Arbeit macht frei

"In a place like this, words fail. In the end, there can only be a dread silence, a silence which is a heartfelt cry to God - Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?"

So said Pope Bendedict at Auschwitz / Birkenau, on Sunday, Eastern European time according to ABC Online.

Look - I'm not God's press secretary, but I find the hypocrisy of this statement totally astounding. No - I'm not laying any blame at Ratzinger's feet; I'm NOT one of those who thinks that because he was in the Hitler Youth then drafted into an Anti Aircraft battery to defend Berlin in 44/45 that he is a "fascist" in the political sense.

And that is probably the last time you are likely to hear me defend someone who I think will be singlehandedly responsible for at least 100 million preventable aids deaths in Africa and Latin America. I know that 100000000 haven't YET died, but give it a generation or two of deaths that would have been avoidable. But I digress.

Where was the voice of Pious XII during the holocaust? For goodness sake, it was Pacelli (as Sec State for the Holy See prior to becoming Pope) who talked Pios XI (his predecessor as pope) out of condemning Kristallnacht.

JPII could get away with visiting Auschwitz as "a son of Poland". Benedict used the line "a son of Germany", and I think that the vast majority accept that.

Having called for Australia to aplogise for its treatment of Aborigines, maybe he should have used this time to condemn the silence of his forebears, rather than to ask god about the silence.