The Holy Father
meets with a Delegation of the Conference of Presidents of Major
American Jewish organizations
Any denial of
the Shoah is intolerable and altogether unacceptable
On Thursday morning, 12
February [2009], the Holy Father spoke to a Delegation of the Conference
of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in the
Vatican's Consistory Hall. The following is the English text of the
Pope's Address.
Dear Friends,
I am pleased to welcome all
of you today, and I thank Rabbi Arthur Schneier and Mr Alan Solow for
the greetings they have addressed to me on your behalf. I well recall
the various occasions, during my visit to the United States last year,
when I was able to meet some of you in Washington, D.C. and New York.
Rabbi Schneier, you graciously received me at Park East Synagogue just
hours before your celebration of Pesah. Now, I am glad to have
this opportunity to offer you hospitality here in my own home. Such
meetings as this enable us to demonstrate our respect for one another. I
want you to know that you are all most welcome here today in the house
of Peter, the home of the Pope.
I look back with gratitude
to the various opportunities I have had over many years to spend time in
the company of my Jewish friends. My visits to your communities in
Washington and New York, though brief, were experiences of fraternal
esteem and sincere friendship. So too was my visit to the Synagogue in
Cologne, the first such visit in my Pontificate. It was very moving for
me to spend those moments with the Jewish community in the city I know
so well, the city which was home to the earliest Jewish settlement in
Germany, its roots reaching back to the time of the Roman Empire.
A year later, in May 2006,
I visited the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. What words can
adequately convey that profoundly moving experience? As I walked through
the entrance to that place of horror, the scene of such untold
suffering, I meditated on the countless number of prisoners, so many of
them Jews, who had trodden that same path into captivity at Auschwitz
and in all the other prison camps. Those children of Abraham,
grief-stricken and degraded, had little to sustain them beyond their
faith in the God of their fathers, a faith that we Christians share with
you, our brothers and sisters. How can we begin to grasp the enormity of
what took place in those infamous prisons? The entire human race feels
deep shame at the savage brutality shown to your people at that time.
Allow me to recall what I said on that sombre occasion: "The rulers of
the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it
from the register of the peoples of the earth. Thus the words of the
Psalm, 'We are being killed, accounted as sheep for the slaughter', were
fulfilled in a terrifying way".
Our meeting today occurs in
the context of your visit to Italy in conjunction with your annual
Leadership Mission to Israel. I too am preparing to visit Israel, a land
which is holy for Christians as well as Jews, since the roots of our
faith are to be found there. Indeed, the Church draws its sustenance
from the root of that good olive tree, the people of Israel, onto which
have been grafted the wild olive branches of the Gentiles (cf. Rm
11:17-24). From the earliest days of Christianity, our identity and
every aspect of our life and worship have been intimately bound up with
the ancient religion of our fathers in faith.
The two-thousand-year
history of the relationship between Judaism and the Church has passed
through many different phases, some of them painful to recall. Now that
we are able to meet in a spirit of reconciliation, we must not allow
past difficulties to hold us back from extending to one another the hand
of friendship. Indeed, what family is there that has not been troubled
by tensions of one kind or another? The Second Vatican Council's
Declaration Nostra Aetate marked a milestone in the journey
towards reconciliation, and clearly outlined the principles that have
governed the Church's approach to Christian-Jewish relations ever since.
The Church is profoundly and irrevocably committed to reject all
anti-Semitism and to continue to build good and lasting relations
between our two communities. If there is one particular image which
encapsulates this commitment, it is the moment when my beloved
predecessor Pope John Paul II stood at the Western Wall in Jerusalem,
pleading for God's forgiveness after all the injustice that the Jewish
people have had to suffer. I now make his prayer my own: "God of our
fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your Name to the
Nations: we are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the
course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and
asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine
brotherhood with the people of the Covenant" (26 March 2000).
The hatred and contempt for
men, women and children that was manifested in the Shoah was a
crime against God and against humanity. This should be, clear to
everyone, especially to those standing in the tradition of the Holy
Scriptures, according to which every human being is created in the image
and likeness of God (Gn 1:26-27). It is beyond question that any denial
or minimization of this terrible crime is intolerable and altogether
unacceptable. Recently, in a public audience, I reaffirmed that the
Shoah must be "a warning for all against forgetfulness, denial or
reductionism, because violence committed against one single human being
is violence against all" (28 January 2009).
This terrible chapter in
our history must never be forgotten. Remembrance – it is rightly said –
is memoria futuri, a warning to us for the future, and a summons
to strive for reconciliation. To remember is to do everything in our
power to prevent any recurrence of such a catastrophe within the human
family by building bridges of lasting friendship. It is my fervent
prayer that the memory of this appalling crime will strengthen our
determination to heal the wounds that for too long have sullied
relations between Christians and Jews. It is my heartfelt desire that
the friendship we now enjoy will grow ever stronger, so that the
Church's irrevocable commitment to respectful and harmonious relations
with the people of the Covenant will bear fruit in abundance.
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