POPE ELOPES! (Indeed)

The election of a new Pope has generated much speculation concerning his inclinations to govern what may be the ungovernable. The gist of it seems to be we shall have to wait and see. Benedict brings a background of brilliant theology and strict discipline to a Curia that cheers for him and to a clergy and laity that will likely to follow their 1.7 billion consciences rather sign on to the latest from Rome. This piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education, courtesy of Denis Dutton and his reliably excellent Arts & Letters.

CRITIC AT LARGE
The Pope's Sins of Omission
By CARLIN ROMANO
Literary tradition holds that Dorothy Parker once aced an Algonquin Round Table contest to knock out the most sensational possible snap headline. Her winner? "Pope Elopes!"
She'd probably still win for pith. Who but historians familiar with the likes of Sergius III (904-11) -- his mistress Marozia the Theophylact bore him an illegitimate son whom she later appointed as John XI (931-36) -- would question the shock value? But international newspapers, if not the usual scaredy-pants American ones when it comes to the Roman Catholic Church, gave Parker a run for her money last month.
"White Smoke, Black Past," trumpeted the headline in Israel's Yediot Aharonot. "From Hitler Youth to ... Papa Ratzi" roared London's Sun, indelicately describing Cardinal Ratzinger as an "ex-World War II enemy soldier." German papers proved harshest on his doctrinal present and personality. "Ratzinger is the Counter-Reformation personified," asserted the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Berliner Zeitung described his hold on the Vatican as "autocratic, authoritarian," deeming the new pope "as shrewd as a serpent." Die Tageszeitung described him as a "reactionary churchman" who "will try to seal the bulkheads of the Holy Roman Church from the modern world."
To Benedict XVI's post-ascension claim that he sees himself as a "simple humble worker in the Lord's vineyard," Die Tageszeitung commented, "Simple he is not, humble hardly." A Der Spiegel poll revealed that a plurality of Germans didn't want him to be pope -- he's unpopular for blocking German priests from counseling pregnant women and keeping German Catholics from sharing communion with Lutherans.
Are the invectives fair? Yes or no, they implicate the new pope's character, not just his theological beliefs. Ratzinger's elevation to Pope Benedict XVI propelled two controversial parts of his life into the spotlight. The first was his membership as a young man in the Hitler Youth, then in the antiaircraft youth division of the Wehrmacht, later in the Wehrmacht infantry itself.
The second was his 24 years as prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or CDF, charged with investigating and sometimes punishing Catholic faculty members and priests accused of departing from Church teachings. That office directly descends from the Roman Inquisition that burned at the stake approximately 160 people, including the philosopher Giordano Bruno, between 1542 and 1761.
A former professor at four German universities, Ratzinger might best be seen as the theology-department chair who makes it to university president. He probably looks on all journalism as unscholarly by definition, however happy he may be to see criticism of his beliefs on birth control or homosexuality balanced by appreciation for the beauty of Vatican ritual and adjectives about his character, such as "shy" and "soft-spoken."
As the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II arrives in Europe, it's appropriate to bring bookish context to a bookish man. Ratzinger's own autobiographical accounts, in his Salt of the Earth (Ignatius Press, 1997) and Milestones: Memoirs, 1927-77 (Ignatius Press, 1998), throw light on his personality, especially when juxtaposed with other sources.
Almost all information on Ratzinger's wartime experiences comes from his own testimony or that of surviving family and friends from Traunstein, his hometown between Munich and Salzburg.
Ratzinger's own accounts sometimes clash with one another. In Milestones, for instance, the future pope writes of his policeman father that, "Time and again, in public meetings, Father had to take a position against the violence of the Nazis." But in Salt of the Earth, a book-length interview, he says of his father's criticism of Nazism, "He made no public opposition; that wouldn't have been possible." His father, he adds, only "spoke freely to people whom he could trust."
In Salt of the Earth, Ratzinger unpacks his adolescent years. He writes that his brother was "obliged" to join Hitler Youth in 1941, but that he himself was later "registered" in it as a seminarian, though he subsequently escaped regular attendance thanks to that same status. "From 1943 on," Ratzinger recalls further, "the seminarians in Traunstein were all conscripted into antiaircraft work at Munich. I was 16 years old, and for a whole year, from August 43 to September 44, we did our service."
In that role, Ratzinger relayed the positions of attacking Allied planes to gunners trying to shoot them down. He doesn't say whether his actions killed anyone, and has explained that he never learned to fire his weapons because of "an infected finger." His own unit suffered bombing that killed and wounded fellow soldiers. He tells us that he had to "perform the same services" as regular soldiers, a great "unpleasantness" for "so nonmilitary a person." Contrary to some newspaper reports, he was "exempt from all military exercises" in only one of his four assignments near Munich.
Ratzinger the memoirist tends to stress his youthful enchantment with the German Catholic Church. He gushes about local Marian shrines, Catholic ritual and architecture. He observes how, at seminary, "the greatest burden for me was the imposition of a progressive idea of education." During the grim year of 1941-42, Ratzinger remembers that he "discovered literature -- read Goethe with delight, was put off a bit by Schiller's moralism ... returned with renewed joy to the liturgical texts. ... This was a time of interior exaltation, full of hope for the great things that were gradually opening up to me in the boundless realm of the spirit." His main wish, it seems, was to be left alone to exult in Catholic theology.
By September 1944, however, Ratzinger found himself drafted into the Reich's "Work Service" and forced to build "tank traps" near the Austro-Hungarian border. When that ended, his obligation to enter the infantry finally kicked in, but he fortunately found himself assigned to a barracks in Traunstein. There Ratzinger, in a rare emotional admission, expresses how his "heart was deeply moved" by the older German soldiers homesick for their families.
Oddities crop up in his end-of-war account in Milestones. "Hitler's death finally strengthened our hope that things would soon end," he writes. "The unhurried manner of the American advance, however, deferred more and more the day of liberation." That "unhurried" is one of several jabs Ratzinger takes at the Americans, though he never criticizes the German military.
After the Americans came to his village and commandeered his house, he recalls, "it especially cut my good mother's heart" to see her son "under the custody of heavily armed Americans." Further on, he also relates how "the American soldiers liked especially to take pictures of us ... in order to take home with them souvenirs of the defeated army."
Nasty, to be sure, compared to what Nazi soldiers did to their prisoners. But the most peculiar moment comes immediately after the mention of Hitler's suicide, which took place on April 30, 1945. Ratzinger writes: "At the end of April or the beginning of May -- I do not remember precisely -- I decided to go home. I knew that the city was surrounded by soldiers who had orders to shoot deserters on the spot." Some have cited this passage to indicate, in the words of The Economist, that "his desertion in 1944 [sic] is evidence of a distaste for Nazism."
But desertion wasn't evidence of the sort at that juncture. It's strange that Ratzinger can't remember whether he decided to go home in April or May. He admits doing so after learning of Hitler's death, which no one but Hitler's bunkermates and other insiders knew of until May 1 at the earliest. So Ratzinger must have done so in the first week of May. But Nazi General Helmuth Weidling publicly announced Hitler's suicide in Berlin on May 2 and ordered "an immediate halt to all resistance." Even given some time lag, a different light falls on Ratzinger's decision to leave the barracks in one part of Traunstein to go to his house in another. Many German soldiers, after Hitler's suicide, assumed the war would be over within days. The risk of being hanged by the SS for deserting had plainly diminished. By Ratzinger's own account, American troops decided he was a soldier who had taken off his uniform and melted back into his family. They ordered him to put his uniform back on, and interned him in a prisoner-of-war camp near Ulm until June 19, 1945.
Those nuances wouldn't trouble so much if the future pope exhibited empathy for victims of the Nazis (aside from inconvenienced German soldiers) or voiced admiration for Catholic resisters to the Nazis. Instead, Milestones projects little moral indignation.
Recent scholarship shows why quickly sealing the Ratzinger "Hitler Youth" file with a single word like "compulsory" or "mandatory" is too simple. One can start with Hitler Youth (Harvard University Press, 2004) by Michael H. Kater, emeritus professor of history at York University, which presents the most textured account in English of its subject.
Kater makes plain that resistance to Hitler Youth -- particularly by Catholic youth -- was not a statistically minute aberration, though it remained an exception. He devotes a whole chapter, "Dissidents and Rebels," to the many youth groups such as the Edelweisspiraten, the leftist Meuten, and the upper-class Swing types, who mocked or actively opposed Hitler Youth. He writes of the "outraged young Catholics" who gathered around Walter Klingenbeck, a Munich mechanic's apprentice who printed and duplicated "Down With Hitler" flyers. (The SS beheaded Klingenbeck in August 1943.) "Individual withdrawal from the Hitler Youth in peace or war," notes Kater, "constituted an important form of dissidence in the Third Reich."
Yet Ratzinger doesn't mention Catholic student dissidents of his era. He says nothing about the heroic White Rose group led by Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie, which operated in his Bavarian backyard. That group's principled bravery -- it denounced Nazism's slaughter of innocents through fliers distributed at both the University of Munich and towns around Munich -- resulted in the Nazis' beheading both Scholls after a fast trial in the dreaded People's Court. Such silence from a German Catholic turned high Vatican official disturbs.
But perhaps it should not surprise. Despite Ratzinger's reveries in his memoirs about academic Catholic theologians and the merits of Augustine and Bonaventure versus Aquinas, he denies a nod even to the mixed tactics of Bishop Clemens von Galen of Munster, who preached against Hitler's plan to euthanize sick, old, disabled, and mentally retarded Germans while keeping silent about Jews -- a selective dissidence also chosen by other officials of the German Catholic Church. Ratzinger never speaks of the slave-labor camp 12 kilometers outside of Traunstein. He never talks about Dachau, some 100 kilometers away, though contemporaries of Ratzinger have told reporters that townspeople knew of the camp, and even used "Watch out or you'll end up in Dachau" as a warning.
Instead, we hear from Ratzinger that Pope Pius XII -- best known in recent years as protagonist of such embarrassing exposés as Hitler's Pope, by John Cornwell (Viking, 1999); The Popes Against the Jews by David I. Kertzer (Knopf, 2001); and A Moral Reckoning, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (Knopf, 2002) -- was a "great figure." Coming from a theologian who remarked that "the Cross recapitulates in advance the horror of Auschwitz" -- raising questions about Ratzinger's economies of scale -- such autobiographical choices do not permit one-word exonerations, even if they don't implicate Ratzinger as an overt Nazi sympathizer. Lack of indignation, rather than complicity, is the sin of omission in his reminiscences.
Further scholarly context raises more questions. According to Ratzinger's brother, it was Cardinal Michael Faulhaber of Munich who originally stirred the future pope's childhood desire to rise in the Church. At age 5, after he saw Cardinal Faulhaber getting out of a great big black car in Traunstein, young Joseph immediately told his father, "I want to be a Cardinal too." After the war, Faulhaber became Ratzinger's mentor and also ordained him.
As a role model for a future pope, though, Faulhaber falls short. He lunched with Hitler at Obersalzburg in 1936, voiced support for the Führer, and denounced "atheistic" Jews. In his much-praised book, Hitler's Willing Executioners (Knopf, 1996), Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, after observing that in Nazi Germany "the Catholic Church as an institution remained thoroughly and publicly anti-Semitic," immediately adds, "Cardinal Michael Faulhaber of Munich expressed this in his Advent sermons at the end of 1933." As late as October 1943, Goldhagen writes, Faulhaber asserted that "nobody in his heart can possibly wish an unsuccessful outcome of the war."
Beth A. Griech-Polelle, in her critical study, Bishop von Galen: German Catholicism and National Socialism (Yale University Press, 2002), helps us to understand an attitude of the German Catholic Church during the war that strikingly reflects Ratzinger's tone in his memoir: "Religious came to mean not supporting the universal values of brotherly love and equality but rather keeping Catholic confessional schools, organizations, and associations alive."
The image of Ratzinger that emerges from his youth -- insular, fond of priestly authority, less moved by the moral core of Jesus' message than by liturgy, eschatology, the precise meaning of "revelation," lovely diocesan buildings -- helps explain his comfort with that later Vatican day job. Here, too, recent scholarship helps. The Modern Inquisition by Paul Collins (Overlook Press, 2005), reports on the experiences of seven internationally prominent Catholic dissidents -- Hans Kung, Charles Curran, Tissa Balasuriya, Lavinia Byrne, Jeannine Gramick, Robert Nugent, and the author himself -- investigated and in some cases punished by Cardinal Ratzinger and the CDF. Collins, an Australian ordained in Melbourne in 1967, resigned from the Church in 2001 after the CDF probed him for supposed "doctrinal problems." The Modern Inquisition provides a rare insider's look at a jurisprudential process traditionally cloaked in secrecy.
All seven describe the CDF as a kangaroo court or Star Chamber, without fairness or due process. Confidence in Ratzinger's sense of justice -- the CDF prefect told the Independent of London in 1990 that "Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church" -- is hardly bolstered by their tales.
According to Collins, the CDF's "processes are secretive, inquisitorial, often blatantly unfair to the accused and lack any application of the basic principles of human rights." Procedural features include anonymous accusers, prosecutors who also act as judges and investigators, presumption of guilt, appointed defense counsels whom the accused can't know or communicate with, and no right of appeal. They make the CDF, in Collins's words, "a creature of the 16th century," not far removed from courts that submerged witnesses underwater to determine if they were telling the truth.
The CDF stripped Curran, a controversial theologian then at the Catholic University of America, of his right to teach Catholic theology. His offense? Insisting on the right to dissent from authoritative but non-infallible papal teaching.
Curran recalls telling Ratzinger at a face-to-face 1986 meeting, "You are a respected German theologian, and are on a first-name basis with six German moralists whom I could name, and you know as well as I do that they are saying the same things as I am saying."
Ratzinger replied, according to Curran: "Well, if you would want to delate [denounce to the CDF] these people, we will open a dossier on them."
Curran says he replied, "I'm not here to do your dirty work."
Assessing Pope Benedict XVI in the light of scholarship helps balance the American media's reflexive treatment of the Vatican as an alluring postage-stamp monarchy, a mini-Monaco with credos rather than chips on the gaming tables, a Broadway set outfitted with grandfatherly players and splendid regalia.
The character of a new pope matters because the respect he personally commands produces life and death differences in whether the faithful obey doctrine. The biography of Benedict XVI should trouble any who believe the pope ought to be a morally inspiring figure, like Jesus himself.
Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer, was a finalist this spring for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in criticism.