Eighty-one years ago, Allied forces liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp. In that camp alone, more than one million people were murdered, the majority of them Jews.
In 2005, the United Nations chose January 27 — the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau — as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a time to remember the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the millions of other victims of Nazi persecution.
2026 is the 25th anniversary of the creation of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Pope Leo XIV commemorated the day with a Tweet on his Pontifex account:
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, I would like to recall that the Church remains faithful to the unwavering position of the Declaration #NostraAetate against every form of antisemitism. The Church rejects any discrimination or harassment based on ethnicity, language, nationality, or religion.
He refers to Nostra Aetate, a landmark 1965 declaration from the Second Vatican Council that addressed the Catholic Church’s relationship with non-Christian religions. The document promotes interreligious dialogue, rejects anti-Semitism, and affirms that the Church respects truth and holiness in other faiths.
In the evening of the Remembrance Day, the Holy Father reiterated this call.
As he left Castel Gandoflo after his usual day away from the Vatican, he was asked by reporters about the situation in the Middle East.
“I will only say that we must pray hard for peace,” he said.
The reporters mentioned the arrival of USS Abraham Lincoln and three accompanying warships to the Middle East, as tensions between the US and Iran are high, amidst the protests in Iran.
“We little ones can raise our voices and always seek dialogue and not violence to resolve these problems,” he said, “especially on this day that commemorates the Shoah.”
“We fight against all forms of anti-Semitism,” he said.
Spiritual ties
The Pope’s words reinforce the message of the Vatican II document, which reads in part:
As the sacred synod searches into the mystery of the Church, it remembers the bond that spiritually ties the people of the New Covenant to Abraham’s stock.
Thus the Church of Christ acknowledges that, according to God’s saving design, the beginnings of her faith and her election are found already among the Patriarchs, Moses and the prophets…
The Church keeps ever in mind the words of the Apostle about his kinsmen: “theirs is the sonship and the glory and the covenants and the law and the worship and the promises; theirs are the fathers and from them is the Christ according to the flesh” (Rom. 9:4-5), the Son of the Virgin Mary. She also recalls that the Apostles, the Church’s main-stay and pillars, as well as most of the early disciples who proclaimed Christ’s Gospel to the world, sprang from the Jewish people…
Since the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is thus so great, this sacred synod wants to foster and recommend that mutual understanding and respect which is the fruit, above all, of biblical and theological studies as well as of fraternal dialogues…
Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone…
We cannot truly call on God, the Father of all, if we refuse to treat in a brotherly way any man, created as he is in the image of God. Man’s relation to God the Father and his relation to men his brothers are so linked together that Scripture says: “He who does not love does not know God” (1 John 4:8).