ROME — Pope Francis urged the world Wednesday not to forget the atrocities of the Holocaust but to make future generations aware of this “black page of history.”
In preparation for Thursday’s commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the pope declared it is necessary “to remember the extermination of millions of Jews, and people of different nationalities and religious faiths.
“This unspeakable cruelty must never be repeated,” he said at the end of his weekly general audience in the Vatican. “I appeal to everyone, especially educators and families, to foster in the new generations an awareness of the horror of this black page of history.”
“It must not be forgotten, so that we can build a future where human dignity is no longer trampled underfoot,” he stated.
Pope Francis walks through the entrance of the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in Oswiecim on 29 July, 2016. (JANEK SKARZYNSKI/AFP via Getty)
Francis has often condemned the evil of anti-Semitism, warning in 2019 of a troubling resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe and elsewhere.
In an address to members of the American Jewish Committee, the pope said that the scourge of anti-Semitism that is growing in many parts of the world is “a source of great concern to me.”
A “climate of wickedness and fury” is spreading in many places, the pope said, “in which an excessive and depraved hatred is taking root. I think especially of the outbreak of anti-Semitic attacks in various countries.”
He also insisted on the need to be “vigilant” about even minor manifestations of anti-Semitism, since experience teaches us where they can lead.
“History teaches us where even the slightest perceptible forms of anti-Semitism can lead: the human tragedy of the Shoah in which two-thirds of European Jewry were annihilated,” he said.
For a Christian, he added, “any form of anti-Semitism is a rejection of one’s own origins, a complete contradiction.”
Pope Francis at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum with Israeli President Shimon Peres and PM Benjamin Netanyahu, on May 26, 2014 in Jerusalem, Israel. (Amos Ben Gershom – GPO /Getty)
In a meeting with the International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee in the Vatican, the pope praised the group for tackling thorny issues, such as “the fight against the troubling recrudescence of anti-Semitism, and concern for the persecution of Christians in various parts of the world.”
The pope has called indifference to anti-Semitism “the root of death,” while urging people of good will to never tire of battling it whenever it appears.
When dealing with anti-Semitism, our enemy “is not only hatred in all of its forms,” Francis said, “but even more fundamentally, indifference; for it is indifference that paralyzes and impedes us from doing what is right even when we know that it is right.”
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