The Pope Visits Israel   

Member of Knesset  Nitzan Horowitz questions if the Pope represents what is best in Christianity or whether he has really repented for his anti-Jewish actions.

Making our world worse

Pope Benedict XVI responsible for suffering of many people worldwide

Nitzan Horowitz
Published:     05.10.09, 18:45 / Israel Opinion

Part 1 of article

 
Joseph Ratzinger, also known as Pope Benedict XVI, bears the responsibility for the suffering of numerous people. The influential guest who will be arriving in Israel shortly is among the most conservative Church figures. The message he brings with him, as a supreme religious leader who according to Catholic tradition cannot be wrong, is not one of compassion, understanding, or tolerance.

 
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In fact, this pope brings a wholly different message: One of indifference, strictness, and religious radicalism.

 
The days of his youth were grim: He joined the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany at the age of 14 a short while after membership in the movement became mandatory. Two years later he was recruited to an anti-aircraft unit that protected a BMW plant manufacturing plane engines. The plant also employed forced labor from the Dachau concentration camp.

 
Ratzinger claims that he never took part in a battle. He was sent to Hungary, where he laid tank traps and saw Jews being sent to extermination camps. He defected from the Nazi army in April 1944 and for several weeks stayed at an American detention camp. Ratzinger and his brother claim they could not resist the Nazis.

 
After the war he embarked on religious studies and started formulating his strict views on issues of “morality and faith.” Ever since then he managed to exercise far-reaching influence on the Church. For many years, even before he was selected to lead the Church, Cardinal Ratzinger held the powerful post Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly known as the Holy Office, the historical Inquisition. In that role, and as pope at this time, he further toughened the decrees spread by the Vatican and its branches worldwide.

 
His strict attitude earned him various nicknames with a clear common denominator: The Enforcer, Panzerkardinal, and even God’s Rottweiler.

 
The pope is in the fact the person who currently leads the global resistance to abortions and prevents women from exercising their right for their bodies. For example, he forbids priests from mentioning the possibility of abortion to pregnant teens who turn to them in great despair. This is so even in cases of pregnancy as result of rape or incest.

 
The pope also leads the objection to the marriage of priests, fights against any recognition of homosexual partnership, and in fact gives his blessing to the discrimination against lesbians and gays.

 
Under his leadership, the Vatican is a fortress of darkness: According to his worldview, the Church must not adapt itself to the spirit of our times, and it must not bend in the face of “individualism.” The faithful must obey and suffer. And they are indeed suffering.

 
        
Of all the injustices committed by the pope, the gravest is his objection to the distribution of contraceptives in the Third World. It is difficult to estimate the number of miserable men and women in Africa, Asia, and South America who contracted AIDS and other diseases as direct result of this backward attitude, but we are talking about great masses.

    
It is important to keep in mind the following: The Catholic Church is the largest, most well organized, and oldest religious body in the world. Most Christians around the world are Catholic, and the followers of the Church constitute one sixth of the world’s population. The pope is seen as Jesus’ emissary on earth.

 

However, the influence exercised by the Vatican and by the pope goes well beyond Catholic circles. The Church, which possesses vast financial resources and has its own educational and cultural institutions, holds immense political clout. When this is used negatively, the results are terrible.

 

Yet on top of the pope’s backward positions on a plethora of issues pertaining to human and individual rights, come his negative views towards other religions and faiths: Ranging from Buddhism and Hinduism to Islam and Judaism.

 

The pope’s most blatant decision in the Jewish context was no doubt the move to rehabilitate British Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson, previously excommunicated by the Church. The latter claimed, in a TV interview, that the Nazis did not use gas chambers to murder Jews during World War II. The pope was condemned from wall to wall and the crisis ended in an official reconciliation with rabbis two months ago: The pope denounced anti-Semitism and was forced to admit that rehabilitating the bishop was a “mistake.”

 

The case of the Holocaust-denying bishop adds up to a series of harsh decisions by the pope that aroused fears among Jewish communities across the world. First, the pope reinstituted an ancient Latin mass that includes a prayer for converting the Jews from “darkness to Catholicism.” Jewish organizations described this decision as a difficult blow to Jewish-Christian relations, yet the pope insisted.

 

A short while later, the pope permitted the more extensive use of the old text of the Good Friday Prayer, which includes a request from God to remove the veil from the hearts of the Jews. Rabbi Michael Lerner, who is among the prominent leaders of American Jewry, put it this way: “Pope Benedict XVI has taken a powerful step toward the re-introduction of the process of demeaning Jews. You cannot respect another religion if you teach that those who are part of it must convert to your own religion.”

 
s result of all of the above, and mostly because of the manner in which Benedict XVI exploits his position in order to sow division across the world, while remaining indifferent to the suffering caused by his decisions, we should not rejoice about his arrival.

 MK Nitzan Horowitz is a Knesset member on behalf of Meretz

 
    {  MK Nitzan Horowitz should be praised for challenging the p.r. campaign that has obscured the negative impact of the current pope. Just as we Jews can critique our own  reactionary religious leaders who have ignored Judaism's teachngs of love and respect and propagated an interpretation of our tradition that I call "Settler Judaism" that promotes  a militaristic and ultra-nationalist interpretation of our tradition, and yet we can say that not because we hate Judaism but because we wish to renew the best elements of our tradition (please see my book Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation), so we can also critique the current Pope who has beeni instrumental in dismantling the progressive visiion of Pope John XXIII and undermining Vatican II's attempts to bring the Church into the modern world--without demeaning all that deserves respect in Catholicism itself. Horowitz points to several of the sins of this pope, but perhaps is too gentle, not knowing the degree to which the pope was responsible for undermining and silencing the liberation theologians in Central and South America who were reviving Christianity's powerful commitment to the poor and oppressed. Similarly, it was this pope, as Cardinal Ratzinger, who silenced its most significant European theologian Hans Kung and eventually forced out of the Church its most creative American theologian Matthew Fox. Most recently, under his leadership there has been an attempt to silence the priest who has organized yearly demonstrations at Ft. Benning against the School of the Americas where the US Army trains South American police and army in the techniques of torture (the grounds for silencing allegedly are that this priest has supported  the idea that women should be ordained as priests). To critique this pope is a moral obligation, but must be done in a way that restates the great desire of the human race to respect and strengthen the voices of love, generosity, peace, social justice and humanity that continue to be part of Christianity and which., we believe, can become dominant again in the Catholic Church just as they can become dominant again in Judaism and Islam, im yirtzeh HaShem,God willing! Strengthening the voices of love and generosity in Judaism and all the other religious traditions is one of the goals of the Tikkun Community at www.tikkun.org and the Network of Spiritual Progressives at www.spiritualprogressives.org} ]