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Rev.
John E. Brooks, S. J.
Dedication
Welcome — May 11, 1979
Your
Excellencies, Bishop Flanagan and Bishop Harrington, distinguished
members of the academic community, and friends: It is my extraordinary
privilege and pleasure this afternoon to welcome so many of
our friends and guests to the College of the Holy Cross. In
particular I extend a warm word of welcome and profound thanks
to:
Mr. Charles E. F. Millard, chairman, President and chief executive
officer of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of New York, and
chairman of the board of trustees of Holy Cross, Father Donald
R. Campion, S.J., a member of the National Jesuit Conference
in Washington, D.C., and a former member of the Holy Cross
board of trustees, our distinguished speaker, Elie Wiesel,
a man who, more than any other single writer of the postwar
years, has educated our generation to the absolute need not
only to remember, but continually to confront the anguish
and mystery of the Holocaust, and finally to my dear friends,
Frances and Jacob Hiatt, a couple who have for many years
generously served the Worcester Community, and who have effectively
taught us all by their example the common responsibility we
have as Jews and Christians to keep alive, before the half-despairing
world of our day, a sense of God's transcendence, His holiness,
and His utter trustworthiness when all else fails.
Today
marks a very special moment in the 136-year history of this
Jesuit College, for, in response to the Jesuit vocation which
earnestly bids us to labor unstintingly for the promotion
of justice, we take this occasion to join other Christians
and Jews in truly making our own the words inscribed on the
international memorial sculpture at Dachau - " Never Again."
And we do this by proclaiming to our entire constituency
- to our students, faculty, administrators, alumni, benefactors
and friends - that the Holocaust is a turning point for mankind,
an event so cataclysmic that it sears human history into two
sharply demarcated ages, and that it is something that happened
to Christians as well as to Jews. As the church historian
Franklin Littell has reminded us, the Holocaust " remains
a major event in recent church history - signalizing...(that)
Christianity itself has been 'put to the question.'"
In dedicating
the Joshua and Leah Hiatt Wings in memory of the victims of
the Holocaust, the college of the Holy Cross acknowledges
the centrality of the Holocaust in modern religious experience,
and strives to teach that the Holocaust was not an abstract
injustice that defiled, tortured and killed six million Jews.
The origins of injustice are in the minds and hearts of men
and women, and justice will come into the world only when
the unjust persons change their ways and are moved to love
of neighbor.
In
this spirit, I conclude my remarks by reading a telegram received
from Vatican City on the occasion of today's dedication. Addressed
to Father John E. Brooks, S.J., College of the Holy Cross, Worcester,
Massachusetts, the telegram reads:
"On
the occasion of the dedication of the Hiatt Wings in memory
of the victims of the Holocaust, I happily send congratulations
and good wishes. Studies related to the ordeals and sufferings
of Jewish people will help bring Christians and Jews more
closely together for the mutual service to and promotion of
human rights among all human beings." Signed: Jan Cardinal
Willebrands, President of the Vatican Commission on Religious
Relations with Judaism
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