Mahony Assails Polish Prelate on Attacking Jews

Roman Catholic Archbishop Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles on Wednesday criticized Polish Cardinal Jozef Glemp’s attack on Jews over the touchy issue of a convent of nuns bordering the Auschwitz death camp and urged Polish church officials to make good on an agreement to relocate the convent.

Echoing a statement by Cardinal John O’Connor of New York made Tuesday, Mahony said he was “shocked” by Glemp’s “harmful and distressing” remarks. Polish church leaders should “get on with their formal commitment to relocate” the convent under a 1987 agreement that called for the move to be made last February, Mahony said, quoting O’Connor.

On Saturday, Glemp, the highest ranking Catholic prelate in Poland and a close personal friend of Pope John Paul II, accused Jews of stirring up anti-Polish sentiment.

Glemp said during a sermon that Jews should “not talk with us (Poles) from the position of a people raised above all others and . . . not dictate conditions that are impossible to fulfill.”

Mahony’s statement, issued to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, also pledged the archdiocese of Los Angeles to continue “with renewed vigor” the Catholic-Jewish dialogues that for more than 25 years have been a hallmark of area interfaith cooperation.

Alfred Wolf, director of the Skirball Institute of the American Jewish Committee and rabbi emeritus of Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, said he welcomed Mahony’s “distancing himself from Cardinal Glemp and especially his reaffirmation of the dialogue in Los Angeles.”

Jewish leaders reacted with outrage to Glemp’s speech, exacerbating the international dispute that began in 1984 when a community of Carmelite sisters moved into a building on the edge of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where millions of Jews, Polish Catholics and others were put to death by Nazi leaders.

Mahony said relocating the convent from the death camp border to a projected interfaith center a few blocks away would help end “bewilderment and anguish” over the controversy.

‘Step Forward’

Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in West Los Angeles, which has outspokenly criticized the delay in moving the convent, said the Jewish community “welcomes the remarks of leading Catholic officials . . . as an important step forward . . . so that this controversy not play out as a source of conflict between Catholics and Jews in the United States.”

In his statement, Mahony noted that the Pope’s September, 1987, visit to the United States had also been a time of Catholic-Jewish tensions, arising from the pontiff’s Vatican meeting earlier that year with Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, who has been accused of Nazi war crimes.

“The ability of Jewish and Roman Catholic leadership locally to keep open channels of conversation made it possible for our two communities to work through a difficult moment,” the archbishop said, adding, “I publicly pledge the archdiocese . . . to journey that same road of open, mutual and respectful dialogue with the Jewish community in connection with the Auschwitz convent controversy.”