And so to the church's own holocaust – in Africa. Condoms can protect Africans from Aids. But who can protect them from Ratzinger? The Catholic churc… - Tanya Gold

Holocaust Memorial Day is 24 hours of shame, but not in the way you think. It was designed to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, and it falls on the day that Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by Soviet forces: January 27, in 1945. This is tragedy enough for the Jewish people, you might think, but HMD — I don't mind giving it an acronym, it deserves one — has changed. It is now an annual festival for the abuse of living Jewish people and the denial of our loss, and we brace ourselves for the memory of the past, and the cruelty of the present. This was the worst year yet.

It's a truism that every wretch in the village is a king on the day of the pogrom because he is not a Jew. And here is his book.

In his actions on child abuse and Aids, Joseph Ratzinger has colluded in the protection of paedophiles and the deaths of millions of Africans. As Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Pope John Paul II's chief enforcer), it was Ratzinger's job to investigate the child abuse scandal that plagued the Catholic church for decades. And how did he do it? In May 2001 he wrote a confidential letter to Catholic bishops, ordering them not to notify the police – or anyone else – about the allegations, on pain of excommunication. He referred to a previous (confidential) Vatican document that ordered that investigations should be handled "in the most secretive way . . . restrained by a perpetual silence". Excommunication is a joke to me, perhaps to you, but to a Catholic it means exclusion and perhaps hellfire – for trying to protect a child. Well, God is love.