Pope: Failure to remember Holocaust will lead world down same path

Pope Francis touches the death wall at the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Oswiecim, Poland, in this July 29, 2016, file photo. The pope said remembering the Holocaust and its victims is not only an "expression of humanity" but also makes people aware that such horrors may happen again. The pope's comments came at his general audience as he commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day Jan. 27. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Remembering the Holocaust and its victims is not only an act of solidarity but also serves as a warning to humanity that such horrors could happen again, Pope Francis said.

Before concluding his weekly general audience on January 27, the Pope marked the observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day by calling on the world to “remember the Shoah” and to “be aware of how this path of death began, this path of extermination, of brutality”.

“To remember also means to be careful because these things can happen again, starting with ideological proposals to save a people and ending up destroying a people and humanity,” he said.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed around the world on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation in 1945 of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Oswiecim, Poland.

In Germany, Catholic bishops marked Holocaust Remembrance Day with a call for decisive action against all forms of anti-Semitism.

“The memory of the Holocaust fills me with profound sorrow, but also with shame because so many remained silent at the time,” the president of the German bishops’ conference, Bishop Georg Bätzing, wrote on Twitter and facebook.

He called on all people to join together to courageously oppose “anti-Jewish prejudice, conspiracy myths and every form of hatred in everyday life, at school or among friends”.

The “industrial murder of the Jews” had been at the end of a path “that began with hate speech, conspiracy myths and social exclusion. We must never go down that path again”.

Photo: Pope Francis touches the death wall at the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Oswiecim, Poland, in 2016 (CNS Photo)

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