Pope personally e-mails Jewish leader on Holocaust.

Pope personally e-mails Jewish leader on Holocaust.(TOI).

Francis pens a reflection on the place of God during the Shoah in light of the massacre of 1 million Jewish children.

ROME – Pope Francis has continued to reach out to Jews, this time with a personal email to Menachem Z. Rosensaft, an American law professor who deals with Holocaust and genocide issues.

Francis’s email was a reflection on the place of God during the Holocaust. It was, Elizabeth Tenety wrote in the Washington Post’s On Faith blog, a response to Rosensaft, who had sent the Vatican the text of a sermon he delivered at New York’s Park Avenue synagogue on this topic during this year’s High Holidays.

The son of two Holocaust survivors, Rosensaft is general counsel of the World Jewish Congress and vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants.

In his sermon, which was published in the On Faith blog, Rosensaft had declared, “My parents’ entire immediate families were murdered in the Shoah. My mother’s five-a-and-half-year-old son, my brother, was one of more than one million Jewish children who were killed by the Germans and their accomplices only and exclusively because they were Jewish. Again, what possible transgressions could any of them have committed to cause God to turn away from them?”

How, he asked, “can we believe in God in the aftermath of the Shoah? Shouldn’t an omniscient God have had to know that the cataclysm was being perpetrated? And shouldn’t an omnipotent God have been able to prevent it?”

According to the Post the pope replied, “When you, with humility, are telling us where God was in that moment, I felt within me that you had transcended all possible explanations and that, after a long pilgrimage — sometimes sad, tedious or dull – you came to discover a certain logic and it is from there that you were speaking to us; the logic of First Kings 19:12, the logic of that ‘gentle breeze’ (I know that it is a very poor translation of the rich Hebrew expression) that constitutes the only possible hermeneutic interpretation. Thank you from my heart. And, please, do not forget to pray for me. May the Lord bless you.”

Hmmmm.....

Pope Francis I:  “Jesus is indignant when he sees these things” because those who suffer are “his faithful people, the people that he loves so much.”

Pope Karol Wojtyla:

In order to perceive the true answer to the "why" of suffering, we must look to the revelation of divine love, the ultimate source of the meaning of everything that exists. 

Love is also the richest source of the meaning of suffering, which always remains a mystery: We are conscious of the insufficiency and inadequacy of our explanations. Christ causes us to enter into the mystery and to discover the "why" of suffering, as far as we are capable of gasping the sublimity of divine love. 

In order to discover the profound meaning of suffering . . . we must above all accept the light of revelation. . . . Love is also the fullest source of the answer to the question of the meaning of suffering. This answer has been given by God to man in the cross of Jesus Christ. (SD 13)