As the world prepares to mark International Holocaust
Remembrance Day on Thursday, Pope Francis urges families to remind younger
generations about the millions of people, especially Jews, killed at the hands
of the Nazi regime.
-By Devin Watkins
“This unspeakable cruelty must never be repeated.”
Pope Francis made that appeal at the end of the
Wednesday General Audience, one day before the world dedicates a day to
recalling the horrors of the Holocaust, also known as the Shoah.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Day is held on
the date of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp on 27 January
1945.
The Pope said the world must remember the
“extermination of millions of Jews, people of various nationalities and
religious faiths.”
He lamented the genocide of around 6 million of
Europe’s Jews, or two-thirds of the continent’s Jewish population, at the hands
of the Nazi regime.
“This is a suffering people. They have suffered hunger
and great cruelty, and they deserve peace.”
Teaching younger
generations
Pope Francis also appealed to everyone, but especially
to “educators and families, so that they might engender in younger generations
the awareness of the horrors of this dark page in human history.”
“It must never be forgotten, so that we can build a
future in which human dignity is never again trampled upon.”
‘So much
cruelty’
Pope Francis visited the ruins of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
concentration camp in 2016, where the Catholic priest St. Maximillian Kolbe was
killed, along with 1.1 million others.
The Pope spoke no words on that occasion, but only
embraced several of the camp’s survivors.
He wrote his prayer in Spanish in the Book of Honor:
“Señor
ten piedad de tu pueblo. ¡Señor, perdón por tanta crueldad! Lord, have mercy on your people. Lord, forgive so much
cruelty!”
Vatican News
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