c. 2006 Religion News Service
WARSAW, Poland _ Joseph Ratzinger was an 11-year-old with a budding interest in classical music and the Roman Catholic priesthood when the Jewish community of his hometown in southern Germany began to disappear. How clearly he remembers what led to their departure _ the smashing of windows, the flight of entire families and the deportation of others _ is not known.
This Sunday (May 28), however, he will come face-to-face with such carnage when he passes through the gates of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz as Pope Benedict XVI.
Unlike his predecessor, John Paul II, Benedict will not be entering the camp as a hero of anti-Nazi resistance during World War II. Benedict’s youth was spent on the other side of the battle lines, witnessing the rise of Adolf Hitler, wearing the regime’s uniform and eventually coping with its horrific consequences.
“He belongs to a generation of Germans that lived through Nazism. Psychologically that’s not something easy to deal with,” said the Rev. Adam Zak, former rector of the Jesuit College in Krakow, near Auschwitz.
Benedict, a pope noted for his depth of thought rather than his expression of human emotion, has invoked the Holocaust on several occasions to illustrate evil in its ugliest and most modern form. How it has impacted him on a personal level is less clear.
The pope was only 5 years old when Hitler swept to power, but the consequences of the Nazi regime would form the prism through which he would filter much of his thinking in subsequent years.
As a teenager, Ratzinger was forced to enroll in the Hitler Youth movement. In the final years of World War II he was drafted into Germany’s military; he never saw battle, but witnessed scores of Hungarian Jews being shipped to death camps. When the war ended, Ratzinger returned home to Bavaria and entered the seminary.
What emerged from these experiences, according to Benedict’s biographer John L. Allen Jr., was the core belief that European Catholicism represented the only true challenge to the hegemony of Nazi totalitarianism.
“From our own experience we now knew what was meant by the `gates of Hell,’ and we could also see with our own eyes that the house built on rock had stood firm,” the then-Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in his 1998 memoir, “Milestones.”
In order for the church to resist such powerful influences, however, it needs to remain pure in its teachings _ a concept that Benedict pushed throughout his tenure as the Vatican’s theological watchdog under John Paul. In his 2000 biography “Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican’s Enforcer of the Faith,” Allen concluded that the then-cardinal “believes the best antidote to political totalitarianism is ecclesial totalitarianism.”
Benedict’s four-day visit to Poland, of course, was not conceived as a trip down memory lane, but as a way to pay homage to John Paul. Benedict will retrace his predecessor’s life in a series of highly choreographed visits to John Paul’s stamping grounds. He will visit Wadowice, the place of John Paul’s birth, and Krakow, where John Paul served as archbishop before becoming pope in 1978. During that visit, Benedict will even appear at the “papal window” at the archbishop’s residence _ just as John Paul did, regaling the Polish public with jokes.
After touching down in Warsaw on Thursday (May 25), however, Benedict stressed that his tribute “is no mere sentimental journey” but rather a challenge to Poles to “stand firm in your faith,” defending the conservative values espoused by John Paul from a rising tide of European secularism and a perceived indifference to moral values.
That cultural trend is what Benedict characterized as a creeping “dictatorship of relativism” in a famous speech prior to his election as pope. Addressing the Polish clergy at the Basilica of St. John the Baptist in downtown Warsaw hours after his arrival in Poland, he again took up the theme of “the temptations of relativism.”
This time, however, Benedict drew a connection between relativistic thought and the “influence of totalitarianism” that Nazi and Soviet occupations once exerted on the Polish clergy. Whether confronting 20th century totalitarians or 21st century relativism, Benedict said, the priesthood cannot downplay its identity or “hide under an external mask.”
(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)
Cultural relativism is not the only force creeping into Polish Catholicism. In recent months the Vatican has grown increasingly concerned that the country’s Radio Maryja Catholic station _ with a daily audience of more than 1 million _ is espousing the views of Poland’s radical right, some of them deeply anti-Semitic.
In March, one of the station’s commentators accused Polish Jews of promoting a “Holocaust industry” aimed at “trying to force our government to pay extortion money disguised as `compensation payments”’ for property lost during and after World War II.
Radio Maryja’s public following has alarmed the surviving members of Poland’s Jewish community. According to Stanislaw Krajewski, chairman of Poland’s Council of Christians and Jews, the station has a growing audience among Poland’s elderly and uneducated classes, in which anti-Semitism runs deepest.
Leading members of Poland’s right-wing government, including President Lech Kaczynski and Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, have also granted interviews to the station. “This is very disturbing to us,” Krajewski said.
Benedict’s visit to Auschwitz, therefore, comes at a key moment for the Polish public. Like many dignitaries who have come before him, Benedict will lay a wreath at the camp’s notorious “Death Wall,” where prisoners were typically executed at gunpoint.
The visit, however, is hardly pro forma.
“The camp was conceived and implemented by the Germans, and Pope Benedict is German, which I think is very relevant,” said Krajewski. “It will be interesting to see if he addresses his past.”
KRE/PH END MEICHTRY
Editors: Includes comments from the pope’s arrival in Warsaw on Thursday. Note time element (Sunday) of papal visit to Auschwitz.
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