“Your story is our story,” Pope Francis says to Slovak Jews

As much his rapid passage in Budapest was parasitized by his antagonism with the national populist Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, as much Pope Francis was obviously at his ease in Slovakia, Monday, September 13, the first day of a visit which must in count three. This country “Is a poem”, he even exclaimed in front of the representatives of the clergy gathered in the cathedral of Saint-Martin, in Bratislava. As for the pontiff, he seemed to have found, after his colon operation in July, a previously dull energy, reviving the improvisations and sometimes comical remarks during certain speeches.

Between the head of the Catholic Church and the Slovak President, Zuzana Caputova, whom he received at the Vatican in December 2020, the current is obviously going very well. The Liberal leader called him “One of the greatest moral and spiritual authorities of present-day humanity”. “You invite a new culture of politics and a new ethics of the economy, she told him. You are speaking out against all those who want to exploit religion for political ends. You stress that the essence of the Gospel is to help the needy, the homeless, those who are driven from their countries by wars, terrorism and poverty. “

“Untold acts of inhumanity”

One of the highlights of the Bratislava stage was a meeting – the first of a pope – with representatives of the country’s small Jewish community. They are now only a few thousand. During the Second World War, some 70,000 of those who lived in the country in 1939 were exterminated in the Nazi camps, with the collaboration of the government, chaired by a priest, Jozef Tiso, at the head of this satellite state of the III^e Reich.

François went to Rybne Square, where a Holocaust memorial was erected on the site of the Neolog synagogue, destroyed in 1969 by the communist regime. Richard Duda, president of the Central Union of Jewish Religious Communities, called the meeting a“Historical” and hoped that the official dialogue initiated since 2017 between Slovak Jews and Christians, following a joint visit to the Vatican, “Allow to update an end point” of “Dark sides of coexistence” between communities, which resulted in the extermination of an entire community 80 years ago.

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