UNC law professor and blogger Eric Muller took strong exception to what the Pope said at
Auschwitz on May 28.
Muller’s argument, which earned a collegial link from
InstaPundit, is interesting if not always informed, so I thought
I’d present its salient points, together with my own observations
and the more astute comments from people who visited his essay and
took time to observe what he did not.
Muller starts with an ad hominem gambit, which to a guy
like me is tantamount to shouting “en garde!”
His jibe:
When the white smoke told the world that Josef
Ratzinger had been elected pope, it took some of us a moment or two
to get our minds around the idea that the College of Cardinals had
elevated a childhood member of the Hitler Youth to one of the
world’s leading positions of moral leadership.
That Muller in the next sentence acknowledges that Ratzinger had
been “no teenaged Nazi” does not dilute the weapons-grade disdain
of that opening salvo. You’d never know from Muller’s essay that
young Ratzinger had been an unwilling Hitler Youth, or that he
later deserted from the German army into which he had been
conscripted.
Muller’s main disappointment with the Pope’s Auschwitz statement
is that for him (and, to be fair, for a few others as well), it
implies that Benedict’s understanding of the Nazi chapter of modern
German history “does not even rise to the level of the ordinary,”
and this because (Muller says) “Ratzinger is out at the
self-absolving fringes of his generation on the question of German
responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich.”
Ignorant fecklessness is an especially provocative charge to
level at a moral and spiritual leader whom more than a billion
people esteem as a shepherd of souls and successor to Peter, but
there’s more. Muller also claims that the Pope “proved himself
incapable of understanding the Holocaust as a crime against the
Jews.”
Muller knows how to build an argument, and in support of his
main thesis, he goes on to assert that Benedict wrongly sees Nazi
motivation as essentially theological rather than grounded in bogus
racial “science.” Certainly Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels were not
theologians (they weren’t scientists, either), but that does not
mean that their National Socialism cannot be viewed theologically.
That a scholarly Pope might view history through a theological
lens, or that bogus science is frequently justified by appeals to
equally bogus metaphysics, seems not to have occurred to
Muller.
The law professor took particular umbrage at this statement of
the Pope’s, reading it as a gross misappropriation: “By destroying
Israel, they [the Nazis] ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot
of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own
invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful.”
By “Israel,” of course, the Pope meant not the country, which
did not then exist, but the Jewish people.
PHILOSEMITIC CHRISTIANS UNDERSTAND those words as an
acknowledgement of the importance of the Jews as God’s chosen
people, from whom came not only Divine (Mosaic) Law but also and
ultimately Jesus as well. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus once put it this
way: “In the shadow of the Holocaust, it is both morally imperative
and good manners to emphasize the linkage between Judaism and
Christianity. But much more is involved than a moral imperative,
and certainly much more than good manners. It simply is not
possible to understand the Christian story apart from its placement
in the Jewish story.”
Muller, however, sees insult where none was intended, lamenting
the alleged “degradation” of identifying Judaism as the taproot of
Christianity, as though the effort to eliminate Judaism from the
world were not “a complete crime in itself.”
That the Pope also had the temerity to mention Edith Stein, aka
Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, gave Muller fits. Benedict’s
notice of the apparent serenity with which Stein went to the gas
chamber is interpreted by Muller as disrespectful of the many Jews
who died along with her without first converting to
Christianity.
It was John Paul II who asserted that Sister Benedicta belonged
in the canon of Christian saints, but Muller gives that beloved son
of Poland a victims’ pass, drawing his rhetorical sword only
because John Paul’s German (oppressor) successor had the
“effrontery” to remember Stein where she was killed, and then echo
centuries of Christian teaching on the meaning of a sacrificial
death. This, for Miller, is beyond the pale. One can’t help but
wonder what he makes of the equally problematic spiritual journey
undertaken by a first-century Pharisee named Paul of Tarsus.
Muller’s overheated rhetoric is as much to be giggled at as
rebutted. In this as in so many other contexts, some of us think
fondly of William Goldman’s script for The Princess Bride.
Pope Benedict does not by any chance have six fingers on his right
hand, which is why I and others must play Dread Pirate Roberts to
Muller’s Inigo Montoya. The law professor is a skilled polemicist,
but to his gleeful cry of “You’re using Bonetti’s defense against
me, eh?” the rejoinder from the rest of us is that it’s not
Bonetti’s defense, it’s Benedetto’s, and it’s fitting, “considering
the rocky terrain.”
MULLER’S REACTION DOES NOT HAVE the sobriety or depth of, for
example, Christopher Blosser’s must-read post on the same subject. Blosser gets
even the little things right, citing one European report from
Deutsche-Welle noting that “Pope Benedict ‘shattered a
taboo in the often-blighted relationship between Christians and
Jews by using his native German language’ to pray for
Jewish-Christian reconciliation.”
Some of the comments left by others on Muller’s blog were
equally deft. There was snark (“Ratzinger got a rainbow at his
speech — what happened when you typed this?”) and
substance:
The Nazis did, in fact, intend to replace all religion
with a divine devotion to the State, the Volk, and the Fuhrer.
Whether the Pope is correct in his assertion that this was the
ultimate reason for the Nazis’ oppression of Jews is debatable (and
certainly incorrect if offered as an a priori reason), but
it does not appear to me that your characterization is a fair
one.
A Jewish reader offered this thoughtful perspective:
I read the Pope’s remarks as trying to clarify what an
affront to the Christian religion the Holocaust was, in Christian
terms. This necessitates a Christian-centric view of, well,
everything, but so what? This is a Christian talking to other
Christians. They have as much right to struggle with what the
Holocaust means in terms of their religion as we Jews
do.
One person chastised Muller for the narrowness of his empathy by
pointing to pastoral reasons that probably guided the pope’s
thought:
If, as he says, reconciliation is a goal (and I have
little cause to doubt this), then perhaps he’s thinking it will be
easier to obtain reconciliation with the German people when he’s
not concentrating on whipping them, again, with the sins of their
fathers.
A reader named Dwight was impatient with Muller’s sneering at “the
touch of anger and disappointment that lingers in Ratzinger’s
account of the Nazis’ rise to power.” Dwight’s piquant rejoinder
implies a potent mixture of self-awareness and common sense: “If I
had watched my entire nation thrown down into madness, despotism,
and fire by a group of lying bastards, I suspect I’d be pretty
angry and disappointed, too.”
Not to be outdone, a reader named Jason offered a summary of
this contretemps that I cannot myself improve upon:
I think the pope may have spoken inartfully at times to
the Jewish ear — but the Jewish ear listens for very different
things than the devout Catholic ear. This difference is especially
huge when it’s a secular Jew listening to a decidedly unsecular
Pope.
Amen to that.
