Pontiff Reminds Catholics of Nazi Camp Deaths : Pope Thanks Waldheim as Austrian Visit Ends

Pope John Paul II, winding up a five-day visit to Austria, Monday denounced industrial society for breeding anxiety and sapping morals and exchanged warm greetings with President Kurt Waldheim in a final encounter with the controversial head of state.

The Pope thanked Waldheim for Austria’s “warm and generous hospitality” after a speech in which he asked Austrians to remember Roman Catholics who died for their faith at the Nazi-era Mauthausen concentration camp, which he had visited Friday.

John Paul had drawn fire from Jewish activists both for his failure to take public note of the deaths of thousands of Jews at Mauthausen, during his visit there, and for his meetings with Waldheim, who is alleged to have been implicated in war crimes while serving as a German army officer in World War II.

Bidding farewell to John Paul on Monday at Innsbruck’s mountain-ringed airport, Waldheim thanked him for “the encouragement to say a clear and loud ‘yes’ to life, which is so often questioned these days.”

Waldheim denies the allegations against him and appears to have overcome demands for his resignation. His meetings with the Pope were strictly a formality.

Waldheim was not present for the Pope’s visit to the concentration camp but told him Monday that its “somber walls . . . remind us of the martyrs of our own time.”

“These relics of a shameful period of our century, however, are not only a memorial,” Waldheim went on, “but rather a lasting warning for us to oppose any hatred and any intolerance and to make the commandment of charity the guideline of all our actions also in political life.”

Faith Endangered

The Pope, addressing a large crowd at a ski jump above this Alpine city, said that Austrians’ faith “is seriously endangered, as it is in many other countries of Europe.”

As “alarming signs” of eroding standards, he cited “a growing lack of communication between the generations, divorces, suicides--even among young people--ruthless fighting among parties and politicians, bitter confrontations among Christians themselves, cynical criticism of the church, even in the church’s publications.”

The Pope also offered as examples for Austrians Sister Edith Stein, a Jewish-born German nun who was killed at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; Father Rupert Mayer, a German Jesuit interned for opposing the Nazis, and Marcel Callo, a devout young Frenchman who died at Mauthausen.