Quote:
Originally posted by chideltjen
I thought they were allowed to pick their own name... but I could be wrong.
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It's actually the first thing they do after accepting the election -- pick the name they will use.
Quote:
Originally posted by honeychile
Not being a Catholic, I have no real "dog in this fight", but doesn't it bother anyone that the former Cardinal Ratzinger was a member of the Hitler Youth? This is far from the only quote I could find about his involvement.
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Hmmm. Grains of salt called for, I would think.
According to reports I have read, Ratzinger's father was a policeman, and his family had to move in 1932 because of his father's outspoken criticism of the Nazis. While that doesn't necessarily mean the son wasn't in the Hitler Youth (we all have our teenage rebellions), I would be more willing to trust the allegation if it was in a real news source.
I think it's clear that this is a "stay-the-course" election. And as much as I know lots of people would have liked to see female priests, for example, that simply wasn't going to happen, given the pool of candidates. Married priests, maybe, but not female priests.
ETA: I found
this story in the Times of London on Ratzinger's Hitler Youth involvement.
A few things worth noting:
The son of a rural Bavarian police officer, Ratzinger was six when Hitler came to power in 1933. His father, also called Joseph, was an anti-Nazi whose attempts to rein in Hitler’s Brown Shirts forced the family to move home several times.
In 1937 Ratzinger’s father retired and the family moved to Traunstein, a staunchly Catholic town in Bavaria close to the Führer’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden. He joined the Hitler Youth aged 14, shortly after membership was made compulsory in 1941.
He quickly won a dispensation on account of his training at a seminary. “Ratzinger was only briefly a member of the Hitler Youth and not an enthusiastic one,” concluded John Allen, his biographer.
This part was a little more troubling to me:
Two years later Ratzinger was enrolled in an anti-aircraft unit that protected a BMW factory making aircraft engines. The workforce included slaves from Dachau concentration camp.
Ratzinger has insisted he never took part in combat or fired a shot — adding that his gun was not even loaded — because of a badly infected finger. He was sent to Hungary, where he set up tank traps and saw Jews being herded to death camps. He deserted in April 1944 and spent a few weeks in a prisoner of war camp.
It is something, though, that he deserted and spent time in a POW camp.