JOHN LEO'S BLOG

The critics have a point. The pope mentioned all the nationalities and religions of people who were killed at the camp. The subliminal effect of this kind of listing is to imply that all were equally victimized, which was hardly the case. Though people from many nations were killed, only one people, the Jews, were marked for extinction. The pope mentioned only two victims by name, both Roman Catholics, Maximilian Kolbe, a heroic Polish priest, and Edith Stein, a Jew who converted to Catholicism. But instead of reminding us that some Catholics died, the pope might have lamented that it was a heavily Catholic and overwhelmingly Christian nation that unleashed the horror. But instead of stressing Christian complicity, the pope used a bit of telltale passive rhetoric confining blame to Nazis. He called himself "a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation's honor."

The same kind of rhetoric tends to pop up in the many Vatican apologies to Jews. One of the best of these statements, "Memory and Reconciliation" (2000), acknowledged that the behavior of Christians leading up to the Holocaust "was not that which might have been expected from Christ's followers." But it talked about "the suffering endured by the people of Israel" rather than about Christians who helped the Nazis impose that suffering. It correctly pointed out that Nazism was a "pagan ideology" but neglected to mention that centuries of anti-Semitism set the stage for the Holocaust. The Vatican has tried mightily to come to terms with the virtual collapse of Catholic moral witness during World War II. But the pope's visit to Auschwitz was a sadly missed opportunity to speak bluntly about Christian failure.