ROME — Pope Francis recalled the Jewish Holocaust on Wednesday, warning against evil ideologies that lead to “death, extermination, and brutality.”
“Today, the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi Extermination Camp of Auschwitz, we celebrate International Holocaust Remembrance Day,” the pope said, following his weekly General Audience, given from the library of the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican.
“We commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and all those persecuted and deported by the Nazi regime,” the pontiff continued.
“Remembrance is an expression of humanity. Remembrance is a sign of civilization. To remember is a condition for a better future of peace and fraternity,” he said, before warning that such atrocities never belong completely to the past.
“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.
In 2019, Francis sounded the alarm regarding a worrisome resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe and elsewhere.
In March of that year, Francis told members of the American Jewish Committee 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 the phenomenon of anti-Semitism.
“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.”
Later, in addressing a meeting of 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 said that indifference to anti-Semitism is “the root of death,” while urging all people of good will to never tire of fighting 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.”