The Holocaust wasn't Christian
Pope Benedict obscured the truth in his Auschwitz address by ignoring anti-Semitism and the Catholic Church's failures.
By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
May 31, 2006

CERTAIN RARE moments provide politicians and religious leaders the setting to etch emblematic statements or gestures in historical consciousness. At a commemoration ceremony in 1970, German Chancellor Willy Brandt dropped spontaneously to his knees with evident emotion and contrition (even though he himself had been an enemy of Nazism) at the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. John Paul II, upon becoming in 1986 the first pope ever to visit Rome's synagogue, unforgettably referred to the assembled Jews, humbly, as "our elder brothers."

Pope Benedict XVI had such a moment before him on Sunday at Auschwitz. In this time of resurgent Holocaust denial by the president of Iran and others, Benedict's visit was historically and politically important. This German pope reaffirmed with his presence and words the falsity and mendacity of Holocaust denial. He came, he said, as "a duty before the truth."

Yet the good he did by visiting Auschwitz was overshadowed by the address he delivered there, which offered none of Brandt's genuine emotion nor John Paul's humility and which failed to heed his own self-proclaimed duty to truth. Instead, Benedict clouded historical understanding, evaded moral responsibility and shirked political duty.