He reminds his hearers of Pope Benedict's words about learning frrom history and about ideologies that seek to destroy and eradicate God himself.
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Bishop Davies on the Holocaust
He reminds his hearers of Pope Benedict's words about learning frrom history and about ideologies that seek to destroy and eradicate God himself.
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18 comments:
Yes, now if certain rabid SSPXers would also get the message.
[And let's not forget the *other* 5-6 million who also died: Poles, priests/religious leaders, political prisoners, mentally/physically handicapped, homosexuals, gypsies, and all others put into slave labor camps.]
Fr Ray, good afternoon. I am the director for the Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) in my area. Every year(for the last 10years)on the saturday nearest the HMD, the MP, local Mayors, councillors, members of the Armed Forces, Royal British Legion, school reps.Police, local institutions, Clergy from all dominations and many others - we meet at 11am in front of the local Cenotaph and pray. Each year when I put together the Service of Remembrance I include the prayer to St Maximilian Kolbe. He was a Polish Catholic Priest (in WW11) who gave his life in order that another concentration camp prisoner may survive. I visited Auschwitz many years ago and prayed by St Maximilian's cell.Since then I pray to him every day for courage and to be able to serve the Lord well. We cannot forget what happened during the terrible persecution of our Jewish brothers and sisters. We cannot forget that millions of people were murdered in Europe. Those who survived WW11 lived with dreadful mental and physical scars, because of the Nazi terror. Many are now dead but some are now very elderly. They remember still, and those horrible deeds committed by the Nazis remain a nightmare to some. It is our responsibility to make sure that this is not repeated again. I always ask the most senior firefighter to carry and put on the Cenotaph the Candle of Peace. This is my way of asking for the Lord to bless our town with peace. I also like to remember the victims of 9/11 and I chose the firefighters because of the courage of Fr Mychal Judge of the New York Catholic Chaplaincy. Fr Mychal Judge was recorded as the first victim of 9/11. Most of the clergy in this town gather together on this day and I ask them which Readings they would like to do. I am not short of volunteers. Lest we forget.
KG
Father, as a child, I remember that we all were on holiday in different parts of Europe each year. One year we went to Poland and visited Kracow (Krakow). We went to Auschwitz and I rememeber my mother crying and praying on her rosary for those who had died there. I remember the tears that flowed from my father's gentle face.I remember his lips moving in prayer. I was 16 and I had never seen my parents cry like that before. My father was a strong man and my mother a beautiful delicate lady.
I will always remember the dreadful silence there. No birds, no talking, no laughter. Just stone faces of the visitors or pilgrims. No grass grew there.
Behind huge glass storage we saw thousands of specticals, prosthetics, hundreds of suitcases with people's names and addresses on them. We saw lamp shades made from human skin and rolls of material made from human hair. We saw hundreds of photos on corridor walls. Names, occupations, religions. Doctors, lawyers, clergy, nuns, teachers, professors, soldiers. It went on and on.
It was then I decided to become a lawyer. That was a profound moment in my life. I will not forget what I saw, nor will I forget to pray for the victims.
Lawyeratwork.com
Genocide is never far away,we have not learnt a thing.We are murdering the unborn at such a rate that the future of the planet is endangered.
The GREEN activists tell us that the World is becoming overpopulated and we should be ashamed to have children.
Because of the GREED of the Imperial Powers millions are being starved into submission in Africa and their wealth is being stolen more now than it ever was.
Secularism is now the KILLER and cause of present day Genocide/
What about the twenty million who died at the hands of Genrikh Yagoda, a Jew?
Sorry, but Jewish suffering is not unique.
+ Wolsey
Great article. Deep appreciation to Bishop Davies - and to you for posting it, Fr. Ray.
For this Orthodox Christian, the moment of truth came not at the site of an extermination camp, but at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, confronted by the physical evidence of millions of lives extinguished by hatred. I had seen lots of monochrome photographs from the period. At Yad Vashem, I experienced the color – unimaginable horror in the full light of day. Strangely, it was the attractive, cheerful blue of the stripes of the prisoners’ uniforms that broke the dam and left me bathed in tears and unable to stand.
I hear it from time to time, “never again”. But the evil continues apace. And grows. Not just denial of God, but widespread, militant ridicule and hatred of Him. That can only lead inexorably to the denial of the true nature of man and to the deprecation and rejection of Judeo-Christian civilization, Eastern and Western. To the eradication of all things holy and beautiful, the eradication of true joy and of life itself.
Never again? Sad, hollow phrase, that. We stand clueless and seemingly helpless in the antechamber of the next Holocaust, as those who would never intend to do so gently ease us over the threshold by acclimating us to the murder of millions of unborn children, and increasingly to the murder of those elderly whom we similarly deem unfit (or too expensive) to allow to live. And to the wholesale destruction of our traditional Christian culture.
Kyrie eleison…
"He reminds his hearers of Pope Benedict's words about learning frrom history and about ideologies that seek to destroy and eradicate God himself."
Exactly. So what about the Holodomor then and Bolshevik Zionism?
Do you think we will ever have a Holodomor Memorial Day? Will a Bishop of E&W speak on that? (I expect a Bishop would though.)
Besides, I thought the only Holocaust that happened upon this Earth was the crucifixion of the King of Kings.
The NHS has managed to kill 7 million innocents since the 60's. When will they be getting their memorial day?
Anonymous/Wolsey and Gem: Bishop Davies was asked to speak as a Christian hierarch to members of a synagogue on Holocaust Memorial Day. It was appropriate that he consider his audience and emphasize the sacrifice of the Jewish people, and the shared heritage of Judaism and Christianity. No one is forgetting the non-Jews who died, and Bishop Davies made reference to historical and ongoing mass crimes and genocides. And no one is unaware that people of all faiths and ethnicities are capable of falling to great depths, and of committing great evil.
All the more reason for us not to be complacent, expecting that such could never happen in our own modern, civilized, politically-“correct” societies. No country in Europe was more modern and civilized than Germany in the 1930s.
Damask Rose -the Cross was no accident. Remember Jesus prayed "Not My Will but Yours Father" . Without His death on the Cross we would have no Hope.
Yet the Holocaust ,the Holodomor-death by hunger- and the Armenian holocaust,the Rwandan Genocide and all other such events, were caused by men who rejected Jesus-the King of the Jews ,and Prince of Peace -,or who thought they could enlist Him in their Cause.
Yes Damask Rose the Holodomor
I’m sorry, readers and Fr. Ray – I promise this will be my last posting on this topic. But this is just too weird.
Damask Rose: Today (Saturday) is Holodomor Memorial Day in a lot of places around the world. Certainly the US, Canada, Australia, Spain and most of Latin America acknowledge the genocide there. I don’t know whether the UK recognizes it or not, but your timing is impeccable.
What’s more, the ultimate instigator of the Holodomor was not precisely a "Bolshevik Zionist"(?!?), but in his youth my brother in the Orthodox Christian faith, Ioseb Jughashvili – better known as Stalin. He was kicked out of an Orthodox seminary after studying there for several years. He then went on to engineer (or allow) the starvation of millions of his erstwhile co-religionists, as well as Catholics, Jews and Protestants.
Knowing Orthodox Christianity as I do, I have no doubt that if Stalin had remained true to his childhood faith, the world would have been infinitely better off - as would have been the case had Hitler retained a genuine Catholicism, and Genrikh Yagoda his Judaism.
Which leads us again to Bishop Davies’ remarks about the effects of rejecting God (and in Hitler’s case, embracing occult spiritualism).
Gem, add to your list Jehovah's Witnesses who were also persecuted.
Genrikh Yagoda was a Jew by birth but disavowed that by becoming a Soviet. Hilter and Himmler were raised Catholics but disavowed that by becoming Nazi's. Today Many people of different faiths disavow it to become militant atheists and sensualist materialists. They in turn persecute the Catholic Church. By the way the Catholic Curch was persecuted by Soviets and Nazi's during the war. All these movements were the result of modernity which I am afraid has not been destroyed. Yes the Soviet and Fascist systems are gone. But the seeds and what produces it remains. Hoe is it possible thta Stephen Fry whose own family are Jeiwsh and many exterminated can reject his own background to become a militant atheist? His love of Englishness and modernity!
Why the yammering about 'modernity' as a cause? The 'cause' goes back to when Cain killed Able, 'modernity'? bah.
[John, yes, as someone who studied history I know that, HOWEVER, in my youth in the 60s, '12 million killed in the slave labor camps' was a phrase FAR more often used than today...but unfortunately too many people DON'T know about the systematic destruction of other groups of unwanted.]
I must say that I find Europeans as a group, far too anti-Jewish. With a lot of them, one gets the distinct impression they are sorry Hitler didn't finish the job. Given Muslim toe holds all over Europe, and Europeans tendency not to reproduce, I think given the bend over and grab the ankles attitude of the politically correct, any Jew still remaining in Europe 50 years from now, better seek refuge elsewhere. It CAN happen again.
And Nickbris, really? I suggest AFRICA'S own leaders are what's killing them now. Frankly, there was less genocide there when the Europeans were running the place. (Rwanda, Uganda, Nigeria anyone?) Never underestimate 3rd world tin-pots ability to plunder, kill and terrorize their own.
Karen,I think you have been reading the wrong version of History. The "Tin-Pots" were installed by the colonial powers so they could carry on plundering and holding them to ransom.
Belgium is responsible for Rwanda and Congo and Great Britain for starvation in Zimbabwe. No need to go right round the continent but you will get the message. The US is not out of it as they were at it wholesale in Ghana.
I have just deleted a whole lot of non-Catholic anti-Semitic comment.
Modernity is the cause because it is tied to the belief that all that is modern is progress. That to overturn what is old or handed on is right. Modern is new and novel and must repudiate the past to be modern!
Hilter called Christianity a jewish fable. Fry calls the 10 commandments the primitive ravings of desert nomads. (Of which he is one) So to be modern one must repudiate! So Fry and Hitler sound similar because both are built on the same idea of modernity.
One day the truth of what happened between 1932 and 1945 will be revealed. It will take another World war for this to happen and, given the state of the Western economies, another war is where we are being taken to next by the same powers who started the last one.
Curiously, the great untold story of Vatican II is how it was hijacked by brainwashed German theologians. Read the likes of Heenan or even the smarter American bishops present in Rome at the time. They knew something was up but couldn't make the connection because the "connection" was beyond irony.
We have lived through nearly 50 years of devastation as a result with no end in sight.
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