ROME — Pope Francis blasted Holocaust deniers Wednesday, just two days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“The commemoration of that extermination of millions of Jewish people and people of other faiths must neither be forgotten nor denied,” the pontiff told the crowds gathered in the Vatican for his weekly general audience.
“There can be no sustained commitment to building fraternity together without first dispelling the roots of hatred and violence that fueled the horror of the Holocaust,” he added.
In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed January 27 as International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. The date marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp.
This was not the first time the pope stressed the need to keep the memory of the Holocaust fresh in our minds.
Last January, Francis urged the world not to forget the atrocities of the Holocaust and instead to make sure future generations are aware of this “black page of history.”
File/Pope Francis visits the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum with Israeli President Shimon Peres and Prime Ministrer Benjamin Netanyahu, on May 26, 2014 in Jerusalem, Israel. (Amos Ben Gershom – GPO /Getty Images)
“This unspeakable cruelty must never be repeated,” he said. “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.
“Remembrance is an expression of humanity. Remembrance is a sign of civilization,” the pope said on a similar occasion in 2020. “To remember is a condition for a better future of peace and fraternity.”
“Remembrance also means being careful because these things can happen again, starting with ideological proposals that are intended to save a people and end up destroying a people and humanity. Be aware of how this road of death, extermination and brutality began,” he said.
Francis has often condemned the evil of anti-Semitism, warning of a troubling resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe and elsewhere.
File/ 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)
In a 2019 address, the pope said that a “climate of wickedness and fury” is spreading in many places, “in which an excessive and depraved hatred is taking root. I think especially of the outbreak of anti-Semitic attacks in various countries.”
“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.”
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.