Holocaust Remembrance Day

My life has been shaped by my high school encounter with the reality of the Holocaust.

I don’t know when I first learned about the Holocaust but during high school I began to be concerned about this horror. At that time I was in a Franciscan minor seminary and so one of my concerns was the apparent failure of the Catholic Church to respond to the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust

There was Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play, The Deputy. Some consider it to be overstated and a piece of propaganda against Pope Pius XII, but it raises the question of why the church was so hesitant to speak openly.

I also ran across Gordan Zahn’s 1962 study, German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars: A Study in Social Control Though Zahn’s interest was mainly in the failure of most of the German bishops to respond to Hitler’s wars, it also brings to the fore the failure of the church to speak out.

Two years later, Gordon Zahn published In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jägerstätter, his account of the life of an Austrian who refused to serve in Hitler’s army. He ran across the story when he was researching his book on war and German Catholics and proceeded to make known the life and writings of this farmer who discerned the evil of Nazism and sacrificed his life for his convictions. He was subsequently beatified by the Catholic Church and recently a movie was released, A Hidden Life, which I heartily recommend.

About this time, I came across the speech that Albert Camus gave at a Dominican monastery in 1948. It put into words my concerns – not just about the Holocaust but also about the Vietnam War which was raging in the mid and late 1960s.

“What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest [person]. That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today.”

Camus concluded his remarks with these prophetic words:

“…if Christians made up their minds to it, millions of voices — millions, I say — throughout the world would be added to the appeal of a handful of isolated individuals who, without any sort of affiliation, today intercede almost everywhere and ceaselessly for children and for [human beings].”

In 1973, I took an extended vacation to Europe, traveling mostly by bicycle and train. I stopped in Munich, in part for the beer, but also I wanted to visit Dachau, the concentration camp. It was not a death camp but many died here and their bodies were cremated. I walked in silence around the camp, paused at the crematory (where I sensed the smell of death), and prayed at the chapel there. As I returned to Munich on a train, I noted that this place of mass death and detention was so close to a major city. How could the people in the nearby town not notice the smell of death and how could the city of Munich not note the presence of this center of evil.

Crematoria at Dachau

Remembering the holocaust and other crimes of mass destruction of the twentieth century as well as the massive civilian deaths in war and concentration camps throughout the world, I have been moved to be with those who suffer and to speak up with them. In some way, it opened me to come to Honduras. 

But it opened me to something more.

A few years ago, the bishop asked me to consider the permanent diaconate. As is my custom, I began to look for information. The first article I came across, by William Ditewig, mentioned that priests in Dachau discussed the permanent diaconate. They asked why the church didn’t respond to the evil of Nazism and wondered whether the clergy was too distant from the realities around them. They thought that it might be good to have people involved in the world as members of the clergy to keep the church closer to the reality people experience. I wrote about this in a blog post a few months before I was ordained. I also wrote ab out this last year in another blogpost.

Last year, I had planned to go to an international deacons’ conference in Germany and had planned to spend a day at Dachau. That, of course, was cancelled due to the outbreak of the Corona-19 virus. I still have hopes to one day visit that seedbed of the contemporary diaconate.

For me, this has meant that for me the diaconate has a strong prophetic dimension.

We are called to announce the Reign of God, that God has come near and is present among us. But that also means that we help people identify the evils – both personal and institutional – around us. We are not just to wash the wounds of those who suffer but we are called to speak up about what has brought about this suffering and death.

This means that we may have to take risks of offending others. But silence opens the way for evil to flourish. It might also mean that we stand with those who suffer. 

I know many deacons stand at the side of the unborn, but how many of us stand with those who suffer from racist attacks? Many stand with the poor, offering them assistance, but how many of us raise questions about why they suffer

For this reason, I have a rather peculiar idea of what it means to be a deacon. 

The deacon must stand at the side of the people in need – all of them, most of all the impoverished. I have my concerns with any deacon who does not get his hands dirty at the side of the poor and who is not willing to speak up with them (and for them). 

We should not do this from the outside, but from within the world of the poor - living the "culture of encounter" that Pope Francis stressed. 

It’s a challenge that I don’t live up to – but God keeps calling me. 

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 Photo of crematoria at Dachau from Wikipedia.