25th November 2011
For immediate release:
The murders of six million European Jews in the Holocaust must serve as a warning to the people of today to remain vigilant against contemporary threats to human life and against any ideology that undermines the Judaeo-Christian values upon which western civilisation is built, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Shrewsbury has said.
In a Holocaust Memorial Day address on Thursday 24th November to an audience in gathered in Menorah Synagogue in Sharston, Manchester, Bishop Mark Davies said that the Nazis had deliberately marked out for “systematic and total destruction” the very people who were first chosen by God to receive his Word.
He said that “contemporary historians point to the logical intention of the National Socialist State rooted in this idolatry of man, of race, of the state to destroy not only the Jewish race but Christian morality and the faith of the Church”.
The Bishop told his audience that both Jews and Christians must be struck by how the Nazis explicitly trampled up each of the Ten Commandments in a “systematic eradication of morality”.
The struggle against evil continues, he said, adding that society had seen a return of the spectre of “eugenic thinking” directed “against the unborn and the most vulnerable deemed ‘unfit to live’ or threatened with ‘mercy killing’”.
Bishop Davies said: “An ideology which grew at the centre of European civilisation sought to remove from the face of the earth in this Holocaust the people called by the Lord before all others.
“This must surely lead us to recognise every continuing assault upon the value and dignity of every human life and person and to recognise in this the denial of the Creator.
“This must call us to vigilance in the face of the developing ideologies and mindsets of our time so often hostile to the Judaeo-Christian foundations on which our civilisation was built.”