Greetings for the Jewish Community in Rome

At 12:00 noon today, in the Room of the Popes at the Vatican Apostolic Palace, the Holy Father, Pope Francis received in audience a delegation from the Jewish Community of Rome, on the occasion of the 70^th anniversary of the deportation of the Hebrews from Rome (16 October 1943).

Roberto Di Segni

Speech of the Holy Father, Pope Francis

for his meeting with the Hebrew community of Rome

Dear friends from the Hebrew community of Rome,

Shalom!

I am pleased to welcome you and thus to have an opportunity to deepen and to expand upon the first encounter that I had with a few of you on March 20 of this year.  I affectionately greet you all, particularly the Chief Rabbi, Doctor Riccardo Di Segni, who I wish to thank for the words he has offered today.  I thank him also for remembering the courage of our father Abraham when he quarreled with the Lord to save Sodom and Gomorrah: and if there were thirty, and if there were twenty-five …  It is really a courageous prayer before the Lord.  Thank you.  I also greet the President of the Jewish Community of Rome, Doctor Riccardo Pacifici, and the President of the Union of Hebrew Communities of Italy, Doctor Renzo Gattegna.

As Bishop of Rome, I feel particularly close to the life of the Hebrew community of this city: I know that with more than two thousand years of uninterrupted presence here, you can boast of being the oldest such community in Western Europe.  Therefore, for many centuries, the Hebrew community and the Church of Rome have lived together in this, our city, with a history – we know it well – which has experienced misunderstandings as well as genuine injustices.  It is a story however, that, with God’s help, has also known many decades of development and growth in friendship and fraternal relations.

This change of mentality has come about at least in part through the contribution of the Catholic Church in the reflections of the Second Vatican Council, but no less a contribution came also from the life and action on both our parts, from wise and generous men, capable of recognizing the call of the Lord and of walking boldly along the new paths of encounter and dialogue.

Paradoxically, the common tragedy of the War has taught us to walk together. In a few days we will observe the 70^th anniversary of the deportation of the Jews of Rome. We will remember and pray for the many innocent victims of human barbarism and for their families. It will also be an occasion to keep our attention always vigilant, so that forms of intolerance and anti-Semitism will never come alive again under any pretext in Rome or in the rest of the world. I’ve said it at other times and I’m pleased to repeat it now: it’s a contradiction for a Christian to be anti-Semitic. Christian roots are to a degree Jewish. A Christian cannot be anti-Semitic! May anti-Semitism be banished from the heart and life of every man and every woman!

The anniversary will also enable us to remember how in the hour of darkness the Christian community of this city was able to extend a hand to brothers in difficulty. We know how many religious institutes, monasteries and the Papal Basilicas themselves, responding to the will of the Pope, opened their doors and provided a fraternal welcome, and how many ordinary Christians offered the help they could give, little or great as it was. The great majority, it’s true, were not aware of the need to update the Christian understanding of Judaism and perhaps they knew very little of the life of the Jewish community itself. However, they had the courage to do the right thing at that moment: to protect brothers who were in danger. I like to stress this aspect because, if it is true that it is important to deepen theological reflection through dialogue on the part of both sides, it is also true that there is a lived dialogue, that of daily experience, which is no less fundamental. What is more, without this, without a true and concrete culture of encounter, which leads to genuine relations, without prejudices and suspicions, any commitment in the intellectual field would be of little use. Here also, as I often like to underline, the People of God has its own scent and intuits the path that God is asking it to follow, in this case, the path of friendship, of closeness, of fraternity.

As Bishop of Rome, I hope to contribute here in Rome to this closeness and friendship, just as I had the grace to do – because it was a grace – with the Jewish community of Buenos Aires. Among the many things that can be shared is our witness to the truth of the Ten Words, of the Decalogue, as a solid foundation and source of life also for our society, so disoriented by an extreme pluralism of choices and orientations, and marked by a relativism that leads to having no longer solid and sure points of reference (cf. Benedict XVI, Address to the Synagogue of Rome, January 17, 2010, 5-6).

Dear friends, I thank you for your visit and invoke with you the protection and blessing of the Most High for this, our common path of friendship and trust. In His benevolence, may He grant His peace to our days. Thank you.