Pope, Recalling Auschwitz, Condemns Anti-Semitism : Religion: ‘Never again genocide,’ John Paul implores. He also presides at beatification of four clerics.

Pope John Paul II, raised in his native Poland not far from Auschwitz, on Sunday recalled the 50th anniversary of the death camp’s liberation with one of his strongest condemnations of anti-Semitism.

“Never again anti-Semitism. Never again the arrogance of nationalism. Never again genocide,” the Pope implored in a midday message from his apartment window to pilgrims massed in St. Peter’s Square.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp where between 1.1 million and 1.5 million people died, 90% of them Jews, was “one of the darkest and most tragic hours of our history,” John Paul said.

“It was a darkening of reason, of conscience, of the heart. The memory of that triumph of evil can only fill us with deep sadness, in brotherly solidarity with those who still bear the indelible mark of those tragedies,” he said.

When John Paul completed his message, a white dove symbolizing peace was released from his window. But instead of flying away over the giant piazza, the bird alighted on John Paul’s white skullcap, adding an unplanned moment of levity.

“It seems he wants to return home,” the Pope said with a laugh. On a second launch, he shooed the reluctant dove into the air with the text of his speech.

A three-hour beatification ceremony Sunday marked the 74-year-old Pope’s return to full-scale ceremonials for the first time since he returned from an 11-day trip to Asia a week ago. He seemed rested and looked strong as he put four clerics on the road to sainthood: two Italians, a Spaniard and Rafael Guizar Valencia, a bishop persecuted early in this century during Mexico’s anticlerical revolution.

A native of Wadowice, Poland, and a seminarian in Krakow under Nazi occupation during World War II--both towns are near Auschwitz--John Paul prayed at the death camp in 1979, a year after being elected Pope.

“At Auschwitz, as in other concentration camps, many innocent people of various nationalities died,” the Pope said after the beatification ceremony. “In particular, the children of the Jewish people, for whom the Nazi regime had planned a systematic extermination, suffered the dramatic experience of the Holocaust.”

Last week, Roman Catholic bishops in Germany observed the 50th anniversary of the camp’s liberation by the Soviet Red Army by saying that they still bear the burden of their church’s failure to help the Jews or vigorously oppose Nazi totalitarianism.

Although his remarks Sunday were some of the strongest John Paul has made against anti-Semitism, he did not address the controversial question of whether the Vatican and individual Roman Catholics could have done more to help the victims of Nazi terror during World War II. Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals and German political dissidents were among the victims at the death camps.

In a letter in November outlining ideas to mark the start of Christianity’s third millennium in the year 2000, John Paul said the church needs to confront its past sins. He suggested in a reference to Nazism that many Catholics had acquiesced in the excesses of totalitarianism.

The issue remains a sore point in Jewish-Catholic relations, which have otherwise warmed to unprecedented levels under John Paul. At papal prodding, the Vatican opened full diplomatic relations with Israel last year.