August 17, 2025 - "The Late James Cardinal Hickey"

Before I was ordained to the priesthood I was on the editorial board for Ancient Christian Writers, a book series of English translations of early Christian writers.  The managing editor was Fr. Dennis Mc Manus, a priest of the Archdiocese of Mobile. Fr. McManus also worked as a liturgist for a number of years at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.  Camillo Barone, a staff reporter for the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) tells the story in a recent column in NCR about Fr. McManus and the late James Cardinal Hickey, former Archbishop of Washington. (Cardinal Hickey ordained me to the diaconate and priesthood in 1998.)

 

In 1997, Fr. McManus took a call from Cardinal Hickey who was badly shaken from a very recent experience when he visited Auschwitz, the former concentration camp in Poland.  Dennis was known even then as an expert on the Holocaust and Jewish-Catholic history.  Cardinal Hickey explained that he wanted to talk with someone who knew something about prayer and Jewish-Catholic relations in light of his experience at the crematorium at Auschwitz.

 

Cardinal Hickey had been part of a private tour of Auschwitz.  As he walked through the gas chamber where hundreds of thousands were killed, he paused before one of the ovens where ashes and bones were still visible.  Overwhelmed, he put his hand in the ashes and started to pray.

 

Suddenly he was surrounded by a group of men in stripped prison uniforms, speaking in German, Polish, and Yiddish—languages that Cardinal Hickey did not understand.  He turned to them to say that he was sorry, but he did not understand what they were saying.  Then the group of men vanished after a few seconds.

 

Cardinal Hickey flew to Rome to talk with Pope Saint John Paul II because he was badly shaken by the vision.  In a private audience with the Holy Father, Cardinal Hickey related what happened to him at Auschwitz.  Pope John Paul II listened and immediately nodded. “It has happened to other priests who visited Auschwitz,” he said. “They are saying: This must never happen again.” Pope Saint John Paul II also told the Cardinal that the voices he heard were imploring him to do something so that this wouldn’t happen ever again.  Cardinal Hickey then asked Pope John Paul II what he should do to answer their request.  Pope John Paul said in reply, “Ask God.”

 

Cardinal Hickey did that and then launched Bearing Witness—a joint program between the Catholic Church and the ADL (Anti-Defamation League)—to help Catholic educators examine the distressing history of Catholic-Jewish relations and to learn the Church’s teaching on this important relationship since Vatican II.  The program has continued to the present day.  From July 23-26, 2025, there was a seminar for Catholic School Educators in New York City entitled “We Remember: Exploring the Holocaust and Antisemitism for Catholic School Educators.”

 

The seminar took its name from the 1998 Vatican document We Remember:  A Reflection on the Shoah.  The Catholic educators who participated not only reflected on the Holocaust but also confronted the tragic history of Jewish-Christian relations and the work done toward healing as they commemorated the sixtieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate (a declaration from Vatican II that  emphasized the Catholic Church’s commitment to fostering positive relations with non-Christian religions, particularly Judaism and Islam, and condemned antisemitism). Catholic educators explored the profound responsibility of teaching the Holocaust within the context of faith, morality, and human rights through an agenda that included expert-led sessions, survivor testimonies, interactive workshops, the latest pedagogy, and opportunities for prayer and reflection.

 

Let me close this reflection by quoting the last paragraph of We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah:

 

Finally, we invite all men and women of good will to reflect deeply on the significance of the Shoah. The victims from their graves, and the survivors through the vivid testimony of what they have suffered, have become a loud voice calling the attention of all of humanity. To remember this terrible experience is to become fully conscious of the salutary waning it entails: the spoiled seeds of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism must never again be allowed to take root in any human heart.

 

Until next week,

Fr. John