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In February 2025 I sat down with Bishop Reed on CatholicTV for a conversation about genocide awareness and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. We talked about history. We talked about education. We talked about the Catholics who were murdered there alongside more than one million Jewish men, women, and children.

But underneath all of it was something simpler and more fundamental than any of those things.

This work, all of it, the virtual tours, the school districts, the partnerships, the Foundation, the doctoral research, the trips to Poland, is ultimately about one conviction that I cannot shake no matter how many years pass or how many classrooms I stand in.

We have been given a gift. The gift of life. Of consciousness. Of the ability to see another person and recognize in them the same force that animates us. Call it a soul. Call it a life force. Call it human dignity. Whatever name you give it, it is the same thing, and it is fragile and it is precious and we have no right to harm it.

Auschwitz is what happens when enough people decide that some human beings do not possess that gift. That some lives are not lives at all. That some souls do not count.

More than one million Jews were murdered there. Polish Catholics were murdered there. Augustinian priests were taken from their monastery in Kraków and murdered there. Roma were murdered there. The disabled were murdered there. The architecture of the crime was different for each group. The underlying denial of their humanity was the same.

What I carry out of every conversation about this history, including the one with Bishop Reed, is not despair. It is clarity.

We are not asked to do extraordinary things. We are asked to do the ordinary thing that the murderers of Auschwitz refused to do. To look at the person beside us and recognize them. To refuse indifference. To treat the life in front of us as the gift it is.

That is not a religious requirement. It is not a political position. It is the most basic human obligation there is.

And it is the easiest thing in the world to forget when we are busy, or frightened, or told that the person beside us is not really like us after all.

Auschwitz is the reminder we cannot afford to look away from.

Watch my full conversation with Bishop Reed on CatholicTV below. And if it moves you, share it with someone who needs to hear it.

Memory without action risks becoming ritual. Where Memory Becomes Mission.

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