From: Father Bob Bossie

This coming Monday is Holocaust Remembrance Day.

For this reason, I am reminded of my visit, long ago, to the Auschwitz concentration camp, site of the unspeakable acts against 12 million of our sisters and brothers: Jewish persons, LGBTQ individuals, the physically and mentally disabled, Roma (gypsies), Poles and other Slavic peoples, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, members of political opposition groups, Priests and Pastors, those married to a Jewish person who refused to divorce them, and other individuals and groups.

As I wondered through this place of horror, I realized that the persons who did this were not devils but were like me, ordinary persons who had slowly capitulated to the customs of the day in order to avoid ridicule, keep a job, go along to get along, avoid persecution, keep going to the better school, or who simply thought it wouldn’t, couldn’t and didn’t happen here. After all, Germany was a good, Christian country. It was then that I prayed to God that I would have the courage to resist such challenges to my own belief about life, knowing that at any moment I could be one of those good persons who did such awful things. And I use the word “good” with the utmost sincerity.

Today, I see us moving, inexorably, toward such a state in the criminalizing of immigrants, extreme police powers, the appointment of corporate, right-wing judges and administrators, extreme nationalism, militarism and corporatism, to name but a few signs of a Fascist regime. Don’t get me wrong, preparation for such a state have been long in the making. But now it is coming to fruition.

For this reason, I recommend that you join in the Holocaust Remembrance Day event.

Bob Bossie