Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Achtung, Benny

Pardon me if I'm not ready to accept Benedict the Sixteenth's self-serving version of events during WWII. I'm not saying it's false; I'm saying just because he says it doesn't make it so:

Though his family made no public show of opposition -- in fact, one of his great uncles had written a series of crudely anti-Semitic books -- Ratzinger has described his father as opposing Nazism, largely as an outgrowth of his faith. "My father was one who with unfailing clairvoyance saw that a victory of Hitler's would not be a victory for Germany but rather a victory for the Antichrist," he wrote in his 1998 memoir, "Milestones."

...

Ratzinger entered a seminary in 1939, following in the footsteps of his older brother Georg, who also became a priest. But in 1943 he was conscripted along with his entire class into the antiaircraft corps and sent to defend a factory that made aircraft engines. He told Time magazine in 1993 that a badly infected finger prevented him from ever firing a shot.

Guess he's not ambidexterous.

Since I'm not Catholic and don't believe the Holy Mother Church's mumbo jumbo, it doesn't matter to me if their Pope is a war hero or a war criminal.

As Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center said, "Membership in the Hitler Youth doesn't disqualify someone from being pope." Can't argue with that.

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