Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
Saying that humanity walked through a "valley of darkness" at Auschwitz, where 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered, Pope Benedict XVI quoted Psalm 23: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for you are with me."
The pontiff continued: "In a place like this, words fail. In the end, there can only be a dread silence, a silence which is a heartfelt cry to God — Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this? Where was God in those days? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?"
John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter regards Benedict's Auschwitz speech as a milestone in Christian reflection on evil: "Without denying that the Holocaust was often implemented by professed Christians, Benedict argued that at a deeper level, Christianity and Judaism both represented systems of thought that the Nazis instinctively understood must be destroyed, because without God and God's moral law there is no bulwark against totalitarianism, or against evil."
"It is as if Benedict wanted to avoid exploiting Auschwitz as a backdrop for any contemporary cause, however noble, and instead wanted to penetrate to what he considers its deepest roots — the primitive human instinct to slay God as the final limit on earthly power."
This is not new to those who have studied the writings of Joseph Ratzinger, Allen contends, and points out that in his book Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, Ratzinger argued that by insisting upon eternal and objective truth, ultimately guaranteed by the mind of God, Plato had identified the only effective limit to human authority. The list of those who have accepted no limit to human authority is long and bloody: Castro, Saddam, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, Caligula… That's why Benedict's Auschwitz address is so important. This new century will, inevitably, produce monsters, but our willingness to uphold moral law will help us when confronting them.
