Ecumenicism at Its Best

For the first time, a commemoration of the Holocaust was held at St. Joseph’s Oratory, the 100-year-old landmark shrine on Mount Royal and one of Roman Catholicism’s most important sacred sites

A collegue at work asked me, in all honesty, if Hitler's Catholicism has anything to do with his genocidal policies. I answered that the opposite was true. Hitler was an apostate (I actually used the more polite term "lapsed catholic") from the Faith. Secular totalitarian ideology and pagan fantasies fueled Hitler's rampage. This collegue was young and asked in ernest.

This article could serve as the final answer on the subject:

Duhaime and Ann Ungar, MHMC executive director, lit seven candles symbolizing the six million Jewish victims and, the seventh, the millions of other civilian victims of the Nazis and their collaborators. Schubert then sang Oseh Shalom.

Ungar delivered the main address, introducing herself as a child of Holocaust survivors.

“Yet, I stand before you today, in this centre of spiritual devotion, not as a Jew, but as a human being...The Holocaust is a story that transcends differences, it is a story about our common humanity, and the lack of humanity that characterized the majority of the world’s response.”

While the horror must be remembered, she said, “we must never forget that [the Holocaust] is also a story of hope” because of the heroism of those who saved Jews.

“While I must highlight the hatred that seized the heart of Europe, I will also bring to light the glimmers of hope, the pinpricks of light, that came out of that unspeakable darkness.”

Among those she recalled were the priests Roger Braun, Pierre Chaillet, Jean Fleury, Jacob Raile and Henri Revol, as well as the nuns Anna Borowska and Maria Skobtsova.

“They saved lives not only with food and refuge, but with heart, with empathy and with prayer.”

One of the most inspiring moments of this story was the fact that this wasn't the first event of its kind. These commemorations have taken place in Christian Churches across Montreal many times before:

The event was organized by Christian-Jewish Dialogue of Montreal, which has held Christian commemorations of the Holocaust for the past 24 years in different Catholic and Protestant churches.

President Jean Duhaime said that this was also the first time that the Montreal Board of Rabbis and the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre (MHMC) were official partners in a commemoration. The oratory’s commemoration was a Sunday morning Eucharist in the basilica and was attended by about 1,800 people. Several Holocaust survivors were among the members of the Jewish community present.

Although I cringed when I heard the Eucharist was involved, the following excerpt appears to have addressed this:

Presided over by the oratory’s rector Father Jean-Pierre Aumont, the French-language service combined elements of Christian and Jewish liturgy. As in past years, Duhaime said it had been agreed upon in advance with Jewish representatives what the Christian portions would be to avoid discomfort.

Christians and Jews have come a long way since the first emancipations of the camps. May we continue to walk the road together as best as we can. It's the least brothers can do.