Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Ratzinger?

I promised myself that I would not write anything here regarding the visit of Joseph Alois Ratzinger to Britain this week. Launching attacks upon the Roman Catholic Church is a remarkably easy thing to do nowadays. Everyone, including a large proportion of Catholics, realise that the institution is rotten to the core and has quite a bit of internal tidying up to do before it gets whatever dignity it had back again (though if you are an Irish Catholic reading this I would encourage you to visit countmeout.ie and follow the instructions provided).

However, after listening to Mr Ratzinger's comments about Nazism somehow being the product what happens when faith is absent in a society I just had to say something. Actually, I don't have to say anything. I shall leave it to Herr Hitler himself, speaking in Berlin in 1933, to explain just what he thought about the presence of a god in society:

We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.

There was more godbothering from the Führer the following year:

National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary, it stands on the ground of a real Christianity. The Church's interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of to-day, in our fight against the Bolshevist culture, against an atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for the consciousness of a community in our national life, for the conquest of hatred and disunion between the classes, for the conquest of civil war and unrest, of strife and discord. These are not anti-Christian, these are Christian principles.

And not forgetting Hitler's remarks during the negotiations for the Reichskonkordat that every single Catholic now seems to have conveniently forgotten about:

Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith.

These types of remarks by Nazism's head honcho are not tucked away in the pages of obscure old history books. You can find them quite easily, complete with the relevant footnotes and sources, on that horrible godless website known as Wikipedia. I have no doubt that Mr Ratzinger and Catholics of his ilk who spew out such historical falsifications are well aware of just where Adolf Hitler stood on the question of atheism. They are many things, but they are not stupid. They know the facts. What they desire is for the rest of us to forget them.

Popes and cardinals and bishops can do many things but they cannot rewrite history. The history of fascism in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s is closely tied with the history of Catholicism in that era. Even this week's state visit was only made possible thanks to the 1929 Lateran Treaty signed between the Holy See and Benito Mussolini establishing the Vatican City State as an independent entity. And what of the Ustaše in Croatia? Or Salazar's Portugal? Or Francoist Spain? Or the fact that the head of fascist Slovakia was Father Jozef Tiso? Even here in Ireland, a country where the far-right never managed to make a breakthrough, a 700-strong volunteer brigade from the Blueshirt movement which travelled to Spain to support Franco's overthrow of the democratically elected republican government was given the blessing of Catholic priests.

Fascism and Nazism did not arise out of the absence of faith. Their origins, not exclusively but to a large extent, lay in its presence in these societies. That the leader of this discredited institution is, 65 years after the end of the war, still attempting to peddle the myth that Hitler and his followers were somehow atheists does not give us much hope today for an honest conclusion to the more recent crimes involving child raping priests. I suppose we can always hope, or, if you still have the stomach for it, pray.