Word: benedict
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...understanding of Benedict's subtle disengagement from Jewish questions begins in his youth. Joseph Ratzinger served a brief, mandatory stint in Hitler's Wehrmacht, but both Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center and the former East German secret police closed investigations into that part of his history without detecting any enthusiasm for Hitler's regime. Ratzinger's family was solidly anti-Nazi. But unlike John Paul, Ratzinger had no childhood Jewish playmates. His older brother Georg told German philosopher Raphaela Schmid, "I didn't know what a Jew was." That changed when their family moved from a small Bavarian village...
Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Pope's point man for Christian-Jewish affairs, says Benedict believes "Germans have a special obligation to do something more for the Jewish-Christian relationship." But it's not apparent that the Pope views the Holocaust with a sense of personal remorse. Wolfgang Benz, head of the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism in Berlin, notes that generalized remorseful feelings "started with [Germans] about 10 years younger" than the 82-year-old Pope. Members of Benedict's generation tend to judge themselves strictly on the grounds of personal culpability. Moreover, the Pope identifies heavily with...
Finally, there is Benedict's relationship to Vatican II's bedrock statement on the Jews, Nostra Aetate. Published in 1965, it said that Christianity "received the revelation of the Old Testament through" them, that they bear no collective or ongoing guilt for the death of Christ and that anti-Semitism is wrong--all teachings the Pope undoubtedly affirms. It also pointedly quotes St. Paul's New Testament preaching that God never retracted covenants he made with the Jews before the birth of Jesus. This contradicts the ancient church claim that Christ replaced (or "superseded") the Jews' divine connection--a position...
...ongoing Jewish covenants--combined with points made in other conciliar documents--seem to temper the idea that Catholicism is a uniquely effective road to salvation that has little to learn from other traditions. But Benedict sometimes seems nostalgic for the old understanding. In 2006, for instance, he preached that in choosing 12 Apostles, Jesus was summoning the 12 tribes of Israel to be "reunited in a new covenant [Christianity], the full and perfect accomplishment of the old." There are harmless ways to interpret this. But it might also help explain why Benedict refused to delete the "conversion" wording from...
...balance, Benedict is an admirer of the Jews, but one whose goodwill toward them may be moderated by his other concerns. Should that matter? "It's hard to imagine, but it's true that the Jews are not at the top of the agenda of everyone else in the world," quips Rabbi Jacob Neusner, a professor of Jewish studies at Bard College with whom the Pope has a fruitful scholarly relationship. One could justifiably wonder why, on an issue like the Latin Mass or SSPX, a busy Pope should constantly have to ask himself whether it's good...