Posted on 05/28/2006 12:58:29 PM PDT by West Coast Conservative
Calling himself "a son of Germany," Pope Benedict prayed at the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz on Sunday and asked why God was silent when 1.5 million victims, mostly Jews, died in this "valley of darkness."
Ending a four-day pilgrimage to Poland, Benedict, 79, said humans could not fathom "this endless slaughter" but only seek reconciliation for those who suffered then and those who now "are suffering in new ways from the power of hatred."
As on the rest of his trip, he walked in the footsteps of his Polish-born predecessor John Paul, who came to the camp in 1979 on his first visit to Poland as pope. John Paul died in April 2005 and is revered as a saint in his native country.
" Pope John Paul II came here as a son of the Polish people. I come here today as a son of the German people," Benedict said in Italian at a monument near the ruins of a crematorium at Birkenau, the death camp section of the Auschwitz complex.
"I could not fail to come here," he said, gazing down the railway tracks that brought Jews in cattle cars to their death. "I had to come. It is a duty before the truth and the just due of all who suffered here, a duty before God."
The leader of the world's 1.1 billion Roman Catholics also prayed for peace in his native German, which he has avoided to not hurt Polish and Jewish sensitivities. He was forced to join the Hitler Youth and drafted into the army during the war.
WHERE WAS GOD?
Before the ceremony, Benedict visited the main Auschwitz camp, where the Nazis executed or starved special prisoners.
He walked in under the camp's gateway with the motto "Arbeit macht frei" (Work makes you free) and proceeded to the Wall of Death firing line, where he met 32 of 200,000 survivors.
Many were Polish Catholics who kissed his papal ring. Benedict kissed a Jewish survivor, Henryk Mandelbaum, on both cheeks.
He also prayed in the cell where Polish priest Maximilian Kolbe died in 1941 after volunteering to replace a family man due to be killed. John Paul made Kolbe a saint in 1982.
Rain fell sporadically over Auschwitz until the main ceremony, when the skies cleared and a rainbow appeared.
Benedict said it was almost impossible, particularly for a German Pope, to speak at such a horrible place.
"The place where we are standing is a place of memory and at the same time, it is the place of the Shoah," he said.
"In a place like this, words fail. In the end, there can only be a dread silence, a silence which is a heartfelt cry to God -- Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?"
"Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?"
Benedict, one of the Church's leading theologians, said humans could not "peer into God's mysterious plan" to understand such evil, but only "cry out humbly yet insistently to God -- 'rouse yourself! Do not forget mankind, your creature!"
Alojzy Maciak, a Polish Auschwitz survivor, said Poles did not hold Benedict's nationality against him.
"We have forgiven the Germans a long time ago," he said at the Birkenau ceremony. "This is a visit by a Pope to Auschwitz, his nationality is not important."
Before he spoke, Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich chanted the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. The New York-born rabbi was attacked on a Warsaw street on Saturday by a young man shouting "Poland is for Poles."
"This incident is very nasty but let's not let it undermine the great importance of today's event," he told Reuters.
Lodz Chief Rabbi Symcha Keller, whose grandfather survived Auschwitz, said the attack showed people still had to be taught the dangers of racial hatred. "That is why Pope Benedict's visit to this grave site is so important," he said.
Earlier on Sunday, Benedict said mass for more than 900,000 people in a field in Krakow where John Paul traditionally held huge gatherings with his countrymen before returning to Rome.
Men were silent, not God.
Men are silent today as well.
Well said.
"Men were silent, not God. "
Yes, exactly. Man is God's witness on earth: fighting evil is our responsibility.
He wasn't. He sent the Americans.
"Men were silent, not God."
You beat me to it!
Good post!
God gave Man free will. Part of giving Man free will is that God allows man to do things that He doesn't want. For God to step in and prevent bad things from happening would be for Him to revoke his most precious gift. And such revocation would at least as great a loss to mankind as anything Man could do to himself.
And then God provided the State of Israel.
Coincidentally I just started reading "Night" by Elie Wiesel last night.
He described how angry he was with God for being silent.
It is easy to feel this way when you observe mothers and children being fed into the furnace, or witness a young child be hanged in front of the prisoners in order to "set an example"
So while the Americans did eventually show up, the time spent amid the horror and inhumanity must have seemed endless to these people.
I agree with the sentiments of the pope, that God must have had a mysterious plan and only He can understand why it was allowed to happen for so long.
May God bless the poor souls of all those who suffered, and who still do suffer.
I've often thought that Israel would not have become a state if it hadn't been for the holocaust.
Carolyn
God was not silent but spoke through Allied armies and navies and air forces. It seems strange that God spoke in part through the Red Army, but if He could use Judas to accomplish salvation He could use Stalin to defeat Hitler.
Indeed true. Surprising that the Pope would not make this simple observation.
Sort of like George Costanza, we humans like to blame God for the bad stuff. But God merely left us to our own sin.
I understand the Pope perfectly. Some people have a hard time understanding anything he says because they have issues with the Roman Catholic Church.
Vy well put.
My own father did his best to help. He gave up his American citizenship to join the Canadian AF and fight the Nazis. He did it because of his belief in God and morals.
And don't forget the British, Allied bombardment of Germany turned large parts of it into hell on earth, unfortunately we bombed out of them the will to fight under any circumstances, so today the "Axis of Weasels", but that's for another thread......
All so scripture could be fulfilled.
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