Remembering Pesach (Passover) this Holy Week

Pope John Paul II, who served as Bishop of Rome and Pope from October 1978 until April 2005

Pope John Paul II ushered in a new era of warm relationship with the Jewish community. From the Second Vatican Council's phenomenal delaration of respect for people of other religious faiths, especially for Jews in the hailed document, Nostra Aetate (Latin for "Our Age"), there has been a gradually growing trust between the Catholic Church and the wider Jewish community.

The late Holy Father referred to Jews as "our elder brothers (and I would add, sisters)". He even took the uprecedented step of publicly acknowledging the failure of Christians in the past to respect Jews and to apologize for the wrongdoing committed in innumerable atrocities through the centuries, especially in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust rendered by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s.

Jewish children at Auschwitz in Nazi-occumpied Poland during the Holocaust of the Jews during the 1940s

This year 2009 we Catholics and other Christians who follow the Gregorian Calendar who are celebrating Holy Week happily coincide with the Jewish Passover (Pesach).

Pesach is the root word for what becomes translated into Greek as "Pascha" and later into Latin as "Pasch". Thus, Jesus Christ as the Paschal Lamb is the Passover Lamb for us Christians. He is the fulfillment of the Law of Moses and the Prophets. He himself is the Paschal Mystery, that great event of salvation which we solemnly celebrate annually during the Sacred Triduum (three days) leading us to Easter -- the Passion, death and resurrection of the Lord.


Pesach means "passing over", as the Book of Exodus relates when the Angel of Death, the Tenth Plague, comes upon Egypt at God's command to slay the first-born of human and beast alike. And among the humans, anyone who does not have the lintels and doorposts marked with the blood of the lamb will lose their first-born, male or female, to the Angel of Death!


Observant (i.e. religious) Jews celebrate the annual commemoration of God delivering Israel from Egyptian slavery -- the Passover meal, the plagues, the flight out of Egypt, the deliverance at the Red Sea, the giving of the Torah, the manna and quail, the water from the rock in the desert, all leading to the entry at the end of forty years into the Promised Land.

Jesus and his Apostles celebrating the Last Supper meal, which the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) portray as the Passover

For us Christians, Jesus is the fulfillment and every Eucharist is our celebration of the Passover of the Lord Jesus from death into resurrection, and our participation in that Paschal Mystery by entering into the Word of God and finally partaking of the Holy Mysteries of the Lord Jesus' Body and Blood at Holy Communion.

Denying the Holocaust -- A Frightening Scandal

How can a bishop deny the truth? This one has heads around the world shaking in disbelief. The sad reality is that Bp. Richard Williamson of the Society of St. Pius X publicly denied that the "Holocaust" as such ever took place.

Arrest of Polish Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II

When Bp. Williamson, originally from Great Britain, went on Swedish TV and publicly denied that millions upon millions of Jews perished under the Nazi regime throughout Central, Western and Eastern Europe, an international outrcy went up.

Thankfully, over the course of several weeks, our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI weighed in to affirm the sobering reality of the Shoah ("holocaust" in Hebrew) and denounce any denial thereof.

In Germany it is a crime to deny the reality of the Holocaust that occured in Europe when the Nazis came to power. Adolph Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and began the anti-Jewish practices that resulted in the "Final Solution" of the Jews. There were others whom the Nazis persecuted -- homosexuals, Roma (gypsies), Masons, Jehovah's Witnesses, communists, trade unionists. But by far the attempt to eliminate Jews from Europe, even from the face of the earth, was the Nazi plot of the so-called "Master Race".

Survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in southern Poland. The camp was liberated by the Soviets in 1945

My Dad, Joseph AR Studwell, Jr. was an MP with Gen. Patton's Third Army during World War II. After the concentration camp at Buchenwald was liberated by the Allies, he entered the camp and told me as I was growing up the gruesomeness of the camp. He had a photo of himself and another MP taken by the bodies of the victims of Nazi atrocity. (I don't have that photo readily available for this blog).

The sad reality with which we still have to deal is anti-Semitism and racism in all its ugly and evil facets. Truth, even when negated, does triumph. Even sadder, though, is when it exists among people who claim to believe in Jesus Christ. How odd that the Messiah of Israel, himself a Jew, becomes coopted by those who would deny the reality of the Holocaust.

Pope Benedict XVI and many, many bishops in communion with him have decried the untruthful comments that have resulted in scandal provoked by Bp. Williamson's remarks. This is also "anti-life", and disgracefully from within the Christian community.