In the Valley of Darkness
Yes, I was a skeptic. Yes, I was more than ready to believe that Pope Benedict, the former Cardinal Ratsinger, former member of the Hitler Youth, former member of a Nazi artillery brigade, was still what he was formerly. Can I now admit to a belief that I have wronged the man? I would very much like to believe that to be so.This man, a religious leader to 1.1 billion Roman Catholics world wide, is publicly paying homage to and personally grieving the long suffering of the Jews. He is striving to ameliorate the millennia-long enmity between the fathers of his church and the Jewish people. He appears honestly to bear a burden as a German, as a religious figure of great repute and world wide respect and honour, for the past harm done to Jews as figures of biblical iniquity, and latterly as mass subjects of the world's most brutal attempt at complete "racial" extermination.
Pope Benedict has made an anguished enquiry of his God, but God will not respond. It was not God who committed boundless atrocities against the Jews of history and of today, and the world at large, after all, but great groups of hate-filled fanatics who sought to shape the world to their lunatic dream of conquest. But Pope Benedict has, nonetheless, held his peerless God to account for his acceptance of the event, without divine intervention. And he laments that fact of icy history.
Should this Pope's attempts to find reason in the unreasonable, to find forgiveness for the unforgivable, to discover hope when all seems utterly hopeless, be rewarded by infecting his flock with a similar quest, then he will have performed his function upon this earth in the name of his god. Then can he indeed intone those immortal prayerful words of the Psalm:
This man wears the intellectual, emotional and righteous robes of his office very well indeed.
He leads me in right paths for his name's sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff -- they comfort me ... I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, May 30, 2006
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