I do not think this should be held against him, but you know some on the left will use it to bash the Holy See.
(2) Ratzinger was a reluctant inductee who never saw action.
This sentence, for instance, is entirely false, and tries to confuse several issues:
His condemnations are legion - of women priests, married priests, dissident theologians and homosexuals, whom he has declared to be suffering from an "objective disorder".
Yawn ... Call Jimmah Carter. He's in charge of voting.
Nearly any child in Germany was a Hitler Youth at the time this man was a child... Personally I'm hoping for a hard core African Pope.. one who has first hand seen the devastation of promescuity, war, inhumanity in recent memory... not some social justice type from the western world.
I have faith that the Holy Spirit will guide the Cardinals and the right man will be selected in the end.
I can't wait for the fecal-slinging that will take place if Ratzinger is elected pope. Oliver Stone is licking his chops.
One liberal theologian,when asked what he thought of a Ratzinger papacy, was more direct: “It fills me with horror.”
LOL! This guy's in for horror then
because these Cardinals are JPII's.
I think whichever pundit said the MSM has built up Ratzinger expectations in order to be able to tear him down was right.
A former boss of mine was in Hitler Youth. He couldn't help it and wasn't proud of it. It just happened. He is also one of the nicest, most intelligent people I know.
Man, what is Ratzinger, a Republican? I mean, you really don't see this kind of opposition research outside of the Democratic party, do you?
This is a pathetic smear campaign. Ratzinger does not advertise this, but he has never made it a secret either. The left seems to forget that the German people were captive victims of Hitler. If an American was favored I expect we would be reading about how he was once in a fanatical right-wing militant movement known as the BOY SCOUTS OF AMERICA.
"Papal hopeful is a former Hitler Youth"
Holy crap! He was a Nazi!
Until you get to this sentence, buried about halfway through:
"He joined the Hitler Youth aged 14, shortly after membership was made compulsory in 1941."
Then he didn't choose to join, he HAD to. What a non-story.
And I believe the other posters who mention the scale of membership in these youth orgs. I had a prof who was in the young fascists or whatever, in Italy, when he was like 6. Big deal.
Not a Catholic. Not a Jew. But I found this article interesting.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull%26cid=1113704370906
For the record, I don't actually think Ratzinger will be elected. My money's on Scola. Although personally I'd like to see Arinze, just to tweak the racists who call themselves Catholic, especially the Europeans, who like to think of themselves as progressive.
You're exactly right. I had a college professor who was a Hitler Youth and fought in Berlin. He also had most of his fingers chopped off in a soviet POW camp. Was in there for 10 years after the war.
It's really no big deal, in my opinion.
"He joined the Hitler Youth aged 14, shortly after membership was made compulsory in 1941."
*#!@& Commies!!
London's Sunday Times would have us believe that one of the leading contenders for the papacy is a closet Nazi. In if-only-they-knew tones, the newspaper informs readers that German-born Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was a member of the Hitler Youth during World War II and suggests that, because of this, the "panzer cardinal" would be quite a contrast to his predecessor, John Paul II.
The article also classifies Ratzinger as a "theological anti-Semite" for believing in Jesus so strongly that – gasp! – he thinks that everyone, even Jews, should accept him as the messiah.
To all this we should say, "This is news?!"
As the Sunday Times article admits, Ratzinger's membership in the Hitler Youth was not voluntary but compulsory; also admitted are the facts that the cardinal – only a teenager during the period in question – was the son of an anti-Nazi policeman, that he was given a dispensation from Hitler Youth activities because of his religious studies, and that he deserted the German army.
Ratzinger has several times gone on record on his supposedly "problematic" past. In the 1997 book Salt of the Earth, Ratzinger is asked whether he was ever in the Hitler Youth.
"At first we weren't," he says, speaking of himself and his older brother, "but when the compulsory Hitler Youth was introduced in 1941, my brother was obliged to join. I was still too young, but later as a seminarian, I was registered in the Hitler Youth. As soon as I was out of the seminary, I never went back. And that was difficult because the tuition reduction, which I really needed, was tied to proof of attendance at the Hitler Youth.
"Thank goodness there was a very understanding mathematics professor. He himself was a Nazi, but an honest man, and said to me, 'Just go once to get the document so we have it...' When he saw that I simply didn't want to, he said, 'I understand, I'll take care of it' and so I was able to stay free of it."
Ratzinger says this again in his own memoirs, printed in 1998. In his 2002 biography of the cardinal, John Allen, Jr. of the National Catholic Reporter wrote in detail about those events.
The only significant complaint that the Times makes against Ratzinger's wartime conduct is that he resisted quietly and passively, rather than having done something drastic enough to earn him a trip to a concentration camp. Of course, whenever it is said that a German failed the exceptional-resistance-to-the-Nazis test, it would behoove us all to recognize that too many Jews failed it, as well.
If he were truly a Nazi sympathizer, then it would undoubtedly have become evident during the past 60 years. Yet throughout his service in the church, Ratzinger has distinguished himself in the field of Jewish-Catholic relations.
As prefect of the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger played an instrumental role in the Vatican's revolutionary reconciliation with the Jews under John Paul II. He personally prepared Memory and Reconciliation, the 2000 document outlining the church's historical "errors" in its treatment of Jews. And as president of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, Ratzinger oversaw the preparation of The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible, a milestone theological explanation for the Jews' rejection of Jesus.
If that's theological anti-Semitism, then we should only be so lucky to "suffer" more of the same.
As for the Hitler Youth issue, not even Yad Vashem has considered it worthy of further investigation. Why should we?