Remembering and learning

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This week the 27th January marks Holocaust Memorial Day, a special one as it is 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz on this day in 1945. It is probably the last major anniversary in which survivors will be able to be involved. There are various events marking this anniversary.
I visited Auschwitz with the September Pilgrims ten years ago in 2010. We were based in nearby Krakow, and decided that we would offer the visit to those who were with us. I think everybody came. We visited the original Auschwitz camp and then the much larger Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. The weather was grey and overcast and rained off and on, somehow suitable for the day.
At the end of the first part of the visit our guide quietly motioned us without words towards a smallish nondescript building looking a bit like a school from the 30s or 40s. But this was the surviving gas-chamber. I went in and found myself in this soul-destroying gloomy room. I observed the candles and the hole in the roof for the gas cylinder. But a few moments was enough – I had to get out of that hell. But in order to get out you had to pass by some of the (in)famous furnaces for the disposal of the bodies. Without any doubt I believe this was the worst place I have ever been. It haunted me for quite a time, and, looking back, its effect went deep.
Some people do not want to go to places like Auschwitz, and some who have been say it was terrible but that they are glad they went. I belong to the second group. For sometimes I wonder if we need to have our faces rubbed in it, as it were. Like most people, I find that the vast majority of the human race are good and kind. But I think that it’s good to be reminded how bad we can be – if we can take it5
If we are to be the Church as the 21st century unfolds, if we are to offer the Good News to what seems to be a world that couldn’t care less, one way of getting some fire in our bellies is by experiencing or coming close to the Bad News that our human race can inflict, and that so many in our world have had to endure, and still are.
“So where was your God at Auschwitz?” some ask, faced with this utter emptiness, a vacuum of humanity. And the nearest to an answer maybe is that our crucified humiliated God, Jesus, the Lamb, was there with them.

Fr Matthew

Third Cousin Fr Adam Kearns

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I learnt this week of the death before Christmas of the only other priest I know of presently in my very extended family. Fr Adam Kearns was a priest of Trenton diocese in New Jersey, to where one member of my mother’s Kearns family had emigrated at the time of the Famine in the middle of the nineteenth century. Fr Adam was born 17 September 1928 and so was 91 when he died. After school in his home parish he went on to gain a bachelor of science followed by philosophy and theology studies at the local seminary. He was ordained in 1954, was assistant priest in no fewer than eight parishes, and eventually became parish priest at Edison NJ until he retired in 1999. He died peacefully on Wednesday 13 November, and was buried with many of his forebears in St Joseph’s Cemetery, Keyport, NJ. His obituary says he was “beloved by the many people he served as both priest and friend and by his brother priests of the Diocese of Trenton. May this kind and loving priest rest in the peace of the Lord whom he served with joy and fidelity!”

Some years ago I spoke to Fr Adam on the phone at his retirement home, which led to him sending me details of his branch of the Kearns family, of which my mother was part. Another Kearns priest that some may have heard of was Fr Tom Kearns, my mother’s cousin, who was a Rosminian, and became Provincial at one time. Fr Adam was a little farther away on the family tree, being my mother’s third cousin…

If you are at all interested in your family tree, one of the first things to do is talk to people, especially the elderly, before they leave us, taking with them their knowledge, both of facts and of the often far more interesting gossip or family legends.

Oh, and by the way on my father’s side I have one Welsh Baptist minister, David Jones my great-grandfather, and a little further back, two Calvinist Methodist ministers, Rev John Jones Llanedi and Rev David Jones Pontyberem. I thought I had better mention them – as it is Unity Week, after all!

Fr Matthew

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