January 8, 2006, Ex-Hitler Youth Member Denounces "Culture of Death"
This kind of self-writing headline is the recurring (and unique) problem with having elected the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI, particularly when he gives off-the-cuff speeches denouncing a vaguely described "culture of death" (which his predecessor usually equated with abortion and birth control, and of course, used the power of his office to, inter alia, rail against the distribution of condoms to AIDS ravaged Africa).
Whatever. As a non-Catholic, my standing to criticize the Church is limited (though the choice of someone who served in Die Hitlerjugend will not be something I'll likely fail to mention when discussing this Pope, particularly when he purports to make moral pronouncements... of any kind...)
The prior Pope, for example, consistently railed against our current President... both when he was a lethal-injection-happy Governor presiding over more executions than any Governor in American history, and later as he was launching military adventures that didn't pass any test for "just war" (other than the "I can politically get away with it" test, the only test, btw, Bush uses for anything.)
For whatever reason, I haven't heard those kind of broader moral pronouncements from this Pope-- only his "small-ball" railing at sexual liberation and "moral relativism" (whatever that is). One must have their priorities, I suppose...