hold on: just found an email relaying an item from a long-gone but (I thought) intelligent blog called bigbrassblog.com – apparently still present online though unupdated since 2011, but lacking the 4/18/05 article in question. Per bbb:
So that, if correct, zaps my false recall of Josef R as a hardcore dead-ender. He turned 18 shortly before the Reich fell, and had no good choices open.
John Hopkins prof Vicente Navarro in CounterPunch:
Oops, left out link in # 8: John Hopkins prof Vicente Navarro in CounterPunch:
Per (uh-oh) False Noise,
… which tends to support my suspicion that bigbrassblog got that desertion year wrong.
For the “Bavarian antifa/resistance, such as it was” see Edelweiss Pirates & related links.
The bigbrassblog article cited in my @ 8 apparently cites a hyperchristian blog under the name of remnantsofgod.com, which in turn cited The Sunday Times of 4/17/05, itself behind a paywall.
Sorry for the delay in moderation – I am suffering a bit of jetlag at the moment, so my sleep pattern is weird, and unfortunately led to you comment being in moderation for a while
‘t’allright – looks like I’m just mumbling to myself anyway.
There is no evidence that Ratzinger was a Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer.
No, but there’s plenty of evidence that his Church was not merely passive and powerless in the face of Nazi aggression and atrocities, but in many cases knowingly supportive of same and refraining from open criticism of atrocities that they knew were happening. Also, the Church — like many other institutions all over Europe — never got off the lazy automatic anti-Semitism bandwagon. See “The Pope’s Many Silences,” New York Review of Books, 20/10/2022. (And yes, they did petition to have a few thousand Jewish-Catholics set free here and there, while studiously avoiding any mention of the fate that awaited millions of others.)
The victories already achieved in the last decades of the 20th century over more liberal Catholic voices over questions of sexual morality, clerical celibacy, the place of women and religious freedom were, as far as Benedict was concerned, secure.
Yeah, all those liberals who could have taken a bolder stand against tyranny, bigotry, destructive capitalism, AND sexual abuse by clergy, got purged; which made the Church an even more pathetic, useless, reactionary backwater than it was before.
Apparently it’s not true, as Ratzinger’s apologists have claimed, that membership of the Hitler Jugend was compulsory. Following Ratzinger’s death, there was a letter in the Guardian from the daughter of someone who was a couple of years senior to Ratzinger, and refused his father’s pleas to join – the father was concerned for his safety.