Your suffering is ours: Pope honors Slovak Holocaust victims

By NICOLE WINFIELD and KAREL JANICEK
Associated Press

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia (AP) — Pope Francis has honored Slovakian Jews killed in the Holocaust as he seeks to promote reconciliation with the Jewish community. Francis was welcomed by Jewish leaders at Slovakia’s Holocaust memorial in a historic encounter. He is atoning for Christian complicity in wartime crimes in a country where a Catholic priest was president of a Nazi puppet state that deported tens of thousands of its Jews. Francis said Monday that “your history is our history, your sufferings are our sufferings.” St. John Paul II made three trips to Slovakia but never met here with the country’s Jews. That is evidence of the strained local Catholic-Jewish relations that endured in the post-war decades even with a Polish pope known for his outreach to Jews.