1. As a teenager, Pope Benedict was a member of the Hitler Youth.
2. Some 10-20% of youths avoided joining but the Pope still joined.
3. He wanted evidence of attending the Hitler youth meetings – not because his safety was at risk, but because it gave him a discount on his tuition.

It is also clear from many other sources that it was NOT compulsory to join the Hitler youth.

To quote one ex-member (Henry Metelman):

“I was a member of the Hitler Youth for five years. A number of my friends had not joined up. Some found it difficult to enrol in the civil service and other state-run institutions. But I know of none of them having been punished in any way”.

(Ref: Guardian, Letters: 25-April-2005)

However, it WAS an impediment for your career.

And so Pope Benedict joined the Hitler youth.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/apr/13/pope-prosecution-dawkins

Nazis make me mad.

“Police estimate that 1 in 3 victims of drug-assisted sexual assault are students, most of whom have their drink spiked in pubs or clubs.”

http://www.cusu.cam.ac.uk/welfare/safety/goingout.html

It may be fun to demonize someone on another continent and sell some more books, but he’s sure to find some nasty shenanigans if he just asks the right questions around his own university.

The Ba’ath Party was notably secularist. Iraq was less of a theocracy than the US. Women enjoyed considerable equality under the law and were educated and well represented in major professions. Since the US graciously liberated the Iraqi people, the status of women there now compares with that of women in the most repressive theocratic regimes in the Middle East. Yay us.

You have a tin ear. The record is unambiguous.

I wonder, in what other circumstance would we allow an organization to conduct an internal investigation for crimes like these? If there were an alleged act of pedophilia in a school, for example, would we let the faculty conduct an investigation? I don’t think we would. I think we’d cut to the chase and call the police. And if the pedophile were caught, would we be satisfied with him just losing his job? It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?

To flip the analogy around, what if it was another type of crime? What if a dead body with a gunshot wound was discovered in a church? Who would we call … the Vatican?

I was floored as I listened to this guy on NPR. The whole idea that the church could mount an internal investigation, even as recently as 2006, shows how incredibly out of touch they are with reality. Let’s face it: the Catholic clergy is not living in the same century as the rest of us, and I applaud legal challenges like this to remind them of how things work in the real world.

Fact: when he was a cardinal, the Pope aided a pedophile. He may not have thought of it that way at the time, and he might be under the impression that he gets a free pass because he’s a religious leader. But to remind him of reality, I’m glad someone is working to make sure he has a lot of trouble with international travel.

Finally, I’d like to add that mentioning “Hitler Youth” in this post does not automatically invoke Godwin’s so-called “law” since this guy *actually was* a legitimate, card-carrying member of the Nazi Party.

>> “Never, never, never,” said Father Frederico Lombardi, to a group of journalists. “The Pope was never in Hitler Youth.”

>> This, strangely, appears to contradict completely Cardinal Ratzinger’s own words, as quoted in his book of autobiographical reflections from 1996, Salt of the Earth.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8046483.stm

Lombardi has his hands full.

>> Nearly immediately after Bertone’s comments at a news conference in Santiago, Chile’s gay rights advocates denounced what they called a “perverse strategy” by the Vatican to “shirk its own ethical and legal responsibility” with a “spurious and disgusting” connection.

http://www.kansascity.com/2010/04/14/1876578/vatican-tamps-down-uproar-over.html

When he was 14 Ratzinger was conscripted into the Hitler Youth as required by law at the time. It is well known that he attended poorly, disliked the organisation, and his father was an early critic of the Nazi regime.

The current well supported allegations that he suppressed serious issues of child abuse by clergy is plenty bad enough, there’s no need to get creatively representational with the facts.

If I remember correctly, the Swiss army is pretty much the entire adult population of Switzerland, all of whom are trained and issued with rifles.

My headline and intro to the excerpt might have been a touch overblown, but wasn’t that obvious? Since you seem to be a very literal-minded person, I’ll make it clear for you: Hitchens and Dawkins aren’t actors, they aren’t making a buddy cop movie, and they aren’t going to personally arrest the Pope when he comes to spread his message of peace and love to the people of jolly old England.