From the Convent Controversy, Let There Be Light

Memory, even sacred memory, can be abused.

It would be a tragic perversion if the blood-drenched ground of Auschwitz were allowed to resurrect arcane animosity between the two communities in Poland that share so profound a kinship of suffering.

If the controversy over the place and propriety of the Carmelite convent is allowed to cast its shadow over the extraordinary progress in Jewish-Catholic relations since Vatican Council II, 29 years ago, it would ironically give Hitler a posthumous victory. The denigrating dictums of Polish Primate Jozef Glemp should not be allowed to eclipse the rising sun of Poland’s new freedom nor the new “covenanted relationship” between Jews and Catholics as articulated in the Declaration of Vatican Council II.

The church’s internal struggle over “supercessionism,” the claim that Jews have forfeited their unique relationship with God and that the church has supplanted that connection, augurs well for interfaith understanding. The good will and mutual respect between synagogue and church in Los Angeles offer daily testimony to the new community among its diverse faiths.

People of good will must make careful distinctions. Cardinal Glemp is not the Catholic Church, nor is he the whole of Poland. The cardinal’s acerbic statements must not distract attention from the prompt and courageous repudiation of his position by Cardinals Albert Decourtray of Lyon, France; Godfried Danneels of Brussels, and Jean Marie Lustiger of Paris. Nor from the forthrightness of Cardinals John O’Connor of New York, Edmund Szoka of Detroit, Bernard Law of Boston and Archbishop Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles. They and others, including Solidarity commentator Krzysztos Sliwinsky and the American press, have urged implementation of the 1987 Geneva agreement to build an interfaith center off the grounds of Auschwitz.

Cardinal Glemp has argued that the church needs more time to teach the Poles about the meaning of Jewish pain and loss. The cardinal is concerned with Polish pride. Let him then tell them of the Dominican convent where seven sisters and a mother superior hid Jews who had escaped from the nearby Vilna ghetto and clothed them in the habits of nuns. Among those rescued were Jewish leaders, poets and writers in the ghetto underground: Abraham Sutzkever, Edek Boraks, Arie Wilner and Abba Kovner, the poet and leader of the fighters in Vilna.

Kovner hid in the convent for three months and later left its safety to return to the ghetto, which was threatened with destruction. In one of his poems, Kovner recalls his love and indebtedness to the mother superior, whose “hood covers her forehead, not her shivering heart.” The sisters prayed to God and roamed the Polish countryside for knives, daggers, pistols and grenades to smuggle into the ghetto for the defense of the Jewish fighters.

Let the Polish people know of the conspiracy of goodness by ordinary Christians who risked life and limb to hide, protect, provide false baptismal papers and identification documents for people outside their circle of faith.

Let the Polish people know of this sacred minority, many of whom live among them, who refused to feign amnesia or play dead but who unlocked their doors to men, women and children hunted by voracious predators. Many of these rescuers were captured by the Nazis, imprisoned, burned or shot to death. These rescuers are Poland’s pride and the pride of the Jewish witness to goodness. They are the moral models for a post-Holocaust generation to emulate.

The killers of the dream who regarded Jews and Poles as untermenschen , or subhumans, remain to be defeated. Out of the chaos and darkness, God said, “Let there be light.” Out of the darkness of Auschwitz and the controversy of the convent, a new covenant of respect and love will memorialize the martyrs of that charnel house.

Cardinal Glemp has reversed his earlier stand and agreed that the convent should be moved from the death camps as soon as possible. The removal of the convent is neither triumph nor defeat for Jews or Catholics. It clears the ground for the establishment of a new interfaith center where, it is hoped, both communities can unite to bind the wounds with respect and love.

Nothing would more honor the memory of the millions of Jews and Catholics buried beneath that soil than the knowledge that their children and children’s children have joined arms together against their common foes: xenophobia, racism, anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism. As Cardinal Glemp himself has said, “Auschwitz should never be a place of controversy.”