The media have decided that Ratzinger’s ruminations on the identity of the real opponents of Jesus in his judgment and death—namely the temple aristocracy and Barabbas’ friends—, were newsworthy. Aside from the temple leadership and the revolutionaries behind Barabbas, the Pope thinks Pilate, who he says is presented fairly realistically in the Gospels, knew that Jesus posed no real threat to Roman power but simply made a political calculation. So perhaps Ratzinger is not so far from a Bernanos who in the *Diary of a country priest* said of human criminal justice that at its best it can only catch and judge the last person to hold and fire the gun. Or from Faulkner’s Quentin who remembers his father saying that “Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels.” I do not understand the Pope’s language, however, when he repeats the old teaching that “we all stand in need of the purifying power of love which is his [Jesus’] blood. These words are not a curse, but rather redemption, salvation.” This is the machinery speaking.