c. 2006 Religion News Service

OSWIECIM, Poland ÆÂ? Pope Benedict XVI made an emotion-filled visit to the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau on Sunday (May 28), closing out his four-day tour of Poland with a gesture aimed at healing wartime wounds ÆÂ? those of Poland and his own.

Hours after celebrating an outdoor Mass before more than 900,000 faithful, the German-born pontiff walked among the red brick cellblocks of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the Nazis murdered more than a million European Jews and nearly 150,000 Poles.

The visit was a particularly poignant moment for Benedict. Unlike John Paul II, who first visited the camp in 1979 as a hero of Poland’s anti-Nazi resistance, Benedict came to Auschwitz bearing heavier historical burdens.

“I could not fail to come here. I had to come,” the pontiff said. He had visited the site twice before becoming pope.

As a teenager, Benedict enrolled in the Hitler Youth movement when membership was compulsory. He was also drafted into the German military in the final years of World War II, but never saw combat.

“Pope John Paul II came here as a son of the Polish people. I come here today as a son of the German people,” the pope said, describing himself as “a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness.” He also said Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime “used and abused” the German public, and coerced them “through terror and intimidation.”

Benedict did not, however, issue any kind of apology for Germany’s role in the Holocaust or his own service in the Hitler Youth and the military. (BEGIN FIRST OPTIONAL TRIM)

The comments come amid signs that anti-Semitism is resurfacing in parts of predominantly Roman Catholic Poland.

Controversy has been swirling around Catholic broadcaster Radio Maryja, one of the country’s most popular radio stations, ever since it aired commentary accusing Jews of trying to make an “industry” out of the Holocaust. Concerns were compounded Saturday, when Poland’s Chief Rabbi, Michael Schudrich, was assaulted in Warsaw.

Schudrich joined Benedict at Birkenau on Sunday along with other religious leaders and sang the Kadish, a Jewish song for the deceased. “Restrain your tongue from evil and your lips from trecherous words,” he sang.

Seated steps from one of Birkenau’s blackened crematories, Benedict referred to Israel as the “taproot of the Christian faith” that the Nazis tried to substitute with a “faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful.” (END FIRST OPTIONAL TRIM)

Benedict, a theologian pope known for his icy rationalism rather than his sentimental touch, acknowledged that the “horror“ of Auschwitz represented a test of faith.

“Constantly the question comes up: Where was God in those days? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?” He called on his audience to seek a “God of reason” based in love, not in “a kind of cold mathematics.”

The pope entered Auschwitz on foot, passing beneath a gateway bearing the inscription “Abeit Macht Frei,” German for “Work Sets You Free” and an aberration of the Gospel motto “The truth will set you free.”

His first stop was at the camp’s “Death Wall,” where inmates were routinely tortured and put to death. Removing his white skullcap, he clasped it between his hands, mouthed a silent prayer, and lit a votive candle. Dozens of former inmates lined one of the courtyard walls, and Benedict greeted them individually, kissing one of them on the cheek.

He then entered an adjacent prison block and descended to the cell of St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest canonized by John Paul for sacrificing his life to save a prisoner condemned to death. There he lit a second candle. (BEGIN SECOND OPTIONAL TRIM)

Auschwitz’s haunting atmosphere provided stark contrast to the festive atmosphere of the outdoor Mass Benedict celebrated Sunday morning.

Nearly 1 million faithful poured into Krakow’s Blonia Park bearing flags that colored its grassy surface in yellows and whites ÆÂ? the official colors of the Holy See.

“Krakow, the city of Karol Wojtyla and of John Paul II, is also my Krakow!” the pontiff told the throng, speaking in Italian but earning strong applause. “I wish I could meet each of you personally.”

Throughout his visit to Poland, Benedict had confined himself to addressing the public in Italian and Polish ÆÂ? not his native German ÆÂ? out of respect for Poles with raw memories of the Nazi occupation. His first words in German came in the form of a brief prayer at the Birkenau camp, where the Nazis built gas chambers as part of their Final Solution to eradicate the Jewish people from the face of Europe.

“May all who live together in peace continue to live in peace, and all who live in conflict reconcile,” he prayed. (END SECOND OPTIONAL TRIM)

Passing before tablets bearing inscriptions by camp inmates, Benedict said he felt a “deep urge“ to pause at an inscription in German, which he said stirred memories of Holocaust victim Edith Stein.

Stein, a German Jew who converted to Catholicism and entered a convent as Nazi persecution spread through Europe, was canonized under John Paul II as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Her martyrdom has been questioned by some Jewish groups who contend she was sent to Auschwitz for her Jewish ethnicity ÆÂ? not her Catholic faith, as martyrdom requires.

Benedict said Stein was condemned “as a Christian and a Jew” to go to Auschwitz where she “accepted death with her people and for them.”

The pope also commemorated the losses of Russia’s Soviet Army, whose campaign against the Nazis, he said, suffered from a “tragic twofold aim” of liberating Eastern Europe “from one dictatorship” and confining it to another ÆÂ? “that of Stalin and the communist system.” KE/RB END MEICHTRY

AP-NY-05-28-06 1632EDT