Pope Benedict XVI
October 27, 2011 in Assisi
Photo: Getty Images
It doesn't look as though non-Catholics are good enough for Pope Benedict XVI to pray in their presence. At an event in the Italian town of Assisi, religious leaders from around the world were invited to attend but not pray alongside the pope like they did in 1986. Prayers all had to be done in separate but equal rooms.
Nevertheless, all those religions were still treated better than atheists because those religions weren't implicitly condemned for the crimes committed by Christians during the Holocaust. Atheism, though, was.
And, unlike the 1986 event and successive ones in 1993 and 2002, there was no time given for any type of communal prayer - a key element of the previous editions in providing images of the world's great religions praying for peace. Benedict had objected to the 1986 event and didn't attend because he disapproved of members of different faiths praying in the presence of one another.
As a result, his 25th anniversary edition removed any whiff of syncretism, or the combining of different beliefs and practices. After a lunch of vegetarian risotto, salad and fruit, the participants retired to hotel rooms where they could pray individually or nap before returning for some concluding remarks. ...
The issue is a sensitive one for Benedict, who has railed against religious relativism, or the idea that there are no absolute truths and that all religions are somehow equal. As then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he issued a controversial document in 2000 in part as a response to the 1986 Assisi event asserting that the fullness of the means of salvation was found in the Catholic Church alone.
Source: AP
I can sympathize with not wanting to inadvertently send the message that one things all religions are equal. It's natural in any conservative religion to have a supremacist ideology: "we're better than everyone else and should be treated accordingly." However, merely praying in one's own way in the same room or street as someone from another religion doesn't contradict Christian Supremacism or Catholic Supremacism. That some believers think it would suggests that they are afraid of something
As noted above, though, the harshest attitudes were reserved for atheism and atheists:
"The horrors of the concentration camps reveal with utter clarity the consequences of God's absence," said Benedict, who as a young German was forced to join the Hitler Youth.
As a young German at the time, Benedict knows full well that Germany was thoroughly infused with Christianity from top to bottom. He knows that Christians all over Germany eagerly participated in both the war and the Holocaust. He knows that the treatment of the Jews was explained and justified on religious grounds. As a Catholic, he also knows that everything which the Nazis did was predicated in one way or another on policies, laws, and actions of the Catholic Church itself. He also knows that Catholic leaders were often fully supportive of Hitler's aggression and violence.
Because of all this, there was nothing the least bit "atheistic" about either the Nazi era generally or the Holocaust in particular. God was no more "absent" from the concentration camps than from anywhere else at any other period in time. What was present, though, was an unrestrained religious fervor. It was a culmination of centuries of Christian hatred of outsiders.
Now, though, it's no longer politically acceptable for Catholics to direct such hatred towards Jews. Instead they are directing to towards atheists. Whereas Catholics once blamed Jews for all the problems around them, they are now blaming atheists. It would be a mistake for atheists to assume that there's no chance that a similar path could not be followed.
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