Papal sins of omission

GIVEN that Pope John Paul II visited Auschwitz in 1979, followed by Pope Benedict in 2006, it would have been a glaring omission had Pope Francis not made the same trip while he was in Poland last week. Nevertheless, we can applaud his decision to make time for a pilgrimage to the site that has become so emblematic of the Holocaust itself, and, thanks to the efforts of Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich, to greet a group of Auschwitz survivors and Polish Catholics who rescued Jews during the Holocaust.

Visits and meetings such as this have great symbolic significance, and they are welcome steps on the road to further Jewish-Catholic understanding. But Jewish history cries out for more. Although there has been much progress from Vatican II in 1965 and since, we are still far from the church taking its share of responsibility for stoking the fires of two millennia of anti-semitism.

The Pope may have prayed for forgiveness for the perpetrators of the horrors of Auschwitz, but he has yet to ask for a similar forbearance for his predecessors who, by action and inaction, created the environment that allowed the Holocaust to happen. We are entitled to judge the Pope by his actions, rather than gestures. By this measure, he and the Catholic Church that he leads, are still found wanting, in at least four areas. The first is the specific message that Francis chose to share.

He did not make an official statement, preferring to let silence be his testimony, but he did comment to reporters that “human cruelty did not end in Auschwitz”, and declared that “We say, yes, there we saw the cruelty of 70 years ago, how people died being shot or hanged or with gas. Today in many parts of the world where there is war, the same thing is happening.”

While on a superficial level this is true, it’s a shocking deflection of what the concentration camp truly represents. There are, sadly, tens of thousands of sites across the world where “cruelty” has taken place. But Auschwitz tells the story of something beyond cruelty, the story of deliberate genocide on an industrial scale, directed against many groups and races but targeting the Jewish people in particular.

By highlighting “cruelty” and executions, while overlooking the uniqueness and evil of genocide itself, the Pope avoided acknowledging the full suffering of the Holocaust’s victims and its true message for the future. Then there is the Birkenau Church.

In 1987, after three years of disagreement over the presence of a Carmelite convent adorned with a giant cross on the site of the death camp itself, the senior Catholic hierarchy in Poland made a formal agreement with Jewish representatives, confirming “ that Auschwitz remains eternally the symbolic place of the Shoah, which arose from the Nazi aim of destroying the Jewish people in a unique, unthinkable and unspeakable enterprise” and promising that “there will . . . be no permanent Catholic place of worship on the site of the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps”.

Yet today the former Nazi Commandant headquarters at Birkenau houses a large church, rendering as worthless the solemn undertaking by the cardinals, and creating another attempt to retrospectively convert what is described as the “world’s largest Jewish cemetery” into a place of Christian worship. There was much hope that the Pope would use his visit to uphold the agreement and to insist that the church be removed.

This hope remains unfulfilled. The third area in which we await real action from Pope Francis is that of history itself. The Vatican disputes the view commonly held by Holocaust scholars that Pope Pius XII disastrously failed his moral challenge, and saved from annihilation only a fraction of the Jews that were in his power to rescue.

On the contrary, claims the Holy See, documents prove that he and his colleagues took all the action that they could in the face of Nazi might. Yet successive requests for these claims to be tested by releasing those documents to the public have been ignored.

If the present Pope is truly moved to advance Jewish-Catholic relations, then this continual refusal to let history accurately judge his predecessor must be reversed. And there is a fourth area. There is a difference that the Pope could make a for just one Jewish family, that would send a loud message that past wrongs must be righted for the entire Jewish nation.

Readers of The AJN will be familiar with the fight in the Polish courts waged by Dr Ann Drillich to reclaim property stolen from her family in Tarnow, Poland, on part of which a church now stands. The Catholic leadership has attempted to use every judicial tactic to prevent the proper restitution of land that belonged to her family, even after the court finally confirmed Dr Drillich as the rightful owner. Currently, the church has still not agreed to settle.

Is it too much to ask for the Pope to give his local representatives a simple lesson in what is right and what is wrong? Pope Francis’s moves to improve relations between our faiths are to be welcomed, as are many of his other reforms. But if his visit to Auschwitz is to be more than an empty gesture, then he must speedily give real substance to his stated aspirations.

Otherwise his noble intentions will remain crushed under the weight of the history of Papal hypocrisy.

Rabbi James Kennard is principal of Mount Scopus Memorial College.