Pope Benedict XVI's Speech to the Delegation of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations

(12 Feb 09 - RV) Below is the full text of Pope Benedict XVI's speech to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

Dear Friends,
I am pleased to welcome all of you today, and I thank Rabbi Arthur Schneier and Mr Alan Solow for the greetings they have addressed to me on your behalf. I well recall the various occasions, during my visit to the United States last year, when I was able to meet some of you in Washington D.C. and New York. Rabbi Schneier, you graciously received me at Park East Synagogue just hours before your celebration of Pesah.

Now, I am glad to have this opportunity to offer you hospitality here in my own home. Such meetings as this enable us to demonstrate our respect for one another. I want you to know that you are all most welcome here today in the house of Peter, the home of the Pope.

I look back with gratitude to the various opportunities I have had over many years to spend time in the company of my Jewish friends. My visits to your communities in Washington and New York, though brief, were experiences of fraternal esteem and sincere friendship. So too was my visit to the Synagogue in Cologne, the first such visit in my Pontificate.

It was very moving for me to spend those moments with the Jewish community in the city I know so well, the city which was home to the earliest Jewish settlement in Germany, its roots reaching back to the time of the Roman Empire.

A year later, in May 2006, I visited the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. What words can adequately convey that profoundly moving experience? As I walked through the entrance to that place of horror, the scene of such untold suffering, I meditated on the countless number of prisoners, so many of them Jews, who had trodden that same path into captivity at Auschwitz and in all the other prison camps.

Those children of Abraham, grief-stricken and degraded, had little to sustain them beyond their faith in the God of their fathers, a faith that we Christians share with you, our brothers and sisters. How can we begin to grasp the enormity of what took place in those infamous prisons?

The entire human race feels deep shame at the savage brutality shown to your people at that time. Allow me to recall what I said on that sombre occasion: “The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the earth. Thus the words of the Psalm, ‘We are being killed, accounted as sheep for the slaughter’, were fulfilled in a terrifying way.”

Our meeting today occurs in the context of your visit to Italy in conjunction with your annual Leadership Mission to Israel. I too am preparing to visit Israel, a land which is holy for Christians as well as Jews, since the roots of our faith are to be found there. Indeed, the Church draws its sustenance from the root of that good olive tree, the people of Israel, onto which have been grafted the wild olive branches of the Gentiles (cf. Rom 11: 17-24). From the earliest days of Christianity, our identity and every aspect of our life and worship have been intimately bound up with the ancient religion of our fathers in faith.

The two-thousand-year history of the relationship between Judaism and the Church has passed through many different phases, some of them painful to recall. Now that we are able to meet in a spirit of reconciliation, we must not allow past difficulties to hold us back from extending to one another the hand of friendship. Indeed, what family is there that has not been troubled by tensions of one kind or another?

The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration Nostra Aetate marked a milestone in the journey towards reconciliation, and clearly outlined the principles that have governed the Church’s approach to Christian-Jewish relations ever since. The Church is profoundly and irrevocably committed to reject all anti-Semitism and to continue to build good and lasting relations between our two communities.

If there is one particular image which encapsulates this commitment, it is the moment when my beloved predecessor Pope John Paul II stood at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, pleading for God’s forgiveness after all the injustice that the Jewish people have had to suffer. I now make his prayer my own: “God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your Name to the Nations: we are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant” (26 March 2000).

The hatred and contempt for men, women and children that was manifested in the Shoah was a crime against God and against humanity. This should be clear to everyone, especially to those standing in the tradition of the Holy Scriptures, according to which every human being is created in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26-27). It is beyond question that any denial or minimization of this terrible crime is intolerable and altogether unacceptable.

Recently, in a public audience, I reaffirmed that the Shoah must be "a warning for all against forgetfulness, denial or reductionism, because violence committed against one single human being is violence against all" (January 28, 2009).

This terrible chapter in our history must never be forgotten. Remembrance — it is rightly said — is memoria futuri, a warning to us for the future, and a summons to strive for reconciliation. To remember is to do everything in our power to prevent any recurrence of such a catastrophe within the human family by building bridges of lasting friendship.

It is my fervent prayer that the memory of this appalling crime will strengthen our determination to heal the wounds that for too long have sullied relations between Christians and Jews. It is my heartfelt desire that the friendship we now enjoy will grow ever stronger, so that the Church’s irrevocable commitment to respectful and harmonious relations with the people of the Covenant will bear fruit in abundance.

 

Comments

[K-Sensor]

What about the Croatian Massacre.

The pope has no power to reign in ecumenicism with Jews or other religions.

[America First]

Right.

Like all Western Governments the Churches are long corrupted.

[Mary O]

This statement is a great disappointment. I was raised as a Catholic, and I basically feel that the Pope could make no more un-Catholic statement.

Unlike Protestantism, Catholicism is a more confrontational religion: "The truth shall set you free." (John 8:32) A Catholic must confront the fact of his mortality, the fact of his moral imperfection, and not deny certain facts in favor of winning popularity. Thus, the Catholic Church does not condone the homosexual lifestyle, nor does it encourage a casual attitude towards divorce, nor does it condone abortion on demand no matter how politically advantageous supporting these policies might be.

The Jews are caught like rats in a trap. They seriously underestimate White intellectual abilities, and planned to inflate the Holocaust as a means to extract money from us ad infinitum. However, starting in about 1980, forensic science advanced to the point where one could hardly turn on the television without hearing of some crime of 20 years ago being reinvestigated, or even scientists discovering exactly how some ancient Egyptian died 3000 years ago. Science has advanced, and all the propaganda in the world cannot turn back the clock to the point at which the Jews do not need to scientifically prove their claims.

Indeed in the 1930s and 1940s, Americans were more sophisticated politically. My father told me that stories about what would come to be called the "Holocaust" were well-known in the early 1940s, but people just dismissed them as propaganda. Like the Germans who supposedly bayoneted infants in WW1, or even the pre-Gulf War Iraqis who killed pre-mature children by leaving them on a cold floor, such claims were seen for what they are; that is, deliberate and calculated untruths for the purpose of inciting hatred and violence against the supposed enemy.

We Whites are the enemy. The Jews draw no distinctions among us. If we might be Irish, German or Russian, we are all the same to them. We Americans must be crushed with huge taxes to compensate Israel for its imaginary suffering. And, the Pope is going along with this evil plan to enslave us.

What are the Jews really whining about? Psychologically, the "Holocaust" (which suggests burning), might actually be a reference to the sack of Khazaria by the Viking Rus in c. 965 AD. The Vikings destroyed the Khazar Empire along the Caspian Sea, and burned their major cities to the ground. In this light, the Jewish contempt for all Whites becomes clear, as all contemporary White ethnic groups have some Viking ancestry.

Some commentators will go farther and suggest that since the Khazars originated in the isolated Caucasus area, they genetically retained a much higher level of Neanderthal genes, and therefore they have this strong sense of being another separate and higher class of being than we are. We Europeans are mainly descendents of Cro-Magnon, who are often blamed for the demise of Neanderthal, (mythically, Cain killing Abel), again with no evidence.

If a Catholic were to tell lies and scheme to take advantage of other people; the Church would advise him to confess his sins, ask God for His forgiveness and to compensate the victims of his crime. Why does the Pope treat the Jews so much differently? Perhaps he sees them as being "different."

Since no forensic evidence or credible papertrails support the so-called "Holocaust," we must accept these wild accusations are nothing more than an attack on our moral character.

[Mary O]

Another point to seriously consider is that the label that people choose for some phenomenon tells quite a lot about what it is: a "junk bond" was deemed junk by someone; the "bailout" expresses disgust for rewarding failure; the various "bubbles" reflect the feeling that our economy is based on the insubstantial.

"Holocaust" is a Greek word for a religious sacrifice, usually consumed in fire. Such a sacrifice, an offering made to God, must be something of value; typically, a lamb in good health, or other animal whose loss would be painful.

Adolf Hitler certainly could not have seen the Jews as a religious offering. Indeed at the Wannsee Conference, the NS discussed ways to deport Jews from Germany. BTW: the "Final Solution" was only deportation, not mass extermination of the Jews. A "holocaust" is not something from which one just wants separation.

So who would have seen the Jews as a religious offering? The bulk of the Jews who actually suffered were the Polish Jews; so we might ask who saw the Polish Jews in particular as a religious sacrifice? Or as perhaps a military sacrifice? The answer is Stalin.

In the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Stalin in effect gave Poland to Hitler.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1939pact.html

Poland had a huge and thriving Jewish community. The Germans targeted these Jewish communities or "ghettoes" when they finally invaded Poland. In so doing, they hoped to win favor with Poles, who hated the oppressive and highly over-privileged Jews. The Polish Jews did suffer as a result, but no more so than many of the other groups made refugees by the war.

All throughout the 1930s, Jews all over the world, including the US, had supported Stalin madly. The truth that they had supported Stalin, who then betrayed their Polish brethren so heartlessly, weighs heavy on the Jewish conscience (according to some analysts). The horrible guilt they feel for causing the slaughter of their Polish brethren drives their insistence on the "Holocaust." For in blaming Hitler, the German NS, the Germans in general or all Whites, they are in fact projecting their own guilt, guilt which they cannot cope with, guilt for supporting Stalin, upon innocent groups. Among themselves, Jews often speak of this "Jewish guilt."

When confronted with the fact that they were Stalinists, Jews will often deny the fact; and argue that Stalin hated and persecuted Jews in the USSR but omitting the fact that the Stalinist persecutions occurred after WW2.

The Pope should urge the Jews to confess the truth, renounce neo-conservatism, and cease attacking the Palestinians and bribing our Congress. Only the truth can set them free.

[Mary O]

Why did the Jews choose a Greek word, "holocaust" to describe their supposed sufferings? Surely this choice was no accident. The ancient Khazar kingdom had an alliance with the Byzantine Empire; however, as the Russians adapted the Greek Orthodox faith (c. 988), Constantinople moved closer to Kiev, making the Khazar alliance less necessary. The Byzantine in effect "sacrificed" their alliance with Khazaria. ("The Thirteenth Tribe" by Arthur Koestler) Eventually the erosion of this alliance led to the fall of Khazaria.

[roscoe]

Ben 16 has no authority to do anything as he is an anti-pope

[Hoff]

Well, you got some thing wrong about Stalin, due to the jews lies. Stalin was married to two or three jewesses. Stalins children are jews.

Most in polituro was jews, and all the non-jews was married to jewesses. The secret police OGP, NKVD, KGB and so on was TOTALLY in the hands of the jews.Soviet was run by jews.

As for the jews in Poland, well ... they kissed the soviet tanks when they rolled over the borders to the balt states and Poland. I dont think the germans had to do much to get the poles on their side.

That Stalin hated jews is just another day in the global jew mafias lying propaganda machine. If you look at the back at a 10.000 shekel not, there is a picture from Mocba (Moskow) and according to Golda Meir there was 50.000 jews that hailed her 1949 when she went to the synagouge in Mocba.

This is straight from her diary in her own words. Lets look at this picture a little closer. What it shows is that there was NO religious persecution of jews in Soviet. The synagoug was in full sevice under Stalin 1949.

Second, if 50.000 russians had came togheter in the center of Mocba, that would have been considered a "counter revolution" and the tanks would be rolling. But because the jews controlled Soviet they had no fear of any counterrevolution.

What the show trail was all about was differente jew mafia taking out each other. Then the lying jews tells us that Stalin hated jews. Total BS.

My blog and the truth about the lying jews.

http://jewise.wordpress.com

[Mary O]

Thank you for your comments, Hoff.

Jewish interference in Russian governance went back even into Czarist times. In Tolstoy's *1877* novel, "Anna Karenina," Anna's brother, the lovable Stiva has run into financial difficulties, and seeks an additional post to help support his large family.

Quote: "The appointment yielded an income of seven to ten thousand a year, and [Stiva] Oblonsky could fill it without giving up his governmental position. It was in the hands of two ministers, one lady, and two Jews, ... [Stiva] believed most positively that the committee in which he was trying to get an appointment was a new, genuine, and honest public body, but that morning when [the Jew] Volgarinov had -- intentionally, beyond a doubt -- kept him two hours waiting with other petitioners in his waiting-room, he had suddenly felt uneasy.

Whether he was uncomfortable that he, a descendent of Rurik, Prince Oblonsky, had been kept for two hours waiting to see a Jew, or that for the first time in his life he was not following the example of his ancestors in serving the government, but was turning off into a new career; anyway he was very uncomfortable ...

But all the while he was uncomfortable and angry, he could not have said why -- whether because he could not get his epigram just right, or from some other reason. When at last Volgarinov had received him with exaggerated politeness and unmistakable triumph at his humiliation, and had all but refused the favor asked of him, [Stiva] had made haste to forget it all as soon as possible. And now, at the mere recollection, he blushed."

So when these Jew-defenders make the claim that the Jews only backed the Communists, because they were so persecuted by the
Czars, we have to go back and ask just exactly why the Czars wanted to get rid of the Jews, too.