Pope Benedict XVI - the ex-Nazi

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(Valencia, Spain) July 8, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI arrived in Spain SaturdayThe pope wasted no time in defending the Vatican's vision of marriage as a union of man and woman. In arrival remarks he said ``the family is a unique institution in God's plan, and the church cannot fail to proclaim and promote its fundamental importance.''Earlier Spain's King Juan Carlos, Queen Sofia and Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero greeted the pope and a military band played the national anthems of the Vatican and Spain.Shortly after arriving the pope was to ride into town in his bullet-proof ``pope mobile'' to pray at the station where Spain's worst-ever subway accident occurred on Monday. Crowds awaited the pope at the ill-fated Jesus subway station in the city center.

In 1943, when he was 16, Ratzinger was drafted with many of his classmates into the Luftwaffenhelfer (Air Force Auxiliary) programme. After his class was released from the Corps in September 1944, Ratzinger was put to work setting up anti-tank defences in the Hungarian border area of Austria in preparation for the expected Red Army offensive. He was eventually drafted into the German army at Munich to receive basic infantry training in the nearby town of Traunstein. His unit served at various posts around the city and was never sent to the front. Ratzinger was briefly interned in an Allied prisoner-of-war camp near Ulm and was repatriated on June 19, 1945. The family was reunited when his brother, Georg, returned after being repatriated from a prisoner-of-war camp in Italy.

Earlier in June, Pope Benedict visited Auschwitz and confirmed his anti-Jewish stance and denial of German's responsibility for what happened at Auschwitz. It was the fault of Hitler and his criminal gang. Implied was that the Jews somehow deserved it for not converting to Christianity which Benedict audaciously claim that Hitler was attacking Christianity indirectly. History talks of a Catholic Church then as closely in collusion with Hitler Germany to annihilate the Jews. As expected, the Pope Benedict did not stop at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising nor did he make any explicit statements in condemnation of anti-Semitism. Instead, it reads more like a denial of responsiblity. Pope benedict argued that the Nazis' control of the German people in effect released the individual from responsibility for the most terrible deeds: Only Hitler and his gangs are to be blamed for the Holocaust, But no respectable scholar sees the evil of the. Nor could one plausibly maintain such a thing, given the overwhelming numbers of ordinary Germans involved that built the Nazi machine of oppression and kept it running. Yet that is Josef Ratzinger's view, a clear denial of moral responsibility.

Ratzinger's claim that the annihilation of the Jews was really just an indirect assault on Christianity is absurd and unforgivable. How degrading it is, at Auschwitz, to speak of Judaism as "the taproot of Christianity" rather than as the faith of so many who perished there! to see behind the Nazis' annihilation of six million Jews an "ultimate" motive to strike at Christianity. Worst still history speaks of the collusion of the Catholic Church with the Nazi Germany and the silence of Pope Pius XII in those days.

The Vatican also used gold plundered from Holocaust victims in Yugoslavia during the Second World War to smuggle war criminals into Latin America and the Middle East. The allegations relate to a US Treasury memo of October 1946 by Emerson Bigelow, who worked for the Treasury's monetary research unit and who received reliable information from the OSS, precursor of the CIA, on Nazi wealth held in specific Swiss accounts. Bigelow's memo claims that the Ustashas, the Nazi puppet regime of Croatia, used the Vatican to look after part of the millions of dollars' worth of gold and jewellery which they plundered from 900,000 Jews, Serbs, Croat moderates and gipsies they had put to death. the memo says that one third of the estimated 350 million Swiss francs which the Ustashas tried to remove from Yugoslavia was impounded by the British at the Austrian-Yugoslav border. The remaining 200 million "was originally held in the Vatican for safe-keeping," to keep the gold from falling into the hands of the Allies. While stating this as fact, the document also quotes rumours saying a large portion of the Vatican-held money was sent through its "pipeline" to Spain and Argentina to pay for war criminals to be smuggled out of Europe.

"I felt a deep urge to pause in a particular way before the inscription in German. It evokes the face of Edith Stein, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross: a woman, Jewish and German, who disappeared along with her sister into the black night of the Nazi-German concentration camp; as a Christian and a Jew, she accepted death with her people and for them."

Ratzinger places a specific human face on the horror of Auschwitz and the face he sees is the face of a person who left Judaism behind to become a Catholic. So many Jewish authors, actors, scientists, lawyers, doctors, politicians, artists, and musicians were murdered there. And so many rabbis. And yet the face that makes the horror real to Josef Ratzinger is the face of a Jew who converted to Catholicism, and who died not only "with" the Jews, but somehow also "for" them. How audacious, this singling out of one ex-Jew's death for special mention, an act of supposed martyrdom, of "dying for" others while everyone else around her merely "died with" each other. How disrespectful of the memories of the unconverted Jews in that gas chamber, those men, women and children who died with each other, but without the significance of Christian martyrdom. The anti-Semitic broadcasts of radio Maria (the Catholic Church's station in Poland), continues to operate unrepentently. His insulting call to the Jews, in March 2006 to convert to Christianity, "to allow themselves to be reunited in a new covenant, full and perfect accomplishment of the old Testament?" was the same demand that Hitler and the German Christians made in the 1930s, the same demand for which Jews were persecuted, murdered and burned. Sixty years have passed, but one German remained true to his anti-Jewish stance. Following the Nazi tradition, it is not surprising that Pope Benedict is against Gays as he is against Jews.

Spain has passed from being a bastion of Roman Catholicism to a predominantly lay society in less than a generation. Statistics show that while 80 percent of Spaniards still call themselves Catholics only 42 percent believe in God and 20 percent go to Mass. However, the pope visit to Valencia will draw 1 million people to this Mediterranean port city. The pope and the Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero were also scheduled to meet for what could be a difficult dialogue besides legalizing gay marriage, Zapatero's government has made it easier for Spaniards to divorce and halted a plan by a previous, conservative government to make religion classes mandatory in public schools. Unlike the past, the Pope could not call upon another inquisition. The Vatican seemed irritated that Zapatero was not planning to attend a papal Mass on Sunday.

At the Mass on Sunday 09 July 2006, Pope Benedict XVI in his final salvo against Gays, praised marriage between a man and a woman as part of God's "loving plan," defending the traditional family Sunday at a Mass in Spain. In a series of addresses after arriving from Rome, he called the family "a unique institution in God's plan" and stressed the church considers a marriage proper only if between a man and a woman. The Pope like many other leaders in the Christian faith has forgotten the gospel of Christ, and perhaps has forgotten Christ. The Gospel is not about morality and the Law. It is about Jesus, and 42% of the Spaniards do not believe in God let alone Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour. Pope Benedicts self righteous morality did not allow him to take part of the blame for the the Vatican and the role of the German people for the deaths of 6 million Jews at Auschwitz. He has forgotten that many German Gays as well were sent to Auschwitz on account of their homosexuality. There they died with the Jews. The right of Gays and the nation of Israel was created out of the blood of the martys at Auschwitz. The Gay rights and the creation of Israel in 1948 arose because they paid the ultimate price, thier lives as seeds for the survival of their cause and aspirations. The Pope will never take that away. On the contrary, soon right at his doorsteps in Rome, Gays will march down the road where the Romans used to parade their prisoners of war, to parade their victory and basic human rights which the church has sin grossly by denying them. The victory was already sealed in the heavens at the end of World World II. It took 60 years to materialized in Spain, but come it will like a rushing flood throughout Europe. However, Pope Benedict's role against the gays will not be so easily forgotten as it will usher in further decline of his church power, and authority in Europe, and even his own popularity.

Cardinal Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli (later to become Pope Pius XII) signs the Concordat between Nazi Germany and the Vatican at a formal ceremony in Rome on 20 July 1933. Nazi Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen sits at the left, Pacelli in the middle, and the Rudolf Buttmann sits at the right.

The Concordat effectively legitimized Hitler and the Nazi government to the eyes of Catholicism, Christianity, and the world.