Catholics and Jews

Stephen Prothero offers a pretty good reflection about what Pope Benedict is doing, and his general tone-deafness.

He writes When I was a professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta, I required my students to read Nazi theology. I wanted them to understand how some Christians bent the words of the Bible into weapons aimed at Jews, and how those weapons found their mark in the concentration camps. My Christian students responded to these disturbing readings with one disturbing voice. The Nazis were not Christians, they said. Jesus was, after all, a Jew. This response was in many respects laudable. But in distancing their religion from the history of the Holocaust, my students absolved themselves of any responsibility for reckoning with how their religious tradition might have contributed to these horrors.

After 9/11, Muslims absolved themselves, too. They said the terrorists who hijacked those jets were not Muslims, absolving themselves of any responsibility of reckoning with how Islam might have contributed to these horrors.

Too easily we ascribe evil to other people, when it is also deep in the human heart. If we want to see God, or the devil, we need merely look into the mirror.

Via.