Whose Auschwitz - controversy over Carmelite convent

National Review, Sept 29, 1989

Auschwitz was the scene of mass murder perpetrated very largely, but not exclusively, against European Jews. That murder was also, viewed from its victims' standpoint, a mass martyrdom. Auschwitz is therefore both holy and unholy, a bleak relic of a monstrous crime evoking horror, a monument to the innocent dead evoking pity, a place of remembrance in both senses. And because Jews were the principal martyrs, their feelings on

how to express such remembrance should be respected.

It was just such a sense of respect that brought about the 1987 Geneva agreement between four Catholic cardinals and the World Jewish Congress to relocate a Carmelite convent from Auschwitz to another site. The Catholic nuns had established themselves there from the highest motives, which, in turn, others should respect: to pray for the Auschwitz victims of every religion. But Jewish opinion sees Auschwitz, in all its terrible ambiguity, as a specifically Jewish place where a Catholic presence would be as jarring as a yeshiva at the shrine of our Lady of Czestochowa.

That alone justifies moving the convent. The agreement was not in any sense an admission that earlier centuries of Christian anti-Semitism had made it somehow unfitting for the co-religionists of the three million Polish Catholics who died in the Holocaust to pray at the site of their martyrdom. And if that were thought to be the logic of the agreement, Catholic and Christian resentment at it would be understandable.

Unfortunately, because the removal of the convent was (for whatever reason) delayed, that is where the argument has drifted. First, the ever-obstreperous Rabbi Avraham Weiss and a handful of American Jews invaded the convent and were unceremoniously ejected by building workers. Then Jozef Cardinal Glemp, Primate of Poland, calling for the agreement to be renegotiated, made remarks which in their English translation seem to echo old themes of anti-Semitism: that the Jews are a superior race that controls the media. In their turn, some Jewish commentators portrayed the Holocaust as an enterprise carried out by "Christians who called themselves Christians." Writing thus in the New York Times, Mr. Leon Wieseltier went on to observe that the shadow of the Cross at Auschwitz was, "with all due respect, sickening." Is such an observation really compatible with "all due respect"? We doubt it.

Others have kept their heads and their tempers. Three of the four cardinals who negotiated the agreement have publicly called for it to be honored. They have been strongly supported by John Cardinal O'Connor of New York. And Rabbi Jack Bemporad of the Synogogue Council of America has sensibly observed that "all this going to the brink is not very helpful." Those directly concerned, if necessary prompted by discreet Vatican diplomacy, should now cordially implement the agreement they signed with as much haste as is compatible with episcopal and rabbinical dignity. A deal is a deal; the special Jewish character of Auschwitz should be respected; and the efficacy of prayer is likely to be more damaged by continuing controversy than by a

change of venue. When the nuns return to their prayers, let them include in them those who have aggravated a painful controversy that could have been resolved by a virtue no higher than that of good manners..