Holy Obstacle, Batman
The Times - Did Benedict XVI need to apologise at Auschwitz? Is the Pope Catholic? By Oliver Kamm
Pope Benedict pointed at Auschwitz to literally the worst crime of our age, which was committed by those who certainly considered themselves emancipated from superstition, and the agents of supposedly scientific notions of race.
But no amount of theological reflection will render future generations immune from the atavistic forces that aimed at the destruction of every last Jew in Europe, and to which the Church certainly made a historical contribution. I have no interest at all in the fortunes of Judaism, but a great concern in the resilience of historically persecuted peoples. Only by removing the accumulated detritus of malign ideologies can that happen.
Organised religion, even in the form of so learned a man as Pope Benedict, is one of the obstacles.
Eh…
May 30th, 2006 at 7:51 pm
. . .and yet no Christians have rioted over the publication of this column.
May 30th, 2006 at 10:17 pm
…and even after ninme highlighted it with such a nifty title. Still no burning cars…
May 30th, 2006 at 10:27 pm
Thank god I’m still under the radar of those infamous online Batman web forums!
May 31st, 2006 at 2:39 am
It was the failure of organised religion to suppress “the atavistic forces that aimed at the destruction of every last Jew in Europe” that resulted in the Holocaust. Christianity explicitly confronts those forces and frees us from them - St Paul is absolutely firm about this. The secular religions of Nazism, Communism and Islam (which, let’s face it, is really about power over man, not the love of God) all relied on an atavistic appeal to the power instinct.
May 31st, 2006 at 4:21 am
A good test of the atavistic-force-fighting qualities of a religion could be the presence of the Golden Rule, or equivalent. Buddhism, Confuscianism, Christianity, Judaism, have it. Nazism, Communism and Islam don’t.
May 31st, 2006 at 5:22 am
You’ve gotta love it that the repudiation of the disgusting epithet “Jews are Christ-killers” turns out to be “Christians are Jew-killers.” And the way to prevent another stamping out of Jews is to “remove the detritus” of our “malign ideology.” I’d like to know his final solution.
I’m thinking Kamm didn’t listen to everything B16 said at Auschwitz, including this: “Deep down, those vicious criminals, by wiping out this people, wanted to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and laid down principles to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally valid. If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the God who spoke to humanity and took us to himself, then that God finally had to die and power had to belong to man alone - to those men, who thought that by force they had made themselves masters of the world. By destroying Israel, by the Shoah, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful.”
May 31st, 2006 at 7:23 am
That’s wonderful. Thanks! Could you write to The Times, please, RC2, and just point this out? Kamm would seem to have been engaged in an act of wilful misunderstanding. Atavism at work, at a guess.
May 31st, 2006 at 8:54 am
No see, it’s all so simple. If only there was no religion, man! You don’t need to read anything because you already know!