Homily: Second Sunday of Easter – Holocaust Remembrance Sunday
Buried inside of our second reading from the Book of Revelation, we heard the following: “Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last, the one who lives. Once I was dead, but now I am alive forever and ever. I hold the keys to death and the netherworld.”
When you picked up your missalette this morning, you probably noticed that this weekend our worldwide Church celebrates Divine Mercy Sunday. In the wider non-Catholic world, but particularly the Jewish one, Sunday April 11, 2010 is “Yom Hasoah” Holocaust Remembrance Day.
It was today, the 27th day of the month of Nisan on the Jewish Calendar – mid April 1943 on the Christian Calendar — that the Jewish residents of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up to attempt to cast off their Nazi masters. For the next six weeks or so, the conflict was horrifyingly brutal. Within two months, the uprising was crushed and over the course of the next two years many millions of people, predominantly but not exclusively Jewish civilians, went to their deaths in camps with names that – even now three generations later — come down to us with cringes of terror: Dachau, Sobibor, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Flossenburg, and especially Auschwitz.
Secular history often forgets that many victims of the Nazi atrocities were not Jewish. Let me tell you a few stories – one or two of which you may have already heard.
Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish Franciscan priest. He was born in 1894 – the same year as my grandfather. He joined his Franciscan community in 1910 and said his final vows in Rome just before World War I. His community then commissioned him as a missionary and in the early 1930’s he was sent to Japan eventually founding a monastery in Nagasaki – near the site – a few years later — of the second atomic bomb explosion.
By 1939, Kolbe had returned to Poland and using his hobby of amateur radio, made many thousands of broadcasts condemning the Nazi occupation of his homeland. In less than 24 months, he was arrested and sent to Auschwitz. In August of that same year, 1941, he volunteered to be executed in exchange for a husband and father who had been arbitrarily selected to suffer that fate. He died on August 14 when an effort to execute him by starvation did not work as well as his camp officials expected and they used a lethal injection to kill him. He was canonized a Saint of our church in 1982 – Pope John Paul II declaring him “The Patron Saint of our Difficult Century.”
My second story is about Diedrich Bonhoffer. He was not a priest or even a Roman Catholic. He was a well-respected internationally known Lutheran theologian and pastor. For several years after graduating with his doctorate from the University of Berlin – long before Hitler came to power – he had lived away from Germany and studied in places like Barcelona Spain, Harlem in New York City and even London.
His public attacks on Hitler started less than two days after the Nazi’s came to power in 1933. In 1939, he quietly returned to Germany and founded what is known to history as “The Seminary on the Run” — quickly setting up classes in small and obscure towns throughout Germany only to even more quickly move to another equally obscure town once his presence was discovered by the Nazi authorities. He briefly returned to the United States but almost immediately regretted abandoning his ministry in time of excruciating peril. He quickly returned to Germany on the last passenger ship to make that trip before the Atlantic was closed because of Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
After many underground anti-Nazi efforts, he was finally arrested and incarcerated in a military prison, then at the concentration camp at Buchenwald and finally transferred to the concentration camp at Flossenburg. There he was executed on April 8, 1945 – three short weeks before the American Army liberated that very same camp. The international Lutheran community continues to hold his memory in high honor.
The person behind my third story is not as well known as either Kolbe or Bonhoffer. She was a quiet and unassuming laywoman, a missionary for the Church of Scotland – the mother church for our American Presbyterian neighbors.
Jane Haining was born in Dunscore, Scotland, the fifth child of a farm family. She grew up as a member of a small town evangelical congregation. Like many women, even in our era, she went on to business school and worked for some ten years as a secretary and office manager for a small business.
In 1932, she volunteered to become a missionary for the Church of Scotland and quickly became one of the matrons at a girl’s orphanage in the Scottish Mission School in Budapest, Hungary. There she cared for 50 of the schools 400 pupils – most of whom were Jewish.
World War II broke out while she was on a vacation in England and she immediately returned to Budapest. Nazi Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944. A month later, the Gestapo arrested her and accused her of both being a British spy and hiding Jewish children.
In May 1944, she was shipped to Auschwitz. Her last postcard to her family was dated July 15, 1944, and her death is recorded in the camp records as two days after that. The Church of Scotland does not recognize Saints but in just the past month or so, the British Government — in absentia – awarded her the title of a “Hero of the Holocaust”.
I have been to these two camps – Flossenburg in October 2007 and Auschwicz in June 2004 — and will likely visit others if I have the opportunity to return to Eastern Europe. Once you physically visit any one of these camps, however, your spirituality will come away permanently changed.
One last story - - this one about how the concentration camp experience directly affects each and every Roman Catholic alive at the present time – each and every one of us. This particular story goes back over 50 years ago to May 1957, a dozen years after the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Early in that month, the pope at that time, Pius XII, convened a Synod of European Bishops. Now, perhaps some explanation is needed here. In our Roman Catholic tradition, a Synod is a smaller version of a Church Council. Instead of gathering together church leaders from throughout worldwide Christianity, these meetings tend to be have smaller geographical areas of concern and to have more restricted agendas, and they do tend to occur with a bit more regularity.
Roman Catholic Synods, however, have their own traditional customs and one of these is to let any participant have an “open-mike” for about five minutes and say whatever is on his mind. At this May 1957 gathering in the Vatican, a surprising number of bishops –- maybe a dozen — maybe fifteen — had been themselves inmates within Nazi Concentration Camps. All of them used their time on that “open-mike” to argue that they should have had the authorization from Rome to ordain married-men to the diaconate on a permanent basis. If they had had that authority, their ministry in those horrible settings would have been immeasurably more tolerable. The testimony of these 12 – 15 bishops made a powerful impact on the rest of those assembled.
NOW, it has NEVER been customary for the convening officials in any of these Synods – in this case the Pope – to say anything during that “open-mike” time. Afterwards, however, someone asked Pius XII about those statements pushing for ordaining married men to the diaconate. His reply – May 1957 — “This is a good idea but the time is not right.”
It was a bit over ten years later – and two popes later — when in 1968; Pope Paul VI restored the Permanent Diaconate to the Western Church. There are now over 24 thousand ordained men, 95% of them married with families, serving our worldwide church.
Today, “Yom Hashoah” Holocaust Remembrance Day, we here at St. Joseph Catholic Parish remember the prophetic foresight of over a dozen unknown Roman Catholic bishops at that May 1957 Synod whose first-hand experiences with the horrors of the holocaust helped to restore an ancient and honorable ordained ministry.
Perhaps it is appropriate that in 2010, both Divine Mercy Sunday and “Yom Hashoah” are celebrated together.

Your thoughts on the new translation are great, too. It will definitely be an adjustment!