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Skriven 2006-05-31 22:13:02 av Marc Lewis (1:396/45)
Ärende: Vatican Information Service - Press Release
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                The following press release is Copyrighted by the
                          Vatican Information Service.
                ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
                               VIS-Press releases

MAY THE LIVING GOD NEVER LET THIS HAPPEN AGAIN

VATICAN CITY, MAY 28, 2006 (VIS) - This afternoon, Benedict XVI travelled by
car from the archbishop's palace in Krakow to the Auschwitz-Birkenau
concentration camps, on the last stage of his apostolic trip to Poland.

The Pope walked into the Auschwitz concentration camp, passing under the words
"Arbeit Macht Frei" (work makes you free) written over the gate. Once inside he
was welcomed by the director of the Auschwitz Museum and by other civil and
religious authorities. He visited the courtyard surrounding the Wall of Death,
where prisoners used to be summarily executed, and met with former inmates. He
also visited the cell where St. Maximilian Kolbe died, in the cellar of block
11.

The Holy Father then travelled by car to the center for dialogue and prayer, a
Catholic institution established near the camp, upon which he bestowed his
apostolic blessing. Returning to his car, he journeyed three kilometers to the
camp of Birkenau. Upon arriving there, the Pope first paused before the 22
bronze slabs that symbolically commemorate the victims of the Holocaust in the
concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. He also met with representatives
of other religions and with a group of concentration camp survivors of various
nationalities.

The Pope prayed for the victims and listened to the Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer
of mourning, before delivering his address:

"To speak in this place of horror, in this place where unprecedented mass
crimes were committed against God and man, is almost impossible - and it is
particularly difficult and troubling for a Christian, for a Pope from Germany,"
said Benedict XVI.

"In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can only be a dread
silence - a silence which is itself a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did You
remain silent? How could You tolerate all this? In silence, then, we bow our
heads before the endless line of those who suffered and were put to death here;
yet our silence becomes in turn a plea for forgiveness and reconciliation, a
plea to the living God never to let this happen again."

The Pope recalled the visit of John Paul II, who "came here as a son of that
people which, along with the Jewish people, suffered most in this place and, in
general, throughout the war. 'Six million Poles lost their lives during the
Second World War: a fifth of the nation,' he reminded us. Here too he solemnly
called for respect for human rights and the rights of nations."

"John Paul II came here as a son of the Polish people. I come here today as a
son of the German people. For this very reason, I can and must echo his words:
I could not fail to come here. I had to come. It is a duty before the truth,
and the just due of all who suffered here, a duty before God, for me to come
here as the successor of John Paul II and as a son of the German people - a son
of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises
of future greatness and the recovery of the nation's honor, prominence and
prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation, with the result that our
people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and
power."

"How many questions arise in this place!" the Holy Father cried. "Constantly
the question comes up: Where was God in those days? ... How could He permit
this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil? The words of Psalm 44 come to
mind, ... This cry of anguish, which Israel raised to God in its suffering, at
moments of deep distress, is also the cry for help raised by all those who in
every age ... suffer for the love of God, for the love of truth and goodness."

"We cannot peer into God's mysterious plan - we see only piecemeal, and we
would be wrong to set ourselves up as judges of God and history. Then we would
not be defending man, but only contributing to his downfall. No - when all is
said and done, we must continue to cry out humbly yet insistently to God: ...
Do not forget mankind, Your creature!"

"Let us cry out to God, with all our hearts, at the present hour, when new
misfortunes befall us, when all the forces of darkness seem to issue anew from
human hearts: whether it is the abuse of God's name as a means of justifying
senseless violence against innocent persons, or the cynicism which refuses to
acknowledge God and ridicules faith in Him."

"The place where we are standing is a place of memory, it is the place of the
Shoah. The past is never simply the past. It always has something to say to us;
it tells us the paths to take and the paths not to take. ... Some [of the]
inscriptions [here] are pointed reminders. There is one in Hebrew. 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. ... If this people, by its very
existence, was a witness to the God Who spoke to humanity and took us to
Himself, then that God finally had to die and power had to belong to man alone
- to those men, who thought that by force they had made themselves masters of
the world."

"Then there is the inscription in Polish. First and foremost they wanted to
eliminate the cultural elite, thus erasing the Polish people as an autonomous
historical subject and reducing it, to the extent that it continued to exist,
to slavery. Another inscription offering a pointed reminder is the one written
in the language of the Sinti and Roma people. Here too, the plan was to wipe
out a whole people. ... There is also the inscription in Russian, which
commemorates the tremendous loss of life endured by the Russian soldiers who
combated the Nazi reign of terror; but this inscription also reminds us that
their mission had a tragic twofold aim: by setting people free from one
dictatorship, they were to submit them to another, that of Stalin and the
communist system." The inscription in German serves as a reminder that "the
Germans who had been brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau and met their death here
were considered as ... the refuse of the nation."

"Yes, behind these inscriptions is hidden the fate of countless human beings.
They jar our memory, they touch our hearts. They have no desire to instill
hatred in us: instead, they show us the terrifying effect of hatred. Their
desire is to help our reason to see evil as evil and to reject it; their desire
is to enkindle in us the courage to do good and to resist evil. They want to
make us feel the sentiments expressed in the words that Sophocles placed on the
lips of Antigone, as she contemplated the horror all around her: 'my nature is
not to join in hate but to join in love'."
PV-POLAND/.../AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU VIS 060529 (1200)

SUMMARY

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