August 17, 2017
This is what’s on my mind:
Walking near the Jewish Ghetto in Rome yesterday morning on another bureaucratic errand, I was confronted by the small brass cobblestones in the streets:
In 2014, Teresa Potenza wrote an article in Wanted in Rome about these stones:
“ … These cobblestone-sized memorials are referred to as stolpersteine in German, or literally translated ‘stumbling stones’ and are installed outside the last chosen place of residence of victims of the Holocaust.
“There are over a dozen in the Jewish ghetto and they are now part of the fabric of the neighborhood, just as the victims once were, who themselves played soccer or strolled with their relatives over the same spot. Each plaque is detailed with the victim’s first and last name, date of birth, date and place of deportation, and date of death in a Nazi extermination camp. There are currently almost 200 stumbling stones installed in nine districts of Rome including Trastevere, Prati, Campo de’ Fiori, Flaminio, S. Pietro, Tiburtina, Prenestino, Appio Latino and Aurelio. A new tranche of stones is laid in Rome every January. … ”
Looking at these cobblestones while remembering the videos of the demonstration in Charlottesville made me sick.
These images of Neo-nazis, white supremacists and members of the Ku Klux Klan carrying torches and flags with swastikas or other racist symbols ― while chanting vile slogans supporting the dominance of the white race and the exclusion of Jews, Muslims, people of color, the LGBTQ community and anyone who isn’t white and “Christian” ― are abhorrent to the values we have been taught by our democracy and by the moral tenets of our religious faiths.
How can these “protesters” in Charlottesville, many of them young white men, exhibit such hatred and bigotry and not realize where their words and actions will possibly take them?
History cannot, and must not, repeat itself. Our prayer should be for the conversion of their hearts and that our civil and religious leaders will show us the way to confront our original sins and move forward with grace and peace.
Paulist Fr. Greg Apparcel is pastor of St. Patrick’s Catholic American Parish in Rome, Italy.
Related: The Paulist Fathers Statement on the Events in Charlottesville, VA