The Pope at Auschwitz: the Nazi slaughter of Jews is also against God and Christians

Benedict XVI looked at God and the Shoah through the eyes of the Psalmist. Through the example of Edith Stein, the need to rediscover that Jews and Christians share the same destiny. Comments by Fr Jaeger, Franciscan priest and Israeli.

« How can it be? », a puzzled, young journalist asks me, « It seems that the Pope is speaking at Auschwitz mainly about God and to God!"  I reassure her that the Pope could not, nor was he supposed to do, otherwise.  At Auschwitz, he did what he must always do: speak about God and all things precisely in relation to God, as also a well-known definition of St Thomas Aquinas puts it.

And it was quite a God of which he spoke!

At Auschwitz, the Pope meets the anguished doubts and protests of those who have asked themselves if, after Auschwitz, it is still possible to speak about God, if it is not in fact nonsensical to invoke the divine in the face of such a strong and "absolute" affirmation of Evil – "pure Evil", I would dare say.  And in the face of so many challenges, the Pope recaptures the God that the sons of Israel knew and adored – or rather, the relationship with God that they knew they had.  It is a passionate relationship, taught to us in a peerless way by the Psalmist, whom the Holy Father quotes repeatedly.  It is the Psalmist, precisely at the insistence of his faith in God, of his boundless love for God, that protests and rebukes God for his silence, for his having failed to come to the aid of his servant, of his friends, of his People…the Psalmist teaches us – and the Pope reminds us – that the relationship with God is a vital relationship, an extremely personal relationship, made of love as well as every kind of hope, impatience and exasperation that – as we know well from the human experience of each one of us – can inseparably accompany love.

Believers in Christ know well that God "made amends" for all these "failures" placing Himself among us in the Person of the Son and redeeming all our suffering – every bit of it, nothing excluded – in the extreme Redeeming Sacrifice on the Cross, which gives and discloses the sense of our "passions".

Of great importance is the Pope's insistence on the radically anti-Christian character of Nazi neo-paganism which, by cutting the Hebrew roots of Christianity, aimed at uprooting it and eliminating it completely.  Still today too many of my Jewish compatriots think simplistically that, in the Europe of 60, 70 years ago, a European was, if not Jewish, necessarily Christian.  Thus many of them think that the slaughter, the Shoah, was committed by Christians!  For us Christians, such thinking is truly the height of absurdity.  But much insistence, much patience, is still asked of us for explaining the truth of these things to many of my compatriots, who know too little about Christianity.  By definition, those who took part in that ideology, in that party, in those crimes, were not Christian – they were in fact enemies of Christianity, anti-Christian.  We must never tire of explaining that it was none other than the abandonment of Christianity, the refusal of Christ, which made the Shoah possible.

In the face of nazi-fascist Evil, Jews and Christians find themselves united more intimately than ever, because what unites them, what they share, is precisely having been the ultimate, definitive object of the destructive madness of this Evil which befell humanity.

In Pope Benedict's speech at Auschwitz, there is a lot of content that needs delving, not just immediately, but for much time to come.

At this initial moment, particularly dear to me is the reference made to the saint and martyr Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Edith Stein.  This reference is fundamental for the construction of a healthy and truthful relationship between Catholics and the Jewish People, and within the Jewish People itself, between believers in Christ and their other "elder brothers," as John Paul II liked to call them.  The Carmelite martyr personifies in a dramatic way what we, Jewish believers in Christ, know well: that we share the same destiny, that believing in Christ does not separate us from our People, but actually makes our solidarity with all its members even stronger, more profound and more significant!  It is precisely through her, and by her, and in no other way, that the definitive welding of friendship, which is the inherent quality of the relationship between the Church and the Jewish People, can truly take place.

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