On May 11th, Pope Benedict XVI visited Jerusalem's Yad Vashem (Holocaust Memorial) sending a strong message for the entire Church.

Choosing the Yad Vashem as one of his first stops in Israel the Pope made a very courageous move.

Pope Benedict XVI said at the memorial, "Gazing upon the faces reflected in the pool that lies in stillness within this memorial, one cannot help but recall how each of them bears a name. I can only imagine the joyful expectation of their parents as they anxiously awaited the birth of their children. What name shall we give this child? What is to become of him or her? Who could have imagined that they would be condemned to such a deplorable fate!"

The Pope's words were not merely his personal reflections, but he spoke them as the head of the Church.

Everybody knows how the Catholic Church rejects all that is violence, all of us have the mission that the Holy Father presented in his discourse: to work so that these tragedies do not happen again in the history of humanity.

The Pope is German, the nation to which belonged the Nazis who organized the Holocaust and his national origin gives even greater weight to his message and his pilgrimage to the holy places.

His words were particularly eloquent when he said, "we do not want these things to be repeated, and faced with the horror of what happened, we have to learn to do everything we can so that this world can be a better world.”

In this context the first leg of the Pope's pilgrimage in Jordan was a good example of this message. Jordan is a country where Christians, Muslims and the other religions coexist in peace. In Jordan, though the Christians are a tiny minority, they have an important role from the perspective of works of charity and also from the perspective of education and culture.