Today, April 8, is Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel. For two minutes, the nation of Israel came to a standstill and remembered with silence the six million Jews who were murdered by Nazi genocide. For Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah, virtually everything in Israel stops. Pedestrians stop walking. Drivers stop driving and get out to stand next to their cars. Business is halted. At 10am, two minutes of silence is observed where all that is heard are the sirens across the country that mark the moment. It is a poignant reminder of the horror of the Holocaust and the promise the world made that such a thing would happen “Never Again.”

Yet, it has happened, over and over again. China. Cambodia. Rwanda. Bangladesh. Bosnia-Herzegovina. Guatemala. Nigeria. Kurdistan. Sudan. Whatever lessons the world hoped to have learned from the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews were quickly forgotten. Of course, the greatest genocide of history has been the legal killing of millions over the coarse of decades by the abortion industry, including the specific targeting of marginalized groups, such as African Americans here in the United States, of whom 19 million have been aborted since 1973, and those diagnosed in utero with Down Syndrome. In the U. S., more than 60% of Down fetuses are aborted. In the Scandinavian countries, it is near 100%.

Perhaps none of this should be surprising given the trend toward moral relativism over recent decades. Bill Donahue, president and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, writes of the teaching of moral relativism in our schools, leading to the abandonment of the idea that there is objective moral truth. In such an environment, even the objective moral evil of the Holocaust is questioned. I recall a professor who taught a class on ethics I attended explaining how it was certainly her opinion that the Holocaust was a moral evil. It was her opinion? I wondered at the time, have we reached a point where there are differing opinions on that question? Apparently we have, for Donahue gives examples of students telling their college instructors that, though they regard what the Nazis did as evil, even still, “who is to say they are morally wrong?”

Who, indeed? God help us, for if we cannot come to agree universally that the willful destruction of millions of innocent lives is a moral wrong, then whatever moral foundation we presume to have is only sand. And we know what Jesus said about those who build their homes on sand (Mt 7:24-27).

Be Christ for all. Bring Christ to all. See Christ in all.