For days, Jewish leaders have strongly questioned the pope's decision to visit Auschwitz on Sunday without underscoring the widespread hatred of Jews that led to the Holocaust.
Some have faulted him for failing to explicitly condemn anti-Semitism, which is experiencing a resurgence in Poland and other European countries. Others have challenged Benedict for not issuing any kind of apology for either Germany's collective role in the Holocaust, the Roman Catholic Church's perceived failure to stand up to it, or his own forced service in the Hitler Youth and the military.
Speaking before a general audience on Wednesday, Benedict told crowds “not to cede to the temptation of racial hatred, which is at the origin of the worst forms of anti-Semitism.”During his speech at Auschwitz, Benedict blamed the Holocaust on a “ring of criminals” and cast Adolf Hitler's plan to eradicate European Jewry as an attack on God that in principle bore consequences for people of all faiths.
That emphasis departed from traditional readings of the Holocaust, which regards Jews as the Nazis' primary target.
“What the Pope did at Auschwitz was to marginalize the distinctly Jewish character of what took place at Auschwitz,” Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement released Tuesday.
Benedict's Auschwitz address also highlighted the lives of two Auschwitz victims -- both now Catholic saints -- who have become a source of tension between Catholics and Jewish groups: Maximilian Kolbe, a Catholic Polish priest accused of editing anti-Semitic tracts; and Edith Stein, a convert from Judaism who entered a convent in a failed bid to escape Nazi persecution.
Foxman said he was “deeply disturbed” that Benedict's address highlighted Catholic figures without making “one explicit acknowledgment of Jewish lives vanquished simply because they were Jews.”
On Wednesday, Benedict noted that “six million Jews” were murdered during the Holocaust, but appeared to reaffirm his position that the Nazis' principle aim in carrying out the Final Solution was to “eliminate God and take his place.”
