Man as God intended

Further to this post on Pope Benedict XVI's speech at Auschwitz, here's a letter from Katherine Barlow to the Times:

Sir, The late Metropolitan Anthony - a monk and later head of the Russian Orthodox Church in Europe, a member of the French Resistance, a surgeon who also worked with survivors of concentration camps - was in a better position... to pinpoint the true question which must be asked of those camps, their perpetrators and their sufferers... The question was not, he said, "Where was God?" in all this. God, as always, was there suffering with the victims. The question was, and will be for all time, "Where was Man? Man as he is meant to be, in fullness as God intended and as Jesus made clear in the Beatitudes."

It is Man who failed at Auschwitz, and the absence of what he really is meant to be, in communion with his Creator, explains such man-made horrors.

I don't subscribe to the theology here, unless in a secularized version - such that God is a name for the best aspirations of humankind, for a world in which people are by and large secure and protected against the worst forms of injustice. But Katherine Barlow speaks the truth. The failure is humanity's - at Auschwitz then, in Darfur now.