The Holocaust was a desecration of many things, surely; but first and last it was about the slaughter of the Jews.
This comes from a
liberal Catholic viewpoint on Pope Benedict's visit to Auschwitz. In an
earlier post on the subject I focused on how the responsibilty of the German people for the crimes of Nazism was rather elided in the Pope's speech. The article here makes the same point about his failure 'to voice repentance for the Catholic Church's nearly two millennia of anti-Semitic teaching':
Nazi vilification of the Jews as the unredeemable enemy of civilization had as much to do with the history of Christian anti-Semitism as with crackbrained notions of racial superiority. No, the Catholic Church was not responsible for the Holocaust, but Nazi anti-Semitism is inconceivable without its Christian antecedents.
(Thanks: JK.)