Born in southeastern Germany in 1927, Joseph Ratzinger was a member of the Hitler Youth as a teenager, and was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1943. He later became one of the Catholic Church’s leading academic theologians, before being made Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. In 2013, he took the unusual step of retiring due to his declining health, and passed away on December 31, 2022. Rabbi Mark Gottlieb considers Benedict’s ideas and his historical significance:

Benedict . . . had nearly as much reverential regard for his “elder brothers in the faith” as his famously philo-Semitic predecessor. At the same time, his deeper appreciation of the eternal bond between God and His people Israel—of the flesh—is tempered by orthodox Catholic teaching on the exclusive salvific power of [Christianity’s founder]. Thus, Benedict’s affirmation, following in the catechetical footsteps of John Paul II, that the “gifts and the call of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29) is complexly woven into more traditional claims.

As the Conciliar scholar Gavin D’Costa chronicles Benedict’s pronouncements on Jews and Judaism, he underscores that this “pontificate is marked by an increasing use of Jewish terms, familiarity with Jewish rabbinical literature, and a clear sense of contemporary Judaism as being the covenant people of God.”

Jews . . . were concerned when in 2008 Benedict reintroduced the Latin Rite Good Friday liturgy, which called for the conversion of the Jews. Benedict amended the full text of the older prayer, removing some of the pre-Conciliar language, but retained the calls for mission and conversion. Jews concerned over a clearly internal Catholic matter, namely the propriety and doctrinal purity of a matter of liturgy, should remember the late, great Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s injunction in his 1964 agenda-setting essay, “Confrontation.” For Soloveitchik, the deepest form of respect for the integrity of another faith community—and hence, one’s own—is demonstrated when we avoid the imposition of our own faith’s standards or interests onto the faith of the other.

This prudent counsel [allows] us to dwell on . . . Benedict’s singular defense of European culture and the West, and his restoration of reason as the crowning achievement of that very civilization under duress.

Commenting on the wave of anti-Hamas demonstrations in the Gaza Strip, Seth Mandel writes:

Gazans have not have been fully honest in public. There’s a reason for that. To take just one example, Amin Abed was nearly beaten to death with hammers for criticizing Hamas. Abed was saved by bystanders, so presumably the intention was to finish him off. During the cease-fire, Hamas members bragged about executing “collaborators” and filmed themselves shooting civilians.

Which is what makes yesterday’s protests all the more significant. To protest Hamas in public is to take one’s life in one’s hands. That is especially true because the protests were bound to be filmed, in order to get the message out to the world. The reason the world needs to hear that message is that Westerners have been Hamas’s willing propaganda tools. The protests on campus are not “pro-Palestinian,” they are pro-Hamas—and the people of Gaza are Hamas’s victims.