By George Weigel, Public Discourse.
On September 10, the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder sponsored a symposium, The Fire This Time: America and the Boulder Attacks, in response to the fire-bombing of peaceful Jewish marchers seeking the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza this past June, in the aftermath of which a Holocaust survivor died of burns. After an introduction by Dr. Joseph Bottum, the following address was delivered by George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Travel back in your mind’s eye some twenty-five years, to the holy city of Jerusalem. There, on March 26, 2000, an eighty-year-old Polish priest, dressed in the traditional white cassock of the Bishop of Rome and leaning heavily on a cane, walked eighty-six slow and difficult steps to the Western Wall of Herod’s Temple. After a moment of silent reflection, he did something that millions of believers in the God of Abraham had done before him: he left a prayer, which read as follows:
God of our forefathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your name to the nations. We are deeply saddened by the behavior 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. Amen.
Three days before, on March 23, 2000, that same Polish priest, Pope John Paul II (now Pope Saint John Paul II) had gone to lay a memorial wreath at the eternal flame that honors the martyrs of the Shoah at Yad Vashem. His press spokesman, the Spanish layman Joaquín Navarro-Valls, once asked John Paul II if he ever cried. “Not outside,” the Pope replied. No one who saw John Paul walking toward that eternal flame could doubt that he was crying inside, as he spoke of the “great need for silence” in this place: silence in which to remember the dead; silence in which to try to make sense of the memories that kept flooding back; silence because there were no words sufficient to condemn the Shoah. Later that evening, my oldest Israeli friend, a distinguished soldier, scholar, and statesman who had seen a lot in his life, called me at my hotel. “I just had to tell you,” he said, “that my wife and I cried throughout the Pope’s visit to Yad Vashem. This was wisdom, humaneness, and integrity personified. Nothing was missing; nothing more needed to be said.”
How did this happen? And what does it mean for us today?