The obituary page of The Massachusetts Spy
By Luke Reschuss
Obituary Editor
Before it headed off into history, 2022 gave us one last parting gift: the long-overdue death of one of the most notorious religious leaders of our time, the reactionary Nazi-loving, Jew- and gay-hating ex-Pope Benedict XVI, who resigned in disgrace after his decades-long coverup of priestly rapists became public.
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| Benedict, in pre-pope uniform |
Installed in 2005 by his fellow Cardinals to stamp out any embers of tolerance and compassion in the Roman Catholic Church (which, good to say, continue to burn despite his best efforts), he spent his pontificate tirelessly advocating on behalf of cruelty and intolerance.
The lengthy but hardly adulatory obsequies performed the public service of dredging up his sordid career, including these especially notorious clangers:
His embrace of demented Catholic Jew haters:
In January 2009, he lifted the excommunications of four breakaway bishops who belonged to the far-right Society of Saint Pius X. One of them, Richard Williamson, had roused outrage when he said in an interview days earlier that Nazi gas chambers had never existed and that only several hundred thousand Jews had died in the Holocaust, and not as a deliberate Nazi policy.
The pope cast his decision as an effort to heal a schism in the church. His critics said it was an extreme example of his willingness to cater to the far-right Catholic fringe.
We would never be confused with St. Thomas Aquinas, but isn't it proper for a church supposedly based on charity, love, and the dignity of all to be in schism with hatred and anti-Semitism? Guess we don't have the keen intellect supposedly possessed by this guy.
His coverup of the worldwide epidemic of priestly rape:
In 1980, when he was archbishop of Munich, he had permitted a priest undergoing psychological treatment for abusing children to be transferred to another parish. The priest abused more victims there and was convicted in 1986. But when the story broke in 2010, it emerged that he had been allowed to return to the ministry and was still serving in a parish.
Defending Benedict, the Vatican said that his assistant in the archdiocese had been responsible. But archdiocese documents revealed that Benedict had led a meeting and was copied on a memo in which the priest’s assignment was discussed.
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| He leaves behind many children |
Sounds like the it-wasn't-me-it-was-Jared defense didn't wash. Although he made a few token efforts to reach out to victims, he did nothing either to provide transparency into his Church's worldwide coverup of sexual abuse (including the efforts of local henchmen like Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law '50, shuffled off to a sinecure in Rome one step ahead of a Suffolk County grand jury) or to honestly grapple with the root causes of priestly sex crimes and their coverup.
Instead, like the Republican defenders of pedophilia and abuse here in America, he chose to smear his political and philosophical opponents:
Benedict attributed the crisis to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, secularization and an erosion of morality that he pinned on liberal theology.
Because if there's one thing that liberal theologians and thinkers have advocated for, it's the right of priests to forcibly rape children in secret with impunity. (The intentional inflammatory and false conflation of tolerance for those with difference gender preferences with advocacy of child rape has become a core principle of today's Trumpublican right. Benedict should be so proud.)
His intolerance for other religions, notably Islam:
Everyone thinks their church is the One True Church, so it's to be expected that a Pope would be generally pro-Catholic. But Benedict went far out of his way to condemn other religions that arose out of the same ethical monotheistic tradition as his. Like Islam:
Benedict did not shy from voicing what he regarded as uncomfortable truths about Europe’s Christian roots and about other religions, Islam in particular. In his 2006 speech at Regensburg, he said, “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.... With tensions already high after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the speech provoked an outcry in the Muslim world.
Imagine a religion so evil it believes it has a duty to spread its faith at the point of a spear or sword.
Now imagine the Crusades.
His apologists blamed the outrageous insult on his supposed “tin ear” for politics. But you don't get to pass yourself off as the most brilliant Pontiff in a millennium and claim at the same time that you said dumb shit because you were insufficiently political. Especially when you successfully climbed the Vatican greasy pole all the way to the top, which suggests rather more acute political instincts.
His cruelty to LGBTQ individuals:
You may argue that Benedict's anti-gay position could be justified on the grounds that Catholic doctrine regards homosexual conduct as sinful, although it gives a pass to the 612 other supposed religious commands in the Book of Leviticus. But Benedict didn't stop there:
With John Paul’s blessing, the church embraced an orthodoxy that Cardinal Ratzinger largely defined. His office moved against dissenting theologians; spoke out against homosexuality, birth control and abortion; and questioned the validity of other faiths.
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The congregation’s [the Inquisition Office headed by Benedict d/b/a Ratzinger] delving into social issues provoked similar protests. In 1986, liberal critics objected to a document on pastoral care of homosexuals that discussed homosexuality as an inclination “toward an intrinsic moral evil” and as “an objective disorder.”
Priestly rape by contrast was just a by-product of ... liberal thinking. As for the Levitical proscriptions against eating storks and wearing blended fabrics, those were not objective moral evils. Because he said so.
Perhaps that's why with AIDS ravaging the world, Benedict came out against simple life-saving measures:
The bad publicity continued. In March, on his first trip to Africa, Benedict provoked new criticism when he said that condoms were not the answer to the continent’s AIDS crisis. Public health advocates complained not only that he had repeated the church’s long-held opposition to condom use, even as a way to fight the AIDS epidemic, but also that he had gone even further by saying that the distribution of condoms “aggravates” the problem.
You'll be thrilled to know that this brilliant thinker and religious statesman changed his mind two years and thousands of needless deaths later.
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| He looks forward to meeting new friends in his new home |
His, um, flexibility when it came to matters of principle was evident at an early age, when, despite his strong Catholic views, he served as a member in good standing of the, wait for it, Hitler Youth.
That's right: Benedict will go down in history as the only Pope to have served as a card-carrying Nazi.
His apologists said he was automatically and involuntarily enrolled in the fun- and Adolf-loving teen club, based upon the accounts of – Benedict himself. The future Pope admitted there was a financial aspect to Hitler Youthing:
later, as a seminarian, I was registered in the HY. As soon as I was out of the seminary, I never went back. That was difficult, because the tuition reduction, which I really needed, was tied to proof of attendance at the HY.
Do these people ever think about anything besides money?
At that time in Germany there were a few brave souls who refused to submit to Nazi terror based on their religious principles. Some, like Sophie Scholl, paid for their beliefs with their lives. In her case, though, there was no chance she could ever be Pope.
Young Ratzinger, on the other hand, wanted to keep his options open. For him it was the right choice, leading to a lifetime of ease passing judgment on Jews, Muslims, LGBTQ persons, social activists, and many others who were united by little else other than that they were never members of Hitler Youth.
Perhaps for these reasons the reactions to Benedict's death were a tad on the restrained side:
The archbishop of Boston, Sean O'Malley released a statement:
“In all of my personal interactions with Pope Benedict (the sixteenth) XVI, I found him to be an engaged leader, thoughtful in his decisions and always committed to the mission of the Church.”
Cardinal Sean O’Malley’s statement also highlighted the former pope’s decades of service. Benedict will be remembered as the first pope to voluntarily resign in nearly six hundred years. He stepped down in 2013, citing his advanced age and ebbing strength amid the clergy sex abuse scandal.
And Delta House had a long tradition of existence to its members.
We note the passing of this committed if not commitable Catholic leader mostly because the intolerance and immorality he hypocritically espoused in the name of religion lives on, in the United States as white Christian dominionism.
That should warm Benedict's heart, although given his current location, we suspect he's warm enough already.
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