Germany: Embarrassed by a German pope

Remember the “great joy over a German pope?” asked the Thüringer Allgemeine in an editorial. When the former Cardinal Josef Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, the whole country celebrated. The tabloid Bild even ran the headline, “We are pope.” No longer. Now that the pope has lifted the excommunications of Holocaust denier Richard Williamson and three other bishops from the renegade Society of St. Pius X, we feel betrayed. Catholics and non-Catholics alike are appalled “that a German, of all people, could rehabilitate a Holocaust denier.” No German “can possibly accept this.”

That’s why Chancellor Angela Merkel was right to speak out, said the Financial Times Deutschland. She demanded that the pope “clarify his stance” toward Williamson and the church’s relationship with Judaism. Some Catholics have tried to defend the pope’s actions, saying it had nothing to do with anti-Semitism and that the pope was simply trying to heal a schism in the church and bring the traditionalist bishops back into the fold. But the argument is disingenuous. Williamson and the other Pius adherents were most upset by the Catholic Church’s rapprochement with Judaism in the Second Vatican Council, at which the church declared that Jews were no longer to be blamed for Christ’s death. The dialogue among religions has provided a means for postwar Europe to “dismantle prejudices” and “deal with the past.” The German government should avoid letting a single papal gesture “nullify all our progress.”

It should also avoid lecturing the pope, said Ludwig Greven in Hamburg’s Die Zeit. Of course the German government is “particularly sensitive” to any denial of the genocide of the Jews—after all, this horror was “perpetrated by Germans and in the name of Germany.” When “the Iranian president, for example,” denies the Holocaust, the German chancellor is right to speak sharply and demand a retraction. But the pope is not the leader of a state. He is the leader of the church. “And church and state are separate here.” It is for German church leaders to criticize the pope—as they have, rightly, done—and not German political leaders.

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That’s a convenient distinction, said Karl Günther Barth in the Hamburger Abendblatt. Unfortunately, it doesn’t hold up. As it happens, Iran’s parliament speaker, Ali Larijani, denied the Holocaust on German soil just last week, at the Munich security conference. Larijani said there were “differing views” on what happened to the Jews during World War II. What’s more, he said it in front of “statesmen from many nations,” all of whom remained “diplomatically silent.” Denying the Holocaust is a crime in Germany, yet the state prosecutors did nothing. Nor do they act at anti-Israeli demonstrations, when Muslim protestors “scream all kinds of scandalous nonsense” about Jews and the Holocaust. It seems we Germans have a double standard when it comes to outrage. The Catholic Church, away in Rome, is an easy target. When will we take on the Holocaust deniers here at home?