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Analysis: The pope and Hitler Youth | GlobalPost
"The mists of history swirl around Pope Benedict XVI's hometown in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps in Germany.
It was there that he came of age as Joseph Ratzinger and served in Hitler Youth during the rise of the Third Reich.
Shining a light on that history offers a glimpse of the context underpinning the Vatican's current crisis, which results from the pope's decision last month to rescind the excommunication of a renegade, ultra-conservative bishop who actively denies the Holocaust.
The decision unleashed a firestorm of controversy, with the German government weighing in last week, Israel's chief rabbinate severing ties with the Vatican, and Catholics and Jews worldwide feeling that decades of hard work and goodwill in improving relations between the two faiths had been undermined.
So can we draw a line from this oversight by the pope, this inability to see how much his decision would insult so many, back to his German past and a decision as a 14-year-old boy to join the Hitler Youth?
Most thoughtful Catholics and many Jewish historians I know would say, no, that is not a line that can be drawn, nor is it fair.
But one man who knows some of the hidden truths in the pope's hometown of Traunstein is Father Rupert Berger, and his story deserves telling.
Berger, now 81, was ordained a Catholic priest alongside Joseph Ratzinger and his brother, Georg, in 1951 in the beautiful church in the center of the town where they all grew up together. But there was something that set their two families apart."
"The mists of history swirl around Pope Benedict XVI's hometown in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps in Germany.
It was there that he came of age as Joseph Ratzinger and served in Hitler Youth during the rise of the Third Reich.
Shining a light on that history offers a glimpse of the context underpinning the Vatican's current crisis, which results from the pope's decision last month to rescind the excommunication of a renegade, ultra-conservative bishop who actively denies the Holocaust.
The decision unleashed a firestorm of controversy, with the German government weighing in last week, Israel's chief rabbinate severing ties with the Vatican, and Catholics and Jews worldwide feeling that decades of hard work and goodwill in improving relations between the two faiths had been undermined.
So can we draw a line from this oversight by the pope, this inability to see how much his decision would insult so many, back to his German past and a decision as a 14-year-old boy to join the Hitler Youth?
Most thoughtful Catholics and many Jewish historians I know would say, no, that is not a line that can be drawn, nor is it fair.
But one man who knows some of the hidden truths in the pope's hometown of Traunstein is Father Rupert Berger, and his story deserves telling.
Berger, now 81, was ordained a Catholic priest alongside Joseph Ratzinger and his brother, Georg, in 1951 in the beautiful church in the center of the town where they all grew up together. But there was something that set their two families apart."
