Interesting that they completely ignored the fact that he was a member of the Hitler Youth...
Yeah, I was kind of interested in the period during the war. No mention of it.
Just about every kid was.
"Like a U.S. presidential campaign, the run-up to the conclave saw dirty laundry being hung out in public.
For example, a Sunday Times of London profile on Ratzinger reported on the cardinal's "brief membership" in the Hitler Youth movement.
In his memoirs, Ratzinger speaks openly of being enrolled in the Nazi youth movement against his will when he was 14 in 1941. He says he was soon let out because of his studies for the priesthood."
New York Post wrote on April 19th
From CNN.com - SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR/CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR/JIM BITTERMANN, CNN CORRESPONDENT
transcript April 18th:
S. O'BRIEN: Let's talk a little bit about Cardinal Ratzinger's background.
I've read that he was a member of the Nazi youth in Germany, that later he served in the German Army in World War 2.
What else can you tell us about him?
ALLEN (CNN Vatican Analyst John Allen ): Well, first of all, Ratzinger's class was forcibly enrolled in the Hitler Youth when he was a young man. He asked immediately to his teacher, or of his teacher, to be disenrolled. And, of course, he was conscripted into the German Army. He didn't volunteer. He spent a few months in an anti-aircraft battalion in Munich and then deserted.
So I don't think you can make any credible case that Ratzinger was in any sense pro-Nazi. Quite the contrary. His family was quiet strongly anti-Nazi. His father took a series of less significant jobs in order to sort of stay away from what was happening in Nazi Germany.
But he obviously did live through the war. He then became a very prominent German theologian. He was part of the progressive majority, ironically enough, at the Second Vatican Council in the mid-'60s.
But after Vatican II, particularly in the wake of the student revolts in Europe in 1968, I think Ratzinger felt that things were getting dangerously out of hand and he began to move in a sort of steadily more conservative direction.
In, and then, of course, as we all know, in 1981, Pope John Paul II called him to service in Rome as the chief doctrinal authority in the church, running the Congregation for the Faith. And in that time, Ratzinger has been the architect, I would say, of the most conservative and therefore controversial aspects of John Paul's papacy, from stands on abortion, divorce, homosexuality, to the pope's crackdown on liberation theology in Latin America in the '80s. That was a movement to try to align the church with progressive movements for social change. Up to the very recent, when Ratzinger has taken a very strong stand asserting that Christian is a kind of superior religion to all the other religions in the world.
So he's a man very much admired by conservatives and he is a man to whom people of a more progressive temperament would certainly have a long list of objections.
S. O'BRIEN: John Allen, lour Vatican analyst, this morning.
I was kind of curious about his interruption for WWII. I figured he must have been in the German army. No biggie, as long as he wasn't guilty of anything. Many German's served honorably for their nation, not for the dictator.