My only ‘live’ encounter’ with Pope Benedict XVI came in May 2006 when His Holiness visited Poland.

The venerable Catholic Church hierarchy this time did not need any miracles to turn water into wine – amidst the drought of an alcohol ban for Poles, through a miracle there came Plenty!

I was struck by many aspects of the Pope’s address at Auschwitz – see the full text here.

As you would expect, many eloquent phrases and subtle ideas:

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

In silence, then, we bow our heads before the endless line of those who suffered and were put to death here; yet our silence becomes in turn a plea for forgiveness and reconciliation, a plea to the living God never to let this happen again…

No – when all is said and done, we must continue to cry out humbly yet insistently to God: Rouse yourself!  Do not forget mankind, your creature! 

And our cry to God must also be a cry that pierces our very heart, a cry that awakens within us God’s hidden presence – so that his power, the power he has planted in our hearts, will not be buried or choked within us by the mire of selfishness, pusillanimity, indifference or opportunism… 

There is also the inscription in Russian, which commemorates the tremendous loss of life endured by the Russian soldiers who combated the Nazi reign of terror; but this inscription also reminds us that their mission had a tragic twofold effect: they set the peoples free from one dictatorship, but the same peoples were thereby subjected to a new one, that of Stalin and the Communist system.

Yet on the one key issue, namely responsibility for the whole disaster Auschwitz represented, the Pope seemed to me to fall short:

… a duty before God, for me to come here as the successor of Pope John Paul II and as a son of the German people – a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation’s honour, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation, with the result that our people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power. 

This contrives to portray the German people as bamboozled victims, rather than people who in their many millions voted for Hitler and otherwise supported him. Not everyone, for sure. But Germans en masse were not only used and abused. In good part they brought their suffering on themselves, and set in motion untold suffering for countless millions of others.

Pope Benedict might have dealt with this by saying a word about his own connection with the Hitler Youth and the power of temptation, or otherwise addressing each individual’s accountability for mass wickedness committed in his/her name. But one way or the other, the formula used here did not, for me, do the trick.

Maybe even the Pope is unable to confess fully and frankly? And perhaps that’s the point?

Here is the Archbishop explaining why the Pope should be warmly welcomed to the UK and what in the bigger scheme of things he represents for our civilisation.