Saint Superman…

on Germany’s ongoing attempts to grapple with the Nazi era.

A couple of things I will note is that an excellent way to encourage a resurgent Nazism is to blame people who were born 20 years ago for things their grandparents did. It’s as plausible as demanding “reparations for slavery” from Americans. One very common human response to such guilt manipulation is to conclude “I may as well indulge in the sin everybody keeps accusing me of since they will go on accusing me no matter what I do or say.”

Another point I think important is this:

This is an issue we ran into quite recently on Pope Benedict’s recent visit to the Holy Land. It’s been a consistent criticism of his engagement with the Holocaust, that he doesn’t seem to embrace the collective responsibility model that has dominated Germany for over half a century. When he talks about the Nazis, he describes them as a sort of other, a foreign invasion upon German soil and not something that was able to grow because it was rooted in the German soul. Part of this has to do with his upbringing; he was not raised in a Nazi household, but in a family which was staunchly opposed to the ideals Hitler promulgated. He served at gunpoint — and unenthusiastically at that — in the Hitler Youth and in the Wehrmact, from which he ultimately deserted.

This, while true, does not get at another vital fact: Benedict believes the Revelation. And the revelation insists that sin does not define us: Christ does. So it is quite understandable that he regards Nazism as ultimately alien because he does not believe that sin constitutes our humanness. Sin is, in the Catholic tradition, normal but never natural, since God is the author of nature. Nature is no corrupt. Corruption is corrupt. From the beginning it was not so. This is a cardinal difference between a Catholic anthropology and a Calvinist, Manichaean or post-Protestant one.