Death-Camp Convent Issue Postpones Interfaith Talks

An international dialogue between Jews and Vatican officials has been postponed because of a continuing controversy over a Carmelite convent on the site of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.

Ten nuns had been living at the convent since 1984, but the site became the focus of an international controversy in January, 1986, when a letter from a group raising funds for the convent promoted it as “a spiritual fortress and a guarantee of the conversion of strayed brothers from our countries, as well as proof of our desire to erase outrages so often done to the Vicar of Christ.”

Jewish leaders protested the location of a convent on the site of the concentration camp, which they wanted preserved as a memorial to the Nazi persecution of Jews. In February, 1987, Vatican officials and four European cardinals signed an agreement in Geneva stipulating that “there will be no permanent Catholic place of prayer on the site of the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps.” The Catholic officials agreed that the convent would be relocated about a mile away from Auschwitz by Feb. 22, 1989.

But last November, Vatican officials indicated that the nuns were resisting the move. Representatives of the World Jewish Congress said they would not take part in a Catholic-Jewish dialogue scheduled to be held in Zurich Feb. 20-24 unless the convent was moved.