“A German Pope Confronts Nazi Past” is the misleading hed on Ian Fishers’ account of Pope Benedict’s recent visit to Auschwitz. Let’s tally the pope’s “confrontations” with the past:

–rather than suggest that responsibility for the Holocaust went beyond the Nazi Party, he laid the blame squarely on the party, absolving all others of communal blame and ignoring decades of scholarship;

–rather than recognize that the extermination of the Jews was the main project of the camps, he greeted 31 Polish Catholic survivors and one Jew;

–rather than confront Christendom’s complicity in fascism — the collaboration of millions and the obvious debt fascism owed to some Christian theologies (see Richard Steigmann-Gall’s authoritative study, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity 1919-45), Benedict declared Nazism an attempt to destroy “the tap root of the Christian faith.” “Tap root?” In my family, we call ourselves “Jews.” No doubt Benedict was trying to compliment Judaism, but he can hardly do so by recasting the Holocaust in the stark ideological terms of contemporary cultural war — as secularism vs. faith — a tactic usually embraced only by militant right wing of Christian conservatism.

Benedict’s performance was repugnant, but The New York Times‘ was ignorant. The paper left uncontested Benedict’s historical revisionism. The Times‘ wasn’t obligated to dispute the pope’s theological version of history, but it should have done more to recognize the ways in which Benedict attempted to construct a narrative that redeems Christianity’s historical record at the expense of the dead — that is, a Times reporter covering a story that is so obviously about contested history ought to be more familiar with the dispute and to include the dispute within the story.

Absent that kind of intellectual reporting, the Times‘ story serves to reinforce Benedict’s conclusion, expressed in a turn of phrase that reveals a startling ignorance of the terms with which survivors and scholars of the Holocaust discuss genocide: “In the end,” declared the pope, “there can only be a dread silence, a silence that itself is a heartfelt cry to God.”

To Benedict’s silence — a theological descendant of Pius XII’s non-response to fascism — one might respond with “history,” which ought to be the foundation of journalism.

–Jeff Sharlet