POPE

spoke with passion about his Auschwitz visit to a crowd of young people gathered outside the archbishop’s residence where he was staying for the night.

“How much pain! How much cruelty! Is it possible that we humans created in God’s image are capable of doing these things?” the pontiff said of the atrocities 70 years ago.

Then he added: “I don’t want to make you bitter, but I have to say the truth. Cruelty did not end in Auschwitz, in Birkenau. Even today … people are being tortured. Many prisoners are tortured, just to make them talk.”

“Today in many parts of the world where there is war the same thing is happening.”

Francis is the first pope to visit Auschwitz who did not himself live through the brutality of World War II on Europe’s soil.

Unlike his predecessors, St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who were young men during the Nazi rule and occupation of much of Europe and had a personal or historical connection to the site, Francis was a toddler when World War II broke out far away from his Argentine homeland.

John Paul, who visited in 1979, witnessed the unspeakable suffering inflicted on his native Poland during the German occupation.

His visit, the first ever by a pontiff, was part of his overall efforts aimed at healing centuries of bitterness between the Vatican and Jews.

His successor, Pope Benedict XVI, who visited in 2006, was a German who served in the Hitler Youth for a time as a teenager.

At Auschwitz, Francis prayed silently for more than 15 minutes before speaking individually to the survivors, shaking their hands and kissing them on the cheeks. He then carried a large white candle to the Death Wall, where prisoners at Auschwitz were executed.

At the dark underground prison cell that once housed St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish friar who sacrificed his life to save a fellow prisoner who had a family, Francis prayed again. A few shafts from a tiny window were the only light cast on the pontiff.

He then traveled two miles (three kilometers) to Birkenau, where Christian Poles who saved Jews during the war and other guests stood in respect as the pope arrived, his vehicle driving alongside the rail tracks once used to transport victims to their deaths there.

At the Birkenau ceremony, Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, recited, in Hebrew Psalm 130, beginning with the words: “From the depths I have cried out to you, Oh Lord.”

Friday’s theme exploring suffering included a Way of the Cross procession that drew 800,000 young Catholics Krakow meadow.

Calling on the young pilgrims to show mercy to refugees and other persecuted people, the pontiff then asked: “Where is God when innocent persons die as a result of violence, terrorism and war.”

These are questions, to a he added, that “humanly speaking, have no answer.”