Move Convent at Auschwitz, Vatican Says

The Vatican moved decisively Tuesday to improve strained relations between Roman Catholics and Jews, saying that a convent of Carmelite nuns at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland should indeed be relocated and offering to help pay the cost.

Although there was no direct sign of it in a carefully worded statement issued by the Vatican press office, the action was tantamount to papal intervention in a dispute that had become an international embarrassment to the Vatican.

Public Squabbling

For weeks the Vatican had watched in strained silence, but Jewish anger touched a sympathetic chord elsewhere in the church and touched off public squabbling among several cardinals.

Vatican sources said they think Tuesday’s statement will encourage action by Polish prelates who had balked at carrying out a 1987 agreement with Jewish leaders to move the convent of 14 contemplative Polish and German nuns.

About 2.5 million Jews were among 4 million inmates killed at the Nazi German camp during World War II. Jewish groups say the convent and its 23-foot-tall cross just outside the camp’s fence offend the memory of Jewish victims.

“This should clear the atmosphere and help build a climate of mutual respect,” said Father Pier Francesco Fumagalli, secretary of the Vatican Commission for Relations with Judaism.

In Los Angeles on Tuesday, Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, called the Vatican action a policy reversal that will encourage better Catholic-Jewish relations.

Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress in New York, said: “We welcome this very important step in restoring the good word of the church. It’s time to move on and implement the agreement.”

The Vatican statement was issued over the signature of Dutch Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, president of the Commission for Relations with Judaism. It praised a Sept. 6 decision by Polish bishops calling for renewed talks with Jewish leaders to build an interfaith center for prayer near the camp to which the nuns would move. The Carmelites have prayed in their Auschwitz convent, an old warehouse where poison gas was once stored, since 1984.

The statement, expressing support for the 1987 agreement with Jewish leaders in Geneva to build the center, said that “the Holy See is convinced that such a center would contribute in an important way to development of good relations between Christians and Jews.”

It recalled hopes expressed last year by Pope John Paul II to Jewish leaders in Vienna that the center would “produce fruitful results and serve as a model for other nations.” It said the Holy See “is prepared to participate financially in undertaking this costly project.”

Amid a widening breach between Catholics and Jews, the Vatican had repeatedly insisted that the Pope would take no hand in the dispute because it was a local issue to be decided by the Polish church. Although Tuesday’s statement could not have been issued without papal approval, Vatican spokesmen were officially noncommittal.

Father Giovanni D’Ercole, deputy Vatican spokesman, confined himself to noting that the commission’s stand had been published Tuesday in the official Vatican Bulletin.

Under the agreement signed in Geneva, the nuns were to have moved by last Feb. 22, but there was no sign of the promised new center for them. Then came a chorus of protest from Jewish groups around the world and a demonstration at the convent in July by seven Jewish militants demanding that the nuns go. That ended with a scuffle and bad feelings all around.

In August, Cardinal Josef Glemp, the Polish primate, accused Jews of trying to be superior and of attempting to stir up anti-Polish sentiment through what he said was control of the mass media in some countries. He said the accord to move the convent was offensive. Glemp’s remarks were criticized as anti-Semitic, and Jewish-Catholic relations plunged to their lowest point in decades.

Then Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, the archbishop of Krakow and one of the signatories of the 1987 agreement, said the Polish church was abrogating the agreement because of aggressive demands and protests by Jewish activists.

That brought three fellow cardinals who had also signed the accord down on Macharski, along with a number of American prelates who also insisted that the agreement be respected. The Vatican commission joined them Tuesday, apparently ensuring that the nuns will move to a new home as the accord stipulates.