Acta Benedicti Pp. XVI 167

am glad to have this opportunity to offer you hospitality here in my own

home. Such meetings as this enable us to demonstrate our respect for one

another. I want you to know that you are all most welcome here today in

the house of Peter, the home of the Pope.

I look back with gratitude to the various opportunities I have had over

many years to spend time in the company of my Jewish friends. My visits

to your communities in Washington and New York, though brief, were

experiences of fraternal esteem and sincere friendship. So too was my visit

to the Synagogue in Cologne, the first such visit in my Pontificate. It was

very moving for me to spend those moments with the Jewish community in

the city I know so well, the city which was home to the earliest Jewish

settlement in Germany, its roots reaching back to the time of the Roman

Empire.

A year later, in May 2006, I visited the extermination camp at Ausch-

witz-Birkenau. What words can adequately convey that profoundly mo-

ving experience? As I walked through the entrance to that place of horror,

the scene of such untold suffering, I meditated on the countless number of

prisoners, so many of them Jews, who had trodden that same path into

captivity at Auschwitz and in all the other prison camps. Those children of

Abraham, grief-stricken and degraded, had little to sustain them beyond

their faith in the God of their fathers, a faith that we Christians share with

you, our brothers and sisters. How can we begin to grasp the enormity of

what took place in those infamous prisons? The entire human race feels

deep shame at the savage brutality shown to your people at that time.

Allow me to recall what I said on that sombre occasion: "The rulers of

the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from

the register of the peoples of the earth. Thus the words of the Psalm, 'We

are being killed, accounted as sheep for the slaughter', were fulfilled in a

terrifying way".

Our meeting today occurs in the context of your visit to Italy in con-

junction with your annual Leadership Mission to Israel. I too am preparing

to visit Israel, a land which is holy for Christians as well as Jews, since the

roots of our faith are to be found there. Indeed, the Church draws its

sustenance from the root of that good olive tree, the people of Israel, onto

which have been grafted the wild olive branches of the Gentiles.1 From the

1 Cfr Rom 11:17-24.