THE Pope’s new book stirred controversy in Germany as Jewish groups condemned passages in which he draws parallels between abortion and the Holocaust.

Paul Spiegel, the president of the Central Council for Jews in Germany, said yesterday that “the Catholic Church does not understand, or does not want to understand, that there is an enormous difference between mass genocide and what women do with their bodies”.

The Vatican rushed to the Pope’s defence, saying that he had been misinterpreted. But the German Greens, who are part of the ruling coalition, said that they were taking court action to ban Memory and Identity, an autobiographical summation of the 84-year-old pontiff’s life.

German law forbids any “offence to the memory of Holocaust victims”. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said that in the offending passage the Pope had discussed the failings of parliamentary democracy and sought to make clear that “a course of action is not necessarily right because the majority have chosen to take it”.

The Pope observes that Hitler rose to power by democratic means and yet proceeded to exterminate millions of Jews. He adds that it follows that parliamentary majorities do not always make “morally just” decisions. “The example which springs to mind is abortion,” he says. “Whoever interrupts a pregnancy commits a grave act of tyranny against an innocent human being.”

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