Word: church
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...since Benedict's election, his relations with Jews--although similar in broad outline to John Paul's--have been plagued by mixed messages that have caused critics to wonder whether he has botched the opportunity to redress past shortcomings and strengthen the church's ties to the Jewish people. Like John Paul, Benedict came of age in one of the Holocaust's European slaughterhouses, and many expected that the Bavarian, like the Pole, could turn his somber history into a special authority for combatting anti-Semitism and pursuing the pro-Jewish reforms the church enacted at the Second Vatican Council...
...group were not guilty of mass murder, neither were they innocent dupes throughout the process. And the idea that Hitler killed 6 million Jews to get at Christianity approaches the perverse. When Jewish groups complained, Benedict devoted a general audience to condemning anti-Semitism--although he revisited neither his church's nor his homeland's role in the Holocaust...
Most troubling of all was Benedict's reinstatement of Williamson, a debacle whose full scope the Vatican seemed to recognize only the day after Merkel's upbraiding. The church demanded that Williamson recant his gas-chamber denial, and the Pontiff released a letter that deplored the strain between the church and the Jews resulting from his "mistake." He assured a visiting group of Israeli rabbis of his intent to deepen Catholic-Jewish relations and his belief that the Jewish people "were chosen as the elected people" to communicate fidelity...
...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 his church, which he sees as having played a heroic anti-Nazi role. (History is far more ambiguous, although institutional Catholicism acquitted itself better than Protestantism.) As Catholicism's longtime philosophical enforcer, he holds even more fiercely than did John Paul to the belief that the church as a holy entity...
...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 that exposed Jews to some 1,700 years of none-too-gentle Christian evangelizing and conversion...