Bye-bye, Pope

Mario Kaiser is a journalist based in Berlin.

He is the grandson of two very different men.

One came from a family that raised the swastika flag on the tallest building in my hometown. The other was a tailor who secretly sewed suits for Jews. They both disappeared in the trenches of World War II. Maybe that is why I'm sensitive when it comes to discussing the Holocaust. Part of my family has blood on its hands, and the part that doesn't was killed anyway.

And since he is sensitive, he wrote an op-ed and informed us that he

walked into a courthouse and divorced myself from the Catholic Church. That is what you have to do as a German if you want to leave the church. I was waiting for the pope to hold me back. I was waiting for him to tell me that it never should have happened. I was waiting for him to correct his mistake. But he kept me waiting.

Why?

When I first heard that the pope had welcomed a once-excommunicated bishop who denies the Holocaust back into the church, I didn't believe it. I thought that the truth was probably more complicated...And then he lost me. The man he had virtually absolved, Bishop Richard Williamson, was known to be a notorious denier of the Holocaust.

Only weeks before, Williamson...dressed in a black robe, a large cross hanging from his neck, he nodded his head and said, in a soft, grandfatherly voice, what he believes. "I believe there were no gas chambers," he said.

...This is the man who, after being excommunicated by a pope more than 20 years ago, was reinstated as a bishop of the Catholic Church - by a German pope who has been to Auschwitz.

After days of unbearable silence and outrage around the world, Benedict finally spoke, and that is when he lost me. He didn't actually speak: The Vatican issued a statement demanding that Williamson "distance himself from his positions on the Shoah."

I looked at these words and wondered why, in the eyes of the Vatican, denying the Holocaust was a "position." I wondered why all it required for a Holocaust-denying bishop to remain a bishop was to "distance himself" from his words.

I couldn't understand why Benedict didn't distance himself and the Catholic Church from Williamson in the same way he had associated himself with him, with the stroke of a pen. So I distanced myself from the pope.

...The pope is not an anti-Semite and has never condoned anti-Semitism. But he chooses to retreat at a time when he should lead, and that, to me, is not an option for a German pope in the face of anti-Semitism.

Maybe I judge him too harshly. I hope so. That's the beauty of being born in a country with a Nazi past. I can hold him to a higher standard.

That is a man of faith (see here for my reference)