Full text isn’t out, but John Allen reports on this morning’s homily from the Preacher of the Papal Household, Capuchin Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa:

Friedrich Nietzsche espoused a pagan lust for power “irreducibly” opposed to Christian non-violence, the Preacher of the Papal Household told the pope this morning, and it’s difficult not to see a connection between Nietzsche’s thought and the Nazi Holocaust.

Capuchin Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, the pope’s official preacher since 1980, addressed Benedict XVI during the weekly retreat he offers for the pope and senior Vatican officials each Lent. His subject was the promise of the Beatitudes in the New Testament: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the land.”

The Capuchin recalled that Nietzsche scorned the vision of humility and non-violence offered by Jesus in the Beatitudes, styling it a “morality of slavery.”

In the last half-century, Cantalamessa observed, it’s been fashionable to try to reconcile Nietzsche and Christianity, arguing that it was only an excessively abstemious and tee-totaling brand of religion to which he objected. Thus when Adolph Hitler invoked Nietzsche to justify the Nazi regime, according to this theory, he was betraying Nietzsche’s intent.

Only one voice, Cantalamessa said, has held out against this revisionist approach: the French Catholic thinker René Girard (today an emeritus professor at Standord). Girard, according to Cantalamessa, saw clearly in Nietzsche’s reaction to the Beatitudes a microcosm of the “irreducible alternative between Christianity and paganism.”

“Paganism exalts the sacrifice of the weak in favor of the strong and the advancement of life; Christianity exalts the sacrifice of the strong in the favor of the weak,” Cantalamessa said.

In that regard, he said, Hitler did not misread Nietzsche.

“It’s difficult not to see an objective connection between the proposal of Nietzsche, and the Hitlerian program of the elimination of entire human groups for the advancement of civilization and the purity of the race,” Cantalamessa said.

“Christianity was not the philosopher’s only target, but Christ,” Cantalamessa said. “‘Dionysus against the Crucified: Behold the antithesis,’ he exclaimed in one of his posthumous fragments.”

In fact, Cantalamessa said, the widespread modern conviction that society is obligated to defend the powerless is a direct result of Christianity’s influence.