Fr Lombardi SJ: on memory and the future

Here is the English version of the weekly Octava Dies editorial from the director of the Press Office of the Holy See, Fr. Federico Lombardi, SJ:

Memory and future

One cannot pass through Berlin without feeling the weight of the darkest page in the history of Germany and Europe in the last century: the madness for power and murder that marked the Nazi era.

That memory is powerfully recalled in the words of the German Pope in the midst of his people when, quoting St. Augustine, he describes how a State without law and justice is reduced to a band of thieves; or when, with the delegation of Jewish leaders, he remembers the criminal planning of the Shoah and the horrors of Kristallnacht that preceded it.

It is a memory made present in the sight of all by the unique gift that the Diocese of Berlin offers the Pope: a picture of the dismal prison of Plötzensee, where almost three thousand people were hanged or guillotined by the Nazis as opponents of the regime.

But the light of those martyred by Nazism shines through the darkness of those times and continues to inspire the building of the future. The president of Germany remembered three notable victims: Blessed Bernhard Lichtenberg, the pastor of the Catholic Cathedral of Berlin; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great Protestant theologian; and St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), a daughter of Israel who became a Catholic nun and was killed at Auschwitz.

The ecumenism of the martyrs is testimony from which the ecumenical movement of today can find great depth and draw enthusiasm. Sacrificing one’s life as a witness to God and to Jesus Christ: could there be a more solid common ground, a firmer basis for continuing the journey in the hope of a union that is not just behind us, but is also ahead of us?