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...Pope Benedict XVI covered a whole lot of sacred terrain on Tuesday. But even as the Pontiff carried a message of peace and reconciliation to some of the holiest sites of the three monotheistic faiths, the weeklong papal visit to the Middle East risks unraveling under the weight of the region's complicated history and Benedict's continuing struggle to be heard both loudly and clearly...
Sergio Minerbi, a former Israeli ambassador and scholar on Israeli-Vactian affairs, was given shelter from the Nazis in an Italian Catholic Boys School during the war. But Minerbi, who has met Benedict several times when he was still a cardinal, says the Pope wants to "Christianize the Holocaust." Minerbi concludes: "There's a long way to go before the Vatican and the Jews establish friendly relations." (See pictures of Hitler's rise to power...
...humble and quiet presence of the aging pontiff at Yad Vashem was itself an attempt to improve those relations. The ties had frayed earlier this year after Benedict lifted the excommunication of four ultra-traditionalist Bishops, including one who denies the widely accepted facts about what happened in Nazi Germany. The Pope, who has since said that the Bishop has no standing in the Church so long as he doesn't change his stance on the events of World War II, denounced any who deny the events of the Holocaust...
Taken on face value, however, Benedict's brief remarks were eloquent, a kind of prayerful meditation about how the names of those murdered renders them nonetheless inextinguishable from the eternal book of human history. "They lost their lives but they will never lose their names," the Pope said, speaking in his softly accented English. "These are indelibly etched in the hearts of their loved ones, their surviving fellow prisoners, and all those determined never to allow such an atrocity to disgrace mankind again." The Pope clearly grasps the scope and horror of the Holocaust. He added this chilling contemplation...
Vatican observers make a point to not constantly compare Benedict to his predecessor: two different men facing two different challenges. Still, their biographies are linked in a way that gave the German Pope a unique chance to complete the legacy of his Polish predecessor in helping to reconcile the 20th century Christian Europe that failed to save its Jews from near annihilation. Instead, eloquent and heartfelt as he may have been, Benedict came to Israel's Holocaust memorial and spoke neither as a man of his times nor his place. With reporting by Aaron J. Klein/Jerusalem