Don’t call abortion a holocaust, says Pope Benedict XVI.

n Face­book there’s a fun­ny lit­tle guy who runs around inter­ro­gat­ing peo­ple on whether they agree with John Paul II that abor­tion is just like the Holo­caust. He’s a self-appoint­ed Inquisi­tor who seems to think that it’s not enough to accept Church teach­ing that abor­tion is a grave sin; you must also accept a par­tic­u­lar metaphor, or his­tor­i­cal com­par­i­son, one pope used to describe it. Even the metaphors are infal­li­ble on this top­ic. If you reject them, you’re a heretic, you’re not pro-life enough, you might even enjoy killing babies. Who knows what the think­ing is behind this line of Inqui­si­tion?

Well, then, Pope Bene­dict XVI is a heretic. In fact, Ratzinger went fur­ther and said that not even John Paul II com­pared abor­tion to the Holo­caust. (Bene­dict XVI was Car­di­nal Ratzinger at the time, and John Paul II was still alive.) “The pope,” said Ratzinger—this was at a press con­fer­ence in which he pre­sent­ed John Paul II’s book Mem­o­ry and Iden­ti­ty—“recalls men’s per­ma­nent temp­ta­tion and tells us that we are not immune either to the destruc­tion of human life; how­ev­er, the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion between the Shoah and abor­tion is for­eign to the book and to the Holy Father’s idea.”

Echo­ing Ratzinger, Vat­i­can spokesman Joaquín Navar­ro Valls added: “The Pope has no desire to com­pare sys­tems of evil; what he wish­es to do is to iden­ti­fy the roots of moral evil.”

This is an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion. Abor­tion and the Holo­caust have sim­i­lar caus­es (i.e., human sin), but they are not sim­i­lar to each oth­er. The com­par­i­son of abor­tion to the Holo­caust, said Navar­ro Valls, “is a mis­take which has no basis in [JP2’s] book [Mem­o­ry and Iden­ti­ty].”

So there you are. The idea that John Paul II com­pares abor­tion to the Holo­caust is based upon a mis­read­ing of John Paul II, accord­ing to Ratzinger and the Vat­i­can spokesman. And yet fun­ny lit­tle guys on Face­book run around turn­ing a mis­read­ing into a dog­ma and engag­ing in pet­ty lit­tle Inqui­si­tions.

So it goes.

Update. An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post mis­tak­en­ly attrib­uted to Car­di­nal Ratzinger some words that actu­al­ly belonged to the Vat­i­can spokesman. The post has been updat­ed accord­ing­ly.

Some are attempt­ing to claim that say­ing abor­tion is a holo­caust is sub­stan­tive­ly dif­fer­ent from com­par­ing it to the Holo­caust. This is, in my view, a facile dis­tinc­tion with­out a dif­fer­ence. The word “holo­caust” is so con­nect­ed to the Shoah that its use will always elic­it the con­nec­tion in peo­ple’s minds. I can not for the life of me fig­ure out why any­one would be so attached to this one descrip­tor, as though the hor­ror of abor­tion could not pos­si­bly be described with­out it, as an evil whol­ly incom­pa­ra­ble to any oth­er.