So I was pondering this new pope as I was drifting off to sleep. OK, you’re a kid and everyone is in the Hitler Youth, so you are too. I get that.

But, later, when conscripted into the Wehrmacht, and I think already a seminary student, wouldn’t, as a devote Catholic, you have to do something? Maybe he did desert in the end (although the Allies did keep him as a POW).

But, since the Nazis were hip to executing Catholics, I would think anyone of that generation and country devout enough to be papal quality (as it were) would have fled or been killed.

It’s not entirely fair to forever flail all Germans for their Nazi past. However, it seems a bit more fair to flail Germans who were there and served as Nazi soldiers.

Yesterday, I was listening on the radio to an interview with Laurence Rees, who just wrote a book on Auschwitz. He was talking about having interviewed not just Holocaust survivors and Nazi war criminals for his book but also soldiers from Japan and the Pacific and from Stalin’s Russian Army. One thing he especially noted is that everyone he talked to from various war-time atrocities consistently said something like, “I had to do it,” “I was forced to do it,” “It was participate or die,” kind of thing.

Except the Germans. Apparently, the former Nazis and Wehrmacht veterans he interviewed explained how they thought they were doing the right thing based on what they knew then. So, they felt justified.

I wonder what Pope Benedict 16 thought at the time?

I found this guy’s weblog while searching for more info. He seems to have done an excellent job providing some interesting source information on John Ratz.

Scariest of all, I think, for us who are not actually living within the arms of the church, is he might well be the guy behind justifying dissing John Kerry at communion. I will never be able to comprehend the Catholic stance on the last election that de facto threw support behind a guy who presided over a nation-leading number of executions as governor of Texas.

Growing up, I believed that the Catholic church was against killing anyone even at the potential stage of sperm, so with that logic birth control is a problem and abortion and the death penalty are both very bad. Apparently, in today’s church, though, Kerry’s legislative votes on abortion make him a sinner, but GW’s zealous killing of retards and minorities is just bizness.

Viva, Papa.