Word: christianize
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...state or the President's closest allies, and dissidents were locked and beaten up, often on the most spurious grounds. Nasheed - who eventually fled to exile in 2003 with other members of his Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) - was, in separate instances, accused of being a terrorist and then a Christian missionary, bent on converting the country's Muslim population...
...event were moved by his obvious emotion at the former death camp. But his address that day was marked by some highly peculiar ellipses. He failed to mention anti-Semitism, instead contending that "ultimately" the Nazis' motive in killing Jews was to "tear up the taproot of the Christian faith." And although he claimed to speak as a "son of the German people," Benedict seemed to downplay any ordinary-German implication in the Holocaust. Instead, he placed blame on a "ring of criminals [who] rose to power by false promises ... through terror ... with the result that our people was used...
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 This contradicts the ancient church claim that Christ replaced (or "superseded") the Jews' divine connection--a position...
There are several good reasons. For one, as Merkel made clear, Germans have a special obligation. "We don't want [history] to repeat itself," as papal adviser Kasper says. The Holocaust also remains an affront to the self-understanding of Christians, and Western civilization as a whole. We learned the word genocide through the Jews. Since Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church has set the post-Shoah standard in acknowledging the absolute unacceptability of the Jewish loss. Without the Catholic Church's leadership on the issue, other Christian groups might not have followed...