The subject was "Ten years after the declaration by the French Bishops in Drancy: how should we dialogue for the future?" Key opinion leaders spoke, and also paid homage to Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger.
Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, archbishop of Paris, called for the dialogue to continue and deepen. Here are some excerpts of his speech:
"We must continue to make three different journeys, because these are guidelines for learning from and developing lessons from the past, and from conversions experienced. The first journey is on the surface, and it is to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Why is it that gradually more and more young people – at least from Catholic high schools and chaplaincies – are taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau? Because it is impossible to explain the unthinkable in terms of concepts. It is only possible to allow people to discover for themselves from living the experience. The Shoah can't be explained, but it can be experienced by visiting sites. The experience then needs backing up with documentation. It is obviously vitally important to be familiar with the Shoah if we are to develop relationships with Jews because it is self-evident that current Jewish identity is conditioned by the events of the Shoah.
The second journey that will give future generations a better understanding of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity is to visit the Holy Land, because the notion of a thoroughly Jewish Christ is another one that is impossible to grasp as a mere concept. We can only show this by the historical and archaeological evidence of his life, and by experiencing the country he lived in.
The third journey is down into the inner depths, in order to give a minimum of knowledge for putting into words the two previous journeys. For the journeys to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Jerusalem to make sense, we need words to express and understand, to interpret and talk about what we have experienced. These words are the ones that our traditions give us through scriptures, commentaries on scriptures and, to an even greater extent, through the prayer-based experience of our faith communities.
I would like to state that after Drancy – after two experiences of Drancy, in the 40s and 1997 (the French Bishops' declaration of repentance, editor's note) – I believe that history has taken a new turn and that we are being irresistibly led to these three journeys I speak of, and there is no going back. But the best thing would be to encourage the younger generations to make these journeys, because they will lead them on the definitive journey to the green pastures of the twenty third Psalm." »
Richard Prasquier suggested "making these three journeys together". The President of CRIF emphasised that: "For many years, particularly over the last fifty years, we have talked. But we haven't travelled. But these are journeys that we must take together. The journey to Auschwitz is a journey to say that human beings have existed who were able to do "that" to other human beings. And this is something we must think through together, because we are all on the same path, a path that consists in finding possible ways of living together. There are not so many possibilities, and if we don't do this together, who will? We live in a world in which all the values we have built on are being called into question. More seriously, although we know something about the past and its dangers, younger people no longer know, or are likely to no longer know these things. So we need to get young people to participate in these journeys we must take together. I think that Jewish-Christian dialogue has entered into a phase in which it must be directed towards the rest of the world and to a restatement of the bases of our common moral stance. We must turn to youth, and to a deepening of the things that bring us together."
Father Patrick Desbois, Director of the National Department for Relationships with Judaism, emphasised that both communities wanted "not just to smooth over their relationship, but to go into the places where it hurts, to the roots of the misunderstandings, to understand what hurts the other, and to emerge vivified."
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