Page 82 - October 7 - Teresa Pirola

remembrance is an essential element in healing the wounds of the past. The document included admission of Christian culpability concerning those members of the church who did not display spiritual or concrete resistance when Jews in their midst were alienated, persecuted, rounded up and sent to Nazi death camps.
IHRD is not a day for remembering all wars or getting lost in the multitude of other issues and conflicts that assail the world. It is a day to remember the victims of the Holocaust, and it was the Jewish people who bore the direct, full frontal genocidal intent of Hitler’s regime with its atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators. One could argue that it is also a fitting day for Christians to reflect on their own moral compass with regard to antisemitism, in light of what their Christian ancestors did or didn’t do to assist Jews during the 1930s-1940s.
Given this central focus of memory, of an attempted genocide against Jews that occurred in living memory, was IHRD really the appropriate occasion for the Pope to deliver his oft-repeated ‘War is always a defeat’ message? ‘Pope says Holocaust Remembrance Day reminds world that war can never be justified’, shouted the headline of one Catholic newspaper with an international readership. ‘Pope issues new anti-war plea as he evokes Nazi Holocaust’, voiced another news agency with worldwide reach.
Many people interpret Pope Francis’ mantra, ‘War is always a defeat’, as a critique of Israel’s military response to Hamas in Gaza. If we are remembering the war waged by the Nazis while simultaneously critiquing Israel waging war on Hamas, are we not opening the door to a subliminal link being drawn between the two, and therefore legitimising a false suggestion of moral equivalence between a democratic State fighting a
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