Vatican City

We began our Jasna Gora Cycle on the feast of Saints Cyril and Methodius [February 14]. We come to you every week, O Mother, in the wide wake that leads through the history of peoples and nations, especially our neighboring countries and kindred nations.

Behold, our time in the midst of Europe is beginning anew. In this new historic beginning we also have our part and our place. There is a great bond with the distant past, and with many recent events in the history of this century. In this century.... In this dramatic twentieth century, which brings to a close the second millennium after Christ.

There is yet another nation, a particular people: the people of the patriarchs, of Moses and the Prophets, the heirs of the faith of Abraham.

"The Church keeps ever before her mind the words of the Apostle Paul about his kinsmen: 'to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the Law, the worship and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race according to the flesh, is the Christ' [Rom. 9:4-5]" [Vatican II, Declaration Nostra Aetate, 4], Christ and the Apostles. And you yourself, O Virgin Mother, Daughter of Sion.

This people lived arm in arm with us for generations on that same land which became a kind of new homeland during the Diaspora.

This people was afflicted by the terrible deaths of millions of its sons and daughters. First they were marked with special signs, then they were shoved into ghettos, into isolated quarters. Then they were carried off to the gas chambers, put to death—simply because they were the sons and daughters of this people.

The assassins did all this on our land, perhaps to cloak it in infamy. However, one cannot cloak a land in infamy by the death of innocent victims. By such deaths the land becomes a sacred relic.

The people who lived with us for many generations has remained with us after the terrible death of millions of its sons and daughters. Together we await the Day of Judgment and Resurrection.