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Article: Pope at Auschwitz praised, faulted.(WORLD)(Benedict XVI doesn't speak out on anti-Semitism)
- Article from:
- National Catholic Reporter
- Article date:
- June 16, 2006
- Author:
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While Pope John Paul II's 1979 visit to Auschwitz, the first ever for a pope, was widely hailed as a watershed, Benedict XVI's May 28 appearance has drawn more mixed reviews. Criticism came mostly for what the pope didn't say--no acknowledgment of Christianity's complicity in the Holocaust, for example, and no reference to contemporary anti-Semitism.
Ironically, John Paul didn't say any of those things in 1979 either. Indeed, most experts say that if anything, Benedict went a little further in deferring to Jewish sensitivities, for example by electing not to celebrate a Catholic Mass in Birkenau as John Paul had a quarter-century before.
Perhaps John ...