Pope Will Visit Austria, Meet Waldheim Again

Pope John Paul II will meet again with Austrian President Kurt Waldheim in the course of a five-day visit to Austria in June, Vatican radio said Tuesday.

The radio said John Paul will also receive Austrian Jewish leaders, who were outraged by his 35-minute audience with Waldheim here last June.

Waldheim’s state visit to the Vatican broke the Austrian leader’s international isolation after accusations that he was involved in the deportation and execution of Jews and others while serving as an officer in the German army in Greece and Yugoslavia in World War II.

Waldheim, whom the U.S. Justice Department has classified as undesirable and barred from visiting the United States because of his having “assisted or otherwise participated” in war crimes, has denied the accusations.

Impending Visit Regretted

American Jewish leaders said they regret the impending visit and suggested that the Pope use the Austrian trip as a forum to fight anti-Semitism.

“This is an opportunity for him to make it very clear in Austria itself, which elected as its president a man who has been accused of Nazi involvement, that he abhors Nazism,” said Rabbi Mordecai Waxman, who headed a Jewish delegation that met with the Pope after the pontiff’s first meeting with Waldheim last summer.

“The forum he chooses to do it in is up to him, but speaking to the Jewish community and to the Austrian community as a whole gives him an opportunity to make clear where he stands, and I trust that he will not miss the opportunity,” said Waxman, of Great Neck, N.Y.

That the Pope would travel to Austria on a reciprocal trip sometime this year has been known since the Waldheim visit, but Tuesday’s broadcast on the official Vatican radio station disclosed the dates and itinerary for the first time.

Six Cities on Schedule

The visit is to take place June 23-27, the broadcast said, and John Paul will conduct services in Vienna, Salzburg, Eisenstadt, Lorch, Gurk and Innsbruck.

In Vienna, it said, John Paul will meet on June 23 with “the president, the government and the diplomatic corps at the Imperial Palace.”

It said he will receive Austrian Jewish leaders the following day at the home of the Vatican’s ambassador to Austria. Meetings with heads of state and local religious leaders are standard elements in a papal trip.

Last year, the Vatican responded to the firestorm of Jewish protest over Waldheim’s Vatican reception by emphasizing that the visit was an official one involving the Holy See’s relations with Austria and did not constitute a personal gesture toward the Austrian leader.

In his public remarks following their private meeting, John Paul praised Waldheim, a former secretary general of the United Nations, for his efforts in promoting world peace. He made no mention of the controversy over Waldheim’s war record.

‘Pain and Distress’

In September, the Pope met with American Jewish leaders in Miami. They expressed “pain and distress” at the Vatican meeting with Waldheim. Rabbi Waxman, the honorary president of the Synagogue Council of America, told the pontiff that the Holocaust was “the culmination of centuries of anti-Semitism in Europe” and that Christian teachings “bear a heavy responsibility” for it. The Pope called for a renewed effort against anti-Semitism.

In New York on Tuesday, Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, the organization that undertook the international inquiry into Waldheim’s World War II activities, said he would have no comment on the scheduled June meeting until it is confirmed that the Pope and Waldheim will meet.

Seymour Reich, president of B’nai B’rith International, said, “I can only see one useful result of such a visit--if the Pope were to take confession from Mr. Waldheim, and if that act gave Austria’s president the moral courage to do what he should have done years ago: publicly admit his Nazi past and withdraw from public life.”

‘Extirpate This Evil’

Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler, who also met with the Pope last year and is president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, which is made up of 805 Reform congregations with a membership of 1.3 million, said he felt the pontiff should convene a meeting of Roman Catholic clergy in Austria in order to preach against Nazism and “to extirpate this evil from a country that was the seedbed of modern anti-Semitism.”

Austria was the birthplace of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

In Los Angeles, Rabbi Harvey Fields said that “many of us in the Jewish community and many non-Jews as well have been concerned about giving Waldheim some kind of moral recognition in a situation where he has been identified rather clearly with a Nazi past.

“I must say that I for one regret the fact that the Pope is now going to once again meet with him and somehow confer on him that kind of legitimacy,” said Fields, senior rabbi at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple and chair of the inter-religious committee of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said: “I think it’s unfortunate that within the course of one year the Pope was the only one to see Waldheim, not once but twice. And within that kind of a framework, it’s difficult to make the point to the Jewish community that the church is sensitive to Jewish concerns.”

U.S. Not Involved

In Washington, Thomas Switzer, press adviser to the State Department’s Bureau of European Affairs, declined to comment. He said the United States is not involved in a papal visit to a third country.

Ronald S. Lauder, former U.S. ambassador to Austria, pointedly absented himself from Waldheim’s inaugural ceremonies and was instructed to avoid attendance at any occasion when Waldheim was the official host.

Switzer was unable to say whether Henry A. Grunwald, former Time magazine editor who has been nominated to succeed Lauder, would be under similar orders if he is confirmed and at the Vienna embassy in June.

John Paul’s visit to Austria, his second as pontiff, is one of four foreign trips scheduled this year. In mid-May, on his first trip outside Italy since visiting the United States, the Pope will go to South America. Trips to southern Africa and France are also on the schedule, but the dates have not been announced.

Montalbano reported from Vatican City and Chazanov from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Don Shannon, in Washington, also contributed to this article.