Vatican spokesman says holocaust asks vital questions about God and evil

(January 27, 2012) The holocaust is also a theological ground that believers cannot avoid as it asks very profound questions about God and about evil. Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi made the comment to Vatican Radio on Friday as the world marked the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. The Jan. 27 observance is in commemoration of the day in 1945 when Soviet soldiers liberated the notorious Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in Poland. Fr. Lombardi said that the holocaust indicates where we stand in front of God and the questions that we ask him in the depths of our silence in front of the mystery. The Jesuit priest explained that for Christians the holocaust means looking up to Christ in the hope that anguish gives way to life. The 2012 observance of the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust focussed on the theme “Children and the Holocaust”. The United Nations remembered the one-and-a-half million Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust, together with the thousands of Roma and Sinti children, the disabled and others, who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators.