Holocaust cannot be forgotten, says Pope

BY CINDY WOODEN
POPE BENEDICT XVI has told American Jewish leaders that denying or minimising the Holocaust “is intolerable and altogether unacceptable”.
The Pope said: “This terrible chapter in our history must never be forgotten.” He made the remarks during an audience with members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations.
He also confirmed that his planned trip to Israel in May would go ahead despite the escalation of violence in the Gaza Strip.
The audience came less than three weeks after it was announced that the Pope had lifted the excommunications of the Lefebvrist bishops, including Bishop Richard Williamson, who claimed that no Jews died in Nazi gas chambers.
The Vatican later published a statement saying Bishop Williamson would not be welcomed into full communion with the Church unless he disavowed his remarks and publicly apologised.
The audience was the first time the Pope had met Jewish leaders since the scandal broke. During the meeting Pope Benedict recalled his own visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 2006.
He said: “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.
“How can we begin to grasp the enormity of what took place in those infamous prisons?” he asked.
The Pope told the leaders: “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,” he said.
“It is beyond question that any denial or minimisation of this terrible crime is intolerable and altogether unacceptable.” The German-born Pope repeated what he had said during his visit to Auschwitz, saying: “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.” The Pope also told the Jewish leaders that the Church “is profoundly and irrevocably committed to reject all antiSemitism” and to build good and lasting relations with the Jewish community.
Reaffirming the importance of remembering the Holocaust, the Pope said: “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.” Telling the Jewish leaders he wanted to make his own a prayer by John Paul II, Pope Benedict prayed: “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.” The prayer was the text of the note Pope John Paul left at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, one of Judaism’s most holy sites, during a March 2000 visit.
Rabbi Arthur Schneier of New York’s Park East Synagogue, which Pope Benedict visited last April, told the group it was “a trying moment in Catholic-Jewish relations” because Bishop Williamson’s excommunication was lifted.
The 78-year-old Austrianborn rabbi told the Pope: “As a Holocaust survivor these have been painful and difficult days when confronted with Holocaust denial by no less than a bishop.
“The Shoah claimed the lives of six million Jewish men, women and children, including my own family in Auschwitz and Terezin,” a camp in what is now the Czech Republic, he said. Addressing the Pope, he said: “Your Holiness, we and so many others, who have seen man’s inhumanity to man, how can we but revolt at Holocaust denial?” “In our autumn years,” he told the Pope, “we must transmit ‘never again’ through Holocaust education to future generations.” Before Israel’s military offensive on the Gaza Strip Pope Benedict had been planning to visit Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories from May 8 to 15.
A Vatican official has confirmed that the trip is back on schedule but declined to provide further details.