Vatican Denies, Then Admits Pope's Hitler Youth Role

Leave it to the Catholic Church to not keep the lies from getting in the way of the truth. Most sleazy organizations stick to their fabricated stories during a PR mess, the Vatican can't even get that right.

Pope Benedict XVI's pilgrimage to the Holy Land veered into controversy over his past on Tuesday when the Vatican denied and then acknowledged his membership in the Hitler Youth during World War II.

The conflicting accounts came in response to criticism by Israeli leaders that the German pontiff's address at the Holocaust Memorial on Monday had failed to acknowledge his witness of Nazi terror as a conscript in the youth movement and the German army.

Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican's chief spokesman, felt compelled to declare that the pope, growing up as Joseph Ratzinger in Bavaria, "never, never, never" belonged to the Hitler Youth. Later he backtracked, conceding what Ratzinger, then a Roman Catholic cardinal, told an interviewer for his 1997 biography: that his membership in the movement had been compulsory.

There was some controversy when the pontiff declared that Hitler's extermination of Jews must "never be denied, belittled or forgotten" but did not use the word Nazi or German.

"The pope spoke like a historian, as somebody observing from the sidelines, about things that shouldn't happen," Israeli Parliament Speaker Reuven Rivlin said on Israel Radio. "But what can you do? He was part of them."

Truth hurts. A picture is worth a 1000 words and Ratzy's Nazi Youth pic above proves it. Born in 1927, Ratzinger would have been 14 in 1941 when he was a member. Seems an age you can remember what you were doing.

Source: Baltimore Sun