“Adam, where are you?” (cf. Gen 3:9). Where are you, o man? What have you come to? In this place, this memorial of the Shoah, we hear God’s question echo once more: “Adam, where are you?” This question is charged with all the sorrow of a Father who has lost his child. The Father knew the risk of freedom; he knew that his children could be lost… yet perhaps not even the Father could imagine so great a fall, so profound an abyss! Here, before the boundless tragedy of the Holocaust, That cry – “Where are you?” – echoes like a faint voice in an unfathomable abyss…
Adam, who are you? I no longer recognize you. Who are you, o man? What have you become? Of what horror have you been capable? What made you fall to such depths?
Certainly it is not the dust of the earth from which you were made. The dust of the earth is something good, the work of my hands. Certainly it is not the breath of life which I breathed into you. That breath comes from me, and it is something good (cf. Gen 2:7).
No, this abyss is not merely the work of your own hands, your own heart… Who corrupted you? Who disfigured you? Who led you to presume that you are the master of good and evil? Who convinced you that you were god? Not only did you torture and kill your brothers and sisters, but you sacrificed them to yourself, because you made yourself a god.
--Pope Francis,
Address at the Yad Vashem
Holocaust Memorial Museum,
May 26, 2014
Address at the Yad Vashem
Holocaust Memorial Museum,
May 26, 2014
Image source 1: Giovanni di Paolo, The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise (1445), http://www.worldsbestpaintings.net/artistsandpaintings/painting/29/
Image source 2 & quotation source: https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-pope-franciss-speech-at-yad-vashem/
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