On the first point, I was reminded of the capacity of human beings to gravitate equally towards great good and great evil. This I felt as we spent three days visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps. On the first day, we toured the camps and were exposed in intimate detail to the egregious horrors of the Nazi Occupation and their Final Solution. On the second day, we privately prayed the Stations of the Cross throughout the Birkenau camp, again reflecting on the suffering, the inaction, the discrimination, the inhumanity that occurred there. We prayed for atonement for such crimes, that such crimes never be repeated, and for the repose of the souls of those who had died. On the third day, we participated in the procession and Mass in honour of St. Maximilian Mary Kolbe at the Wall of Death in the Auschwitz camp near the cell where he died.
For me, the lesson was this: Very often, in instances of tragedy and death, the natural response is to simply treat it as the unspeakable. To treat it with silence and the resolve that it must never happen again.
But I think that in a true spirit of faith, we must not run away from the deeper questions. We may not have an absolute answer, but I think we must be open to considering them. Like the author Elie Wiesel remarked in his writing Night, the question arose where was God in these camps...
Auschwitz for me was a reminder that prejudice, discrimination, indifference, and genocide occurred not once, but too many times in human history. Auschwitz was also a reminder that sometimes the opposite of love might not be hatred, but indifference. For many of these officers, they might have just been following orders, indifferent to the effects. It was reminder that while we are all fundamentally good Creation from God, we are all capable of indifference and prejudice, and when left unchecked, it can lead to great evil. It is said that there is no saint without a past and no sinner without a future. What this pilgrimage has highlighted is both a sobering and hopeful truth. Every lost sinner and every great saint started where we are. As people of faith, we recognize the constant need for God’s grace and mercy, and we strive to always make choices towards those paths leading to Him.
The second lesson stems from the first: A reminder that even when people have relegated themselves to such evil, they are still God’s creation. They are still what God originally made Good. Our pilgrimage had as a precursor to Auschwitz a journey through the Divine Mercy Devotions and tracing the footsteps of St. Faustina Kowalska, St. John Paul II, and St. Maximilian Mary Kolbe. The Divine Mercy is among many things a reminder that everyone is worth saving, no matter how far gone they have wandered from the glory of God. We are told that St. Maximilian Kolbe saw this in not only his fellow prisoners, but also his persecutors. He felt not so much a hatred, but a swell of pity for their sorry souls having wandered so far from God. It was reminiscent of Our Lord’s plea during his ignominious suffering on the Cross that the Father “forgive them for they know not what they do.” But, our Lord gave up His life with all the suffering that came with it for even his persecutors. Even they were worth saving. Even the Nazis were worth saving.
The third lesson is to put all this into practice. One lesson we learnt from St. Maximilian Kolbe is that we are not all called to some Herculean task of changing all hearts towards forgiveness and mercy. Rather, it is in the small everyday accessible encounters that we can put these themes into effect. For me, as I mentioned, a lot spoke to me in this journey and even now as to my own spirituality, morality, relationships, and vocations. But, for one thing, a lesson for all, is to start to let mercy and love guide more radically... The virtue of Hope fundamentally bridges the gap between the Ideal and the Real. Consequently, to dare to hope and live our lives in light of Hope might seem to be an impossible or impractical task. But, with God, nothing is impossible.
Without attempting to boast, to say that I have heard some of these themes for the first time would be a lie. However, from time to time, they do grow dormant in one’s heart. And for this reason, this pilgrimage for me was nothing short of a rebirth; a call to remember who we are and the full radical extent of what we are called to do.
I am eternally grateful for this journey and for all who planned it. God bless. -Jeremy
