Italian Jews Call on Pope to Act in Auschwitz Dispute

Italy’s Jewish community Monday joined the growing Catholic-Jewish controversy over a convent of silent nuns at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, urging Pope John Paul II to intervene.

“Things are in the hands of extremists on both sides. We are amazed it has been allowed to go this far,” said Tullia Zevi, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities. “It is time the Pope contributed to the solution--if not publicly, then at least privately.”

Zevi, a vice president of the European Jewish Congress, was one of five Jewish leaders who signed a 1987 agreement with four Roman Catholic cardinals calling for the convent of 14 Carmelite nuns to be moved from a warehouse that once stored the deadly gas used to kill prisoners at the concentration camp.

During World War II, Nazis murdered 4 million inmates at Auschwitz, 2.5 million of them Jews. Jewish groups protest the location of the convent and its 23-foot cross just outside the concentration camp fence, saying they offend the memory of the Jews who died there.

Zevi said she has requested a papal audience to express concerns of an Italian Jewish community of 35,000 that was itself decimated in death camps during the war. “This has become a stumbling block to the dialogue between Jews and Catholics. It must be removed,” she said.

Under the agreement signed in Geneva, the convent of the Polish and German nuns--who have taken a vow of silence and spend their day in prayer--was to have been moved by February to an interfaith center to be constructed farther away from the camp. No center was built, and after the nuns remained beyond the deadline, Jewish groups protested. Seven militant American Jews stormed the convent in July, angering both Polish workers, who evicted them, and leaders of the Polish Catholic church.

By now, the controversy has grown to include the extraordinary spectacle of Catholic cardinals publicly disagreeing with one another. Through it all, the Pope, himself a Pole, has remained silent.

“There has been no new initiative on the part of the Holy See regarding the Auschwitz matter,” papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro said Monday, denying reports circulated by Jewish groups in Israel and the United States that the Pope had ordered the convent moved.

Vatican sources say that while the church is embarrassed by the dispute with the Jews--and its own infighting--the Pope will not intervene. John Paul, the sources say, believes that the issue must be resolved by the Polish church, which, under canon law, has responsibility for the convent, opened five years ago in the disused warehouse.

Cardinals Criticized

The two Polish cardinals most directly involved with the convent--Jozef Glemp and Franciszek Macharski--are drawing fire from both Jewish groups and from some of their peers from within the Catholic church.

With tempers high over the convent dispute, Glemp, the primate of Poland, embarrassed many of his fellow Catholics in an Aug. 26 homily in which he said: “Dear Jews, do not talk with us from the position of a nation raised beyond all others, and do not dictate terms that are impossible to fulfill. Don’t you see, esteemed Jews, that openly opposing the Carmelite nuns hurts the feelings of all Poles and violates our hard-won sovereignty.”

He urged Jews not to use “powers in the mass media at your immediate disposal in many countries” to spread “anti-Polonism.”

That brought immediate fire, even within Catholic Poland, where the Solidarity daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza voiced “pain and regret.” Cardinal John O’Connor of New York quickly disassociated himself from Glemp’s remarks, which he called “distressing and harmful.” Los Angeles Archbishop Roger M. Mahony said he was “shocked” by Glemp’s remarks and called on Polish church officials to honor the 1987 agreement to move the convent.

Speaking with Italian reporters last weekend, Glemp said it would be “a scandal” to move the convent. “Who do the nuns offend by praying next to the wall of the concentration camp?”

The convent is within the archdiocese of Krakow, which is headed by Macharski. He was one of the cardinals who signed the 1987 agreement but who now says it is suspended because of “aggressive” demands and protests by Jewish activists.

‘Incompetent’ Cardinals

Glemp is insisting on renegotiation of the agreement, which, he said, had been signed by cardinals “incompetent in the sense that they did not know well the situation and the mentality of the Polish people.” The other three cardinals, all of whose countries were also overrun by Nazi Germany, demur. In a weekend statement, Cardinal Albert Decourtray of Lyon, France, Cardinal Godfried Danneels of Brussels and Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris said bluntly that “the signed engagements must be upheld.”

The accord recognized the legitimacy of the convent, they said, but it must be moved “outside the perimeter of the concentration camp.” Glemp erred when he questioned the competence of the negotiators, the West European cardinals said. “If four cardinals, including the archbishop of Krakow, are not competent to represent the Catholic side, who might be?” the statement demanded.

Macharski met at Vatican City with the Pope last week, and although Vatican officials say he came for other reasons, it is widely believed that they discussed the Auschwitz convent.

Vatican sources say the Pope is particularly loathe to intervene because the convent is in Poland--and in his own old archdiocese.