Pope John Paul II paid homage yesterday to the victims of the 1944 Ardeatine Caves massacre. In the presence of Roman. Catholic and Jewish dignitaries he knelt to pray and laid a wreath of flowers on the graves of the 335 citizens of Rome, many of them Jews, who were shot to death at the site on March 24, 1944 in a Nazi reprisal for a partisan ambush of 33 German soldiers on a Rome street.
The Pope told the gathering that he had come “to hear the words, loud and clear, of those who had disappeared, victims of homicidal barbarism.” They “demand,” he said, “that their suffering was not useless for human society” and that “the world live in justice, harmony, peace, in reciprocal respect for the unalienable rights of the human being created in the image and resemblance of God.”
The Pope added his signature to the book of visitors to the site. Looking on were the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Elio Toaff, the Mayor and the Vicar of Rome, Cardinal Poletti and the surviving families of the victims.
The last time the Ardeatine Caves were visited by a Pope was in September 1965 when Poul VI memorialized the victims.
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