John Paul II and Benedict XVI have interesting histories in regards to the Third Reich. Here’s how the last Pope spent the war :

All that was interrupted by the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, which devastated the country and left an indelible impression on nineteen-year-old Karol Wojtyla. A priest later described how Wojtyla arrived at the cathedral when the first German bombs started to fall and served Mass amid the howl of sirens and the blasts of explosions.

With official schools closed during the German occupation, he helped set up an underground university and the clandestine ?Rhapsodic Theater,? which met in members? apartments.
. . .
What delayed his entry to the priesthood was his great passion for literature, philosophy and drama ? but the war helped change that, too.

He started noticing that some of his friends had disappeared, killed in war or seized in the night by Nazi troops. It haunted him.

?Any day I could have been picked up on the street, at the factory or at the stone quarry and sent to a concentration camp. Sometimes I asked myself: ?So many people at my age were losing their lives, why not me??? he wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination.

He gradually came to feel that he was spared for a higher reason, part of a divine plan to bring something good out of wartime Poland.

And here’s what the current Pope was doing at the same time (via Billmon):

In 1937 Ratzinger?s father retired and the family moved to Traunstein, a staunchly Catholic town in Bavaria close to the F?hrer?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.

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.

He has since said that although he was opposed to the Nazi regime, any open resistance would have been futile.

Not that I’m trying to say that “Ratso” is/was a Nazi. Like with Sen. Byrd’s involvement with the KKK, I think the past is important as far as it informs the present. I don’t know enough about Ratzinger to say whether or not he shares the hateful views of the Nazis, but considering the despotic nature of the Nazi regime, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

That said, for all the cries of “resistance would have been futile”, I’d be willing to bet that the penalty for a Pole setting up an underground anti-Nazi group would have been much more extreme than for a German who decides to avoid work that contributes to the war effort. Pope Ratso was a coward in comparison to John Paul II then and I can only assume that his papacy will be equally weak and gutless in comparison. Considering all the other reasons to dislike Benedict XVI, I just hope his tenure is brief.