So, my guess is that Pope Benedict XV's election is gonna alienate a lot of American Catholics. European Catholics tend to be not so conservative, also, but are they gonna be mollified by his being a European?

I have no idea how this'll be received in other parts of the world, is what I'm getting at.

What brenda said. I think I would feel less, whatever... suspicious...harsh...something about his HY membership if in his adulthood he'd shown what effect that had. Surely if you're forced to join an evil organization that's overtaking your country, committing atrocities, crimes against humanity, don't you later see the dangers in calling a certain segment of people less than equal? Don't you caution against the power of the majority to impose its will on the minority? I don't see that. And yeah, I'd still like an inspiring story about 12 year old Ben jacking with the Nazis partisan style. But I could forgo that if, like I said, he seemed like he'd learned the lessons of what he saw and was doing his part to make sure it never happened again.

Did anyone ever link this here? In my neighborhood.

Ratzinger? Vey is mir. I feel like starting a Catholic "Sorry Everybody" website. Fuck.

I keep wondering if there will be a schism between the US Catholics and Rome.

Possibly. Can't say I'd be sorry, either.

And I wonder if Ratzinger is in, if that would precipitate it.

This would so not surprise me, not at all.

FTR- I'm not calling him a Nazi. I'm just not calling him not one. And being pretty skeptical about handwaving it away.

How is theology defined, as distinct from the church? Is it the bookish stuff? From a biography of Ratzinger:

Under Hitler, Ratzinger says he watched the Nazis twist and distort the truth. Their lies about Jews, about genetics, were more than academic exercises. People died by the millions because of them. The church's service to society, Ratzinger concluded, is to stand for absolute truths that function as boundary markers: Move about within these limits, but outside them lies disaster.

Later reflection on the Nazi experience also left Ratzinger with a conviction that theology must either bind itself to the church, with its creed and teaching authority, or it becomes the plaything of outside forces -- the state in a totalitarian system or secular culture in Western liberal democracies. In a widely noted 1986 lecture in Toronto, Ratzinger put it this way: "A church without theology impoverishes and blinds, while a churchless theology melts away into caprice." *

I think the Hitler Youth thing is a huge distraction. It's inconclusive. Good people, very good people, bad people and evil people have probably been members. It's not a predictor of much. However, his actions and his words as an adult are his (more or less) alone, and it seems there's plenty of fodder there.

Oh neat. HE'S THE POPE? Fine. When do we start Inquisition II?

So, knowing very little about cardinals except there's that charismatic one from Africa who typically wears black over purple, rather than red over white, and that there's Cardinal Law who screwed the pooch on the whole sex abuse scandal thing, and there's the new Boston Archbishop, who's, what, a Dominican?

The Boston Archbishop is a Franciscan I think.

I make no defense of his conservatism. I just get twitchy at blanket villification. Some of my husband's relatives in Germany went the "I'd rather do my best to get my family fed, where do I sign up to stay below the radar?" route. Not everyone is brave.

However, his actions and his words as an adult are his (more or less) alone, and it seems there's plenty of fodder there.

But that's what I'm saying. His words as an adult don't show me he learned anything from his experience except to follow what the church says because if you're not religious, you're prone to evil or being corrupted by it- he makes no move toward tolerance and understanding in that biography passage.

So, am I to take it that, from a progressive, inclusive, not-alienating-more-Catholics-let-alone-everybody-else perspective, they could hardly have chosen worse than Ratzinger?

Das ist korrekt.

JZ, I'll register the domain. You start rounding up pictures.