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.
loud and clear
I've come to the conclusion that, when we say "why doesn't God do something about x", he's calling us to act.
As you say, the Americans eventually showed up, and history is all about what it took to get us there, and what kept us from acting sooner. When you think in those terms, its actually scary, when you look around you at all the situations where God is apparently silent, knowing that it is "we" who have failed to act. Its not God who has failed judgement, its us.
I remember an old movie in which a group of believers were under attack, praying for help. A bunch of cowboys ride to their aid, laughing "they pray for God to help them, and all they're going to get is us".
Many times I have wondered where the Holocaust fits into Jewish and Christian theology. I read all the comments posted to this article. So far, yours come closest to explaining it.
BUMP.
I am sure the MSM laps this up. Why did God let this happen.
Something was done, not fast enough for those who died and suffered, but something was done, the good in man, that quality that God put in us defeated the bad, the stuff Satan brought to us.
The same could be said about the middle east today, why is God letting this happen, he is not, the Devil is.
We as children of God need to show our fortitude and not back done to evil but fight the good fight and do the right thing.
I believe it's twice that God told the Jews to get back to Israel...The 2nd time was in 2nd Chronicles, I believe, the last book of the Jewish Bible...
In 1917, the British were in control of 'Palestine' and a fella named Balfour made it possible for the Jews to go back to their homeland...
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/mideast/balfour.htm
Problem is, most of the Jews didn't want to go back...I (and some others) figure the concentration camps were provided to give a little persuasion...
But after the war, they did go back...And established Israel as their homeland for the 2nd time in History in 1948...
Where were you, pal? That's the big question.
not sure why there was silence, but i imagine this is why IDF exists
The question stuck me as at least partly rhetorical...
God was there -- in the person of St. Maximilan Kolbe, who took the place of condemned Jews in the death camps ... in those like the people who sheltered the Frank family, and the many others who risked their own lives rather than turn their backs on such evil.
God didn't intervene in the Holocaust because He couldn't intervene, anymore than the Sun or the Moon could have prevented the Holocaust.
Lev 26 14 " 'But if you will not listen to me and carry out all these commands, 15 and if you reject my decrees and abhor my laws and fail to carry out all my commands and so violate my covenant, 16 then I will do this to you: I will bring upon you sudden terror, wasting diseases and fever that will destroy your sight and drain away your life. You will plant seed in vain, because your enemies will eat it. 17 I will set my face against you so that you will be defeated by your enemies; those who hate you will rule over you, and you will flee even when no one is pursuing you.
18 " 'If after all this you will not listen to me, I will punish you for your sins seven times over. 19 I will break down your stubborn pride and make the sky above you like iron and the ground beneath you like bronze. 20 Your strength will be spent in vain, because your soil will not yield its crops, nor will the trees of the land yield their fruit.
21 " 'If you remain hostile toward me and refuse to listen to me, I will multiply your afflictions seven times over, as your sins deserve. 22 I will send wild animals against you, and they will rob you of your children, destroy your cattle and make you so few in number that your roads will be deserted.
23 " 'If in spite of these things you do not accept my correction but continue to be hostile toward me, 24 I myself will be hostile toward you and will afflict you for your sins seven times over. 25 And I will bring the sword upon you to avenge the breaking of the covenant. When you withdraw into your cities, I will send a plague among you, and you will be given into enemy hands. 26 When I cut off your supply of bread, ten women will be able to bake your bread in one oven, and they will dole out the bread by weight. You will eat, but you will not be satisfied.
27 " 'If in spite of this you still do not listen to me but continue to be hostile toward me, 28 then in my anger I will be hostile toward you, and I myself will punish you for your sins seven times over. 29 You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters. 30 I will destroy your high places, cut down your incense altars and pile your dead bodies on the lifeless forms of your idols, and I will abhor you. 31 I will turn your cities into ruins and lay waste your sanctuaries, and I will take no delight in the pleasing aroma of your offerings. 32 I will lay waste the land, so that your enemies who live there will be appalled. 33 I will scatter you among the nations and will draw out my sword and pursue you. Your land will be laid waste, and your cities will lie in ruins. 34 Then the land will enjoy its sabbath years all the time that it lies desolate and you are in the country of your enemies; then the land will rest and enjoy its sabbaths. 35 All the time that it lies desolate, the land will have the rest it did not have during the sabbaths you lived in it.
36 " 'As for those of you who are left, I will make their hearts so fearful in the lands of their enemies that the sound of a windblown leaf will put them to flight. They will run as though fleeing from the sword, and they will fall, even though no one is pursuing them. 37 They will stumble over one another as though fleeing from the sword, even though no one is pursuing them. So you will not be able to stand before your enemies. 38 You will perish among the nations; the land of your enemies will devour you. 39 Those of you who are left will waste away in the lands of their enemies because of their sins; also because of their fathers' sins they will waste away.
"(but if they repent...)"
40 " 'But if they will confess their sins and the sins of their fathers—their treachery against me and their hostility toward me, 41 which made me hostile toward them so that I sent them into the land of their enemies—then when their uncircumcised hearts are humbled and they pay for their sin, 42 I will remember my covenant with Jacob and my covenant with Isaac and my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land. 43 For the land will be deserted by them and will enjoy its sabbaths while it lies desolate without them. They will pay for their sins because they rejected my laws and abhorred my decrees.
("and even if they don't repent...")
44 Yet in spite of this, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them or abhor them so as to destroy them completely, breaking my covenant with them. I am the LORD their God. 45 But for their sake I will remember the covenant with their ancestors whom I brought out of Egypt in the sight of the nations to be their God. I am the LORD.' "
(Israel's Crime was failing to recognize their Lord and thereby rejecting the promised new covenant)>
Luke 19:41And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, 42Saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. 43For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, 44 And shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.
(A restored Israel will suddenly recognize their Messiah)
Zechariah 12 ...2Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah and against Jerusalem. 3And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it. ... 6In that day will I make the governors of Judah like an hearth of fire among the wood, and like a torch of fire in a sheaf; and they shall devour all the people round about, on the right hand and on the left: and Jerusalem shall be inhabited again in her own place, even in Jerusalem. ... 9And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem. 10And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn.
See my post 32 It's not that He couldn't intervene. It's that this is what He said was going to happen!!!
There is no firm promise to us but salvation. The rest is just suffering, and any blessings are a bonus earned only by human efforts, ie. temporary.
The red army spoke for themselves. The red army was up to the same thing the german army was.
"use Judas to accomplish salvation"
Judas also spoke for himself. Just as the ones that killed Jesus did.
Agreed. It's God who is asking why Christians were silent during the Holocaust.
God speaks gently into our hearts. If we don't take the time, we never hear Him. Those who do hear Him, have a hard time convincing others.
If I recall correctly, didn't Jesus Christ himself ask his Father "Why have you forsaken me?" And King David, a man "after God's own heart," certainly questioned God's will at times. Seems kinda natural. No-one can know the ways of God, but sometimes you still just gotta ask "Why?"
(I'm not arguing with you, just wanted to say my piece and didn't know who else to reply to.) :-)
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