The pope at Auschwitz

by Editor · June 7, 2006

THE visit of the German-born Pope Benedict to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland will have impressed not only those who admire the pontiff, but even some of his harshest critics especially after reports that the visit was included only on the popes personal insistence.

Pope Benedicts visit has served as a confirmation that the Church will continue on the path charted by Pope John Paul II, who acknowledged the Shoah (or Holocaust) as a crime against humanity and God.

While Pope John Paul visited Auschwitz, in the words of his successor, as a son of that people which, along with the Jewish people, suffered most in this place, Pope Benedict was acutely aware that he came as a son of the German people.

Invariably, some critics mockingly brought up the young Joseph Ratzingers involuntary membership in the Hitler Youth, seeking to somehow implicate him in the Holocaust, and ignoring the Ratzinger familys documented history as non-Nazis.

Whatever his personal history, it was important that a German pope would visit the Nazi death camp. He came primarily as a Germansaying how difficult it was for a German to visit a Nazi death-camp and only secondarily as the head of the Catholic Church.

A central theme of his visit was the question of reconciliation. The pope said he had come to Auschwitz to implore the grace of reconciliation first of all from God, who alone can open and purify our hearts; from the men and women who suffered here; and finally the grace of reconciliation for all those who, at his hour of our history, are suffering in new ways from the power of hatred and the violence which hatred spawns.

Under Pope John Paul, the Church made momentous progress in reconciling with Judaism. The late pope acknowledged, in anguished apologies on behalf the Church to Jews, almost two millennia of sinful Christian anti-Semitism.

The reality of anti-Semitism over nearly two millennia remains an ignominious chapter in Catholic history. The Church is shamed by the pogroms that would regularly follow Good Friday pageants, forced conversions, the liturgical references to perfidious Jews, the establishment of ghettos and so on. Christian anti-Semitism over the centuries fertilised the soil from which the pagan Nazis reaped their genocidal harvest.

Thankfully, the chapter of anti-Semitism in the Catholic Church is now closed. The Church today calls us to fight all forms of racial, ethnic and religious bigotry.

A few days after visiting Auschwitz, Pope Benedict again spelled out the Churchs agenda: Humanity must not give in to the temptation of racial hatred, which is at the origin of the worst forms of anti-Semitism.

During his visit to Auschwitz, Pope Benedict pointed out how challenging it was for believers in a loving God to comprehend the evil that was committed there.

He described Auschwitz as a place where the human heart still cries out to God, asking where he was, why he was silent, and why he did not save his people.

Pope Benedict prayed to God to help people to actively resist hatred, violence and attacks on the dignity of others.

May all Catholics not only join the pope in this prayer, but also become those people he asks God to help.