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A German Lesson: the Fallacy of One True Path

By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is the author of "A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair" (Vintage, 1997).

April 22, 2005

Since Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, I have received many inquiries about the believability of his account of his and his family's life in Nazi Germany. Coming from an anti-Nazi family, at 14 he nevertheless joined the Hitler Youth, a commonplace occurrence in Nazi Germany. Many Germans who after the war served democratic Germany nobly — including the great liberal democratic thinker Jurgen Habermas — had been in the Hitler Youth. Ratzinger was later conscripted into military service, which, in the last month of the war, he deserted at the age of 18.

Ratzinger's story is plausible and by no means disqualifies someone from distinguished religious or political service after the war and today. Barring new information contradicting his story, the focus on the truthfulness of his account bypasses more important questions.

These questions revolve around what Benedict learned from this formative period of his life, and how it influenced his later service, theology and, potentially, his papacy. He was a witness to Nazi Germany's all-consuming racism, brutal conquest of other peoples and mass murder. Unlike John Paul II, whose papacy and capacious heart for Jews was marked by his living through the Holocaust in Poland, Benedict curiously has spoken little about the horrors publicly. Instead, he has pointed to both Nazism's and modern civilization's rejection of Christianity and its truth to justify his insistence that Catholicism ought to resist many aspects of modernity, including "relativism" — by which he centrally means the false notion that other religions are valid paths to God. As an account of the sources of Nazism and its horrors, this is selective and false; as a lesson learned from Nazism, it is selective and deeply troubling.

Benedict's conflation, under the rubric of "relativism," of the horrors of Nazism, a creed of extreme intolerance, with modernity and pluralism today is self-evidently bizarre. It also ignores several facts: Contrary to Benedict's explicit claim in his memoirs, the church hardly "stood firm" against Nazism. Although dissenting from Nazism in many matters, the church, in the name of its true God, willingly collaborated with Nazism and fascism on others. Christian intolerance — its anti-Semitism — was the sine qua non for the emergence of Nazi racial anti-Semitism and for the Nazis' capacity to enlist so many Christians in their war against the Jews. And although the Catholic Church was not responsible for the Holocaust, it is also a fact that, in many ways, substantial parts of the church avidly aided various aspects of the Nazis' persecution of the Jews. The church, for example, supported the Nazis' and fascists' anti-Semitic race laws, and the Slovakian episcopate explained to the Slovakian nation why its government, headed by a priest, must deport the country's Jews. With regard to Jews, the church was not the fundamental antidote to the problem, but part of it.

A man living through this period and witnessing the destruction of Hungarian Jewry — as Benedict has conceded — and the German episcopate's support of the Nazis' war of conquest would know how fallible the church's true path has been.

On Wednesday, in his first message as pope, Benedict called for "open and sincere dialogue" with other religions. But what does dialogue mean for him? In "Dominus Jesus" of 2000, his ringing millennial statement about the need for the Catholic Church's primacy over the world, Benedict gave his carefully considered answer. He calls for a world imperial church. He denigrates other religions as not being true religions or paths to salvation. He does mandate that, when in dialogue, the church must show respect for "the equal personal dignity of the parties" — but not for their religions. The church's dialogue with other religions, Benedict declares, "must be primarily committed to … announcing the necessity of conversion to Jesus Christ and adherence to the Church through baptism, and the other sacraments."

Benedict has not fully learned the bitter lessons of teaching contempt for Jews and peoples of other faiths. He personally deals with Jews respectfully and congenially, has condemned anti-Semitism and has worked to further the general progress of the church regarding Jews. Yet continuing to approach Jews with the insistence that they must renounce their Jewishness and embrace this church is a reaffirmation of 2,000 years of the church's refusal to accept the legitimacy of Judaism (as well as other faiths, including Islam).

Benedict's theology that the church must single-mindedly combat relativism with an imperial insistence on the world adhering to the church's one true path shows that he has not learned perhaps the most essential lesson of the 20th century. Religious and secular creeds that have fought pluralism (which the Nazis deprecated as a Babel-like confusion) by trying to institute a uniform adherence to a single truth have produced colossal catastrophes. Whatever one thinks of "relativism," history shows that the cure of fighting modernity and pluralism with synchronizing orthodoxy is worse than the alleged disease.

I do not mean to suggest that Benedict's imperial certitude — in his biographer John Allen's formulation, his "ecclesiastical totalitarianism" — is the same as the Nazis' or the Communists', or even Osama bin Laden's. The church remains an immensely powerful political institution that commands the attention of the world and affects the lives of the more than 1 billion Catholics, and to some degree all others who have relations with them. Yet it has no wish to physically conquer and coerce those who disagree and has no capacity to do so.

Benedict would additionally say that the difference is that his truth is the Truth. But so did the others. Including those who made him a teenage witness to the mass murder of the Jews.

Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-goldhagen22apr22,1,7373731.story?coll=la-head...