AUSCHWITZ CONTINUES TO RESONATE
The Pope's visit to Auschwitz continues to resonate and will certainly be grist for more stories from the media in the coming days. Here are three from the Italian press which appeared at different times.
First from yesterday's issue of Osservatore Romano:
The Pope's face
spoke volumes
“There are messages that are not conveyed by words – they are entrusted to gestures that may be simple but have strong impact.”
The Vatican newspaper, in reviewing the Pope’s trip to Poland, defends the Pope from criticisms to the discourse he made in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“The Pope’s face spoke volumes and conveyed strong emotion” – this was the title for the newspaper’s commentary:
“The Pope did much through such gestures during his pilgrimage to the extermination camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Gestures which anticipated and gave added value to the discourse that the Pope later delivered.
“We can therefore truthfully say that his encounter with sorrow and with horror, of which those places remain as tragic symbols, was modulated through gestures and words, both important in order to fully understand the spirit with which the Pope undertook the last stage of his journey to Poland.
“And so, there was Benedict XVI who walked alone through the gate of Auschwitz (everybody else stayed back). He was focused, meditative. One could sense he felt the whole weight of the evil which the place evokes. A weight that is oppressive for every man and for every Christian.
“And the Pope, who comes from Germany, through that singular solo initiative, seemed to have taken on the weight, as truly the
alter Christus, vicar of Christ, who feels and takes upon himself the sins of the world.
“It was a perception that gained with every succeeding step – at the Wall of Death, at block 11, and the dungeon where St. Maximilian Kolbe met his death.
“Meanwhile – as everyone could not fail to note – the rain stopped, and a rainbow appeared, many taking this as a sign of hope that is entrusted to our hands and inspires us, as the Pope says, “to recognize – always and everywhere – evil as evil, and to reject it.”
From Corriere della Sera yesterday:
The Pope and anti-Semitism:
“Never give in to racial hatred’
By Luigi Accatoli
VATICAN CITY – The Pope recalled to his Auschwitz visit and replied to some criticism he received: he cited “more than 6 million Jews’ exterminated by Hitler, said the ‘Nazi regime’ was responsible for Auschwitz and other ‘factories of death,’, made explicit reference to ‘anti-Semitism’ arising from ‘racial hatred’ and called on humanity to guard against it.
Thus Benedict XVI indirectly answered criticisms of his Auschwitz discourse at the general audience on Wednesday. He dedicated his usual catechetical hour to a narration of his four days in Poland (May 25-28) which culminated in that visit to Auschwitz last Sunday. It was evident he wished to cut short the objections that he had not specifically mentioned Nazism, anti-Semitism and 6 million Jewish dead.
He said Christians are duty-bound to render their own ‘evangelical testimony’ to prevent “mankind in the third millennium from knowing horrors similar to those evoked” by Auschwitz.
“In Auschwitz-Birkenau, as in other similar camps, “ he said, “Hitler ordered the extermination of six million Jews. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, some 150,000 Poles also died, along with tens of thousands of other men and women of different nationalities.
“But to confront the horror of Auschwitz, there is no other answer but the Cross of Christ – love descended to the very abyss of evil to save man at the root, there where his freedom could make him rebel against God.”
“Let not humanity today forget Auschwitz and the other factories of death,” he concluded, “in which the Nazi regime sought to eliminate God in order to take His place! Do not give in to the temptation of racial hatred, which is at the origin of the worst kinds of anti-Semitism.”
Cardinal Kasper
speaks out for the Pope
Meanwhile, a passionate defense of the Pope’s discourse in Auschwitz was made Wednesday afternoon by German Cardinal Walter Kasper, who spoke to journalists during the opening of a bookstore on Via della Conciliazione.
“A German Pope who goes to Auschwitz must walk a very very difficult path. I am German, too, and whoever saw his face in those moments will understand what I mean. To even make a speech in that place was very difficult to him; he perhaps would have preferred to be silent but he could not do that. ..Therefore
the important thing is what he said, not what he did not say.”
He continued:
“The Pope did not deliver the address as a politician who must fulfill the expectations of most people. He posed the most profound question, about the silence of God, which has been the question for many Jews, and that is where he left it. It was an extraordinary speech of the highest level.”
And from Avvenire, the Italian bishops' newspaper, the first account by their correspondent who covered the event:
Living memory:
The Pope at Auschwitz -
"Never again"
By Salvatore Mazza
Everything happened in the space of a few minutes. Not more than five. The Pope’s arrival, a large white umbrella protecting him from the rain. The downpour dominating an unreal silence.
And he- slowly he stopped at each of 22 stone slabs which, in as many languages, tell the story of the same horror. Then the wind picked up, the clouds opened up and the sun came out. The rain stopped, the white umbrella was withdrawn.
And now the Pope is by himself, in front of those memorials. Over his shoulder, from the west, a rainbow starts to show itself across the grey sky that turned blue fast.
The place where all this happened is the long-inactive railway of the concentration camp at Birkenau. There, where the train cars with their weight of human beings stopped to unload them. The doors opened and the deportees came out to be lined up and examined.
It was here where Dr. Mengele assiduously sought out subjects for his horrific experiments. Where families were broken up. Where the first column – the weak, the children, the aged – were sent directly to the showers with Zyklon-B, to death, to the crematorium. Where the second column walked slowly behind, towards the barracks -
those who would be able to work until they gave out, at which point it was their turn to go to the showers.
Even today, just thinking of that spectrum of horror, the question that cries out from the heart is always the same: “Where was God in those days?”
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, Benedict XVI made that question his. After having said: “I could not
not come here. I had to come. It was and is an obligation to truth and to the rights of those who have suffered, a duty before God to be here as the successor of John Paul II and as a son of the German people.”
Without a doubt, Papa Ratzinger felt on Sunday afternoon the weight of history on his shoulders. His face said it, as did his walk by himself, hands clasped, through Auschwitz-1, passing alone through the gate with the inscription ‘Arbeit macht frei’ through which millions of unfortunate human beings were led “like lambs to the slaughter” into the most infamous death camp in the history of the world.
“Lord, why did you tolerate all of this?”
Papa Ratzinger arrived at Birkenau’s last train platform after his silent walk through Auschwitz-1, a prayer with uncovered head before the Wall of Death, a visit to Block 11 where St. Maximilian Kolbe died, an encounter with some survivors where he took his time, not concerned about running late as he did (arriving in rome almost at midnight instead of the originally scheduled time of 9:15 p.m.).
And at Birkenau, he listened in silence to the chanting of Psalm 22, the prayers, and Kaddish, the Jewish lament for the dead. He lit a candle to “remember the faces of individual victims”.
“I could not
not come here, I had to come, even if it is “difficult and onerous” to speak in “this place of horror without equal in history.”
And so he spoke, Benedict XVI did, and he choose to aim high. He said all that he needed to say and felt he had to say. Without, on the one hand, yielding to empty rhetoric, nor on the other hand, deconstructing the trite paradigms of political correctness.
Going beyond stereotypes, before many ex-prisoners who wore capos white and gold, the colors of the Vatican, he spoke of the “place...of memory which is also the place of the Shoah” and
observed that “the past is never simply the past’ but that it “concerns us.”
He gives no answer to the insistent anguished question posed to God because “we cannot scrutinize the secret of God, we only see fragments of his design, and we would be wrong to judge God and history.”
He admonishes that even today we can be ‘left alone' with the ‘humble and insistent lamentation of Psalm 44, “Wake up!”, and we do so “precisely in this present hours when
new misfortunes weigh on us in which all the dark forces seem to be emerging anew in the hearts of men.”
The thread which ran through his discourse was the description of various victim groups in those memorial slabs which he contemplated one by one: that for the Jewish people, whom “the powerful men of the Third Reich wished to crush…in totality, to eliminate from the list of the earth’s inhabitants,” willing ultimately to “kill the God who summoned Abraham,” and in this way, “tear out the very roots on which the Christian faith is based, replacing it with a do-it-yourself faith, faith in the dominion of man, the dominion of force.”
He cites the memorial slab that remembers the Polish victims, “listed” by the Nazis among “the useless elements in the history of the world”. The mrmorial for gypsies. The memorial for Soviet soldiers who,“liberating peoples from one dictatorship, then served also to subjugate them to a new dictatorship, that of Stalin and the communist ideology.”
And the memorial inscribed in German, from which emerges the face of Edith Stein who, as “a Christian and as a Jew”, chose to die with her people….a witness to how, even in Germany, there were those who did not bow down to the power of evil and who now appear to us like lights in a dark night.”
He paused to contemplate the memorial in German, “an intimate duty’, he said, as “a son of that people over whom a group of criminals reached power through false promises, in the name of fantasies of greatness, of recovering the honor of the nation and its relevance in the world, promising welfare for all, but also through the force of terror and intimidation, so that our people could be used and abused as an instrument of their frenzy for destruction and domination.”
He gave no answers. Early in the discourse he said: “I am here to beseech the grace of reconciliation,” and to ask “the living God never to permit such things to happen again.”
In that moment, the rainbow had arched across the sky and seemed to arch down to the east, right over the ruins of Crematorium-II.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/06/2006 23.37]