Catholic honcho commemorates Jewish deportations of 1943

Pope Francis is trying to make Catholics and all Christians come to the realization that the Christian faith is a part and parcel of the Jewish faith.

Francis Rocca writing at CatholicNewsService:
.... At a meeting with members of Rome's Jewish community,  Pope Francis denounced anti-Semitism and recalled the 1943 deportation of more than 1,000 of the city's Jews to the most notorious Nazi death camp -- an incident that has proven a major source of tension between the papacy and Jewish leaders.

"It's a contradiction for a Christian to be anti-Semitic, his roots are in part Jewish," the pope said Oct 11. "May anti-Semitism be banished from the heart and the life of every man and woman."

Pope Francis gave a delegation led by Rabbi Riccardo Segni, the chief rabbi of Rome, a message commemorating the 70th anniversary of the deportation of Rome's Jews Oct. 16, 1943. Of the more than 1,000 people sent to Auschwitz by the German occupiers that day, just 16 eventually returned.

"While we return in memory to those tragic hours of October 1943, it is our duty to keep before our eyes the destiny of those deportees," the pope wrote. "To imagine their fear, their pain, their desperation, so as not to forget them, to keep them alive in our memory and in our prayer, along with their families, their relatives and friends who mourned their loss and who remain disheartened by the depths of barbarity to which humankind can sink.".........