A sign of contradiction:

...And, in an extremely significant development, a front-page editorial in Gazeta Wyborcza, the Solidarity newspaper, criticized the cardinal for making statements that the newspaper said would be a source of great pain for Jews...

...On the Jewish side, the pervasive mistake has been a continuing failure to acknowledge clearly, if at all, the special role that Auschwitz holds in recent Polish history...

...The Polish delegation must be somewhat expanded...

...t first the words of protest from the Jewish community over the failure to implement the accord were relatively moderate...

...And after the Geneva agreement they failed to undertake efforts to convince Polish Catholics of the basic validity of the Jewish claim...

...Responding to this pervasive anger, Cardinal Macharski, without consulting the other Catholic or Jewish signatories to the Geneva agreement, issued a statement August 10 that was widely interpreted as rescinding the Geneva agreement...

...The materials spoke of the "enemies of Christ...

...Such comments simply fail to take account of the solid, scholarly work on Polish-Jewish relations generated by historians connected with the Oxford Institute for Polish-Jewish studies, as well as books such as the late Stefan Korbonski's The Jews and the Poles in World War II...

...Nor can it be resolved without a major diffusion of emotions on all sides...

...Polish community, a group of Catholic and Jewish scholars involved in an ongoing dialogue prepared a conciliatory statement that was published simultaneously in the New World, the archdiocesan newspaper, and Chicago JUF News, sponsored by the Jewish United Fund...

...An international leadership group of Jewish women joined them on one occasion...

...A compromise agreement was reached in February 1987 pledging relocation of the convent to a new site in the town which would become an interreligious center...

...His trespass on to the convent grounds surely went beyond the bounds of legitimate protest...

...The debate over the Auschwitz convent has given life to these unqualified indictments, particularly in newspaper editorials...

...After the agreement the controversy quieted until early this year, when it was becoming obvious that the target date of Februrary 1989 was not going to be met...

...Second, a new round of meetings of key Catholic and Jewish leaders to create a second timetable is imperative...

...A failure of reconciliation in this dispute would be a victory for no one but the ghost of Hitler...

...This last point is particularly important...

...The "no-talk" attitude of certain European Jewish leaders is self-defeating...

...Some progress was being made toward diffusing tension...

...its very name had come to symbolize for Jews the unprecedented evil of the Final Solution...

...Jewish leaders in the dialogue, including Rabbis Marc Tanenbaum and Henry Siegman, and Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League spoke out, directly or indirectly, against the Weiss demonstration...

...Given the history of Catholic anti-Semitism and its undeniable contribution to the success of the Nazi effort, most Jews considered it highly presumptuous for the Carmelites to be praying for Jewish victims at this site...

...Archbishop Roger Mahony of Los Angeles associated himself with those remarks, while Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston urged the Carmelites themselves to move from the present site...

...It was deeply resented by many Catholics, who perceived the rabbi and his group as abusing Polish hospitality, engaging in illegal trespass, and ultimately violating sacred space...

...Also contributing to Polish frustration and tensions has been the continuing castigation of Poland in many of the Jewish media as the leading anti-Semitic nation, almost as if Poland and not Germany had run the concentration camps...

...While Weiss's personal standing did not suddenly escalate in mainline Jewish circles, Jews were outraged by the reaction of the Polish workmen and bystanders, which they saw as an attack on Jews as such...

...This is the one valid point in Cardinal Glemp's Italian interview...

...Jewish student groups from Europe, joined by representatives of the U.S.-based "Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry," began demonstrations at the Auschwitz memorial...

...Until very recently, North American Jews and Israelis played a very secondary role in the controversy...

...they also called for better understanding of the significance of Auschwitz for the Polish nation and an end to broad stereotyping of Poles as anti-Semitic...

...The National Polish American-Jewish Council also released a call for reconciliation...

...Some Jewish leaders who have spoken on the controversy seem almost totally oblivious to Auschwitz's significance for Poland...

...It is up to Cardinal Macharski publicly to affirm the agreement's continuing validity...

...Not only at Auschwitz but throughout Poland (and elsewhere as well) the Catholic community must commit itself to understanding the special meaning of Auschwitz for Jews and to comprehend Jewish attitudes toward appropriate ways of memorializing the dead...

...With that incident, awareness of the church's failure to fulfill the Geneva agreement became widely known in the Jewish community...

...This was likewise the stance of Vatican spokesmen, who described Cardinal Macharski's statement as a "personal opinion," a term later used in a radio interview by Father Stanislaus Musial, S.J., Cardinal Macharski's secretary for Catholic-Jewish affairs...

...s I write early in September, the impasse continues...

...Originally it was founded as a center of prayer for the millions of Jewish and non-Jewish victims who died in this most notorious of concentration camps...

...They were stopped by the Polish police and by water thrown on them by Polish workmen at the convent while bystanders shouted anti-Jewish insults...

...Father Musial also insisted that implementation of the Geneva accord would resume as soon as the confrontational atmosphere dissipated...

...The Weiss demonstration had a marked impact on the Polish scene as well...

...in a statement issued September 3, they ask, "if four cardinals, including the archbishop of Cracow, are not qualified to represent the Catholic side, who might be...

...Most objectionable to Jews, but not only to Jews, was the cardinal's language about alleged Jewish power over world media that carried the overtones of classic anti-Semitic stereotypes...

...The dispute eventually resulted in a series of meetings in Geneva in 1986 and 1987 involving Jewish representatives and, on the Catholic side, Cardinal Franciszek Macharski of Cracow, in whose archdiocese Auschwitz is situated, and Cardinals Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris, Godfried Danneels of Brussels, and Albert Decourtray of Lyon, cities where the Jewish outcry against the convent was strong...

...Outside of Poland little notice was taken of the sisters' presence at the site until a conservative Belgian Catholic foundation, "Aid to the Church in Distress," began a fundraising effort for the convent in 1986...

...Responsibility for this state of affairs clearly does not rest with one community alone...

...This arrangement all too easily triggered a defensive response in the Polish national psyche, which has been conditioned to resent imposed "foreign" solutions...

...he said rather that present conditions in Poland brought about by persistent attacks from certain Western Jewish sources made it impossible for him to continue implementation of the agreement...

...But then another series of statements from Poland again set back the process of reconciliation...

...The agenda might also involve a joint Jewish-Catholic appeal to the Auschwitz Museum authorities to improve the presentation of exhibits at the site to emphasize the uniquely evil character of the Nazis' genocidal program...

...The newly emergent Jewish community of Western Europe picked up this issue as their special cause...

...At the time of the Geneva agreement they committed a major blunder by failing to discuss its provisions with the Carmelites, thereby stiffening their resistance to a move...

...they might include immediate removal of the controversial twenty-three foot cross on the present convent as well as steps to move the Carmelites to an intermediate site until the design for the interreligious center can be completed and financing secured...

...Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel warned of the anti-Semitic potential in Cardinal Glemp's words...

...News stories and photographs of the incident, widely published in the Western press, dramatically raised tensions in both communities...

...There was a deep suspicion in some Jewish circles that the church was trying to "Christianize" the Holocaust...

...In Chicago, center of the U.S...

...Three of the signatories, Cardinals Decourtray, Lustiger, and Danneels, have once again defended the agreement...

...and, in a concession to Cardinal Macharski, ended with a sentence declaring that the death camp site is located "on Polish Christian ground...

...There was still hope that combined Catholic-Jewish pressure might move the Polish church to fulfill the agreement...

...Understanding the failures on both sides that launched and then embittered this dispute is, of course, only a first step...

...A SIGN OF CONTRADICTION PAIN TO JEWS, SHAME TO CATHOLICS Little doubt remains that the Auschwitz convent controversy has the potential to destroy nearly a quarter-century of constructive efforts to improve Catholic-Jewish relations, and not only in Poland...

...There has been intense debate in Polish publications in recent years over the record of anti-Semitism, but even those who have been critical of the national response become unnerved at the blanket condemnations that appear all too frequently in Jewish and Israeli publications...

...First, there is no alternative to the Geneva accord...

...And some weeks ago Rabbi Avi Weiss, a maverick in the American Jewish community without any solid organizational base, led a small group of demonstrators to the site...

...The conflict is the more painful because it is unnecessary, contrary to the best instincts on both sides, contrary to the true lessons of Auschwitz...

...Clearly Cardinal Macharski had run into tremendous difficulties in selling the agreement to the rest of the Polish hierarchy and to the Polish church at large...

...Because of the conflict's larger implications, its resolution cannot be left solely to the Polish Catholic church...

...JOHN T. PAWLIKOWSKI John T. Pawlikowski, O.S.M., is professor of social ethics at Catholic Theological Union, Chicago, and an active participant in the Catholic-Jewish dialogue.e Catholic-Jewish dialogue...

...Whereas Americans might see the issue purely in terms of property rights, for many Poles the violation was more profound...

...This commitment should be matched by Jewish efforts to educate their community about the significance that Auschwitz has for Poland...

...In the end, there is no way out of the present impasse without a resumption of face-to-face dialogue seeking restoration of mutual trust...

...Yet discussions of the event, as in the Jerusalem Post editorial, omit all mention of this dimension of the affair...

...Materials distributed in connection with this effort contained ambiguous language that could be interpreted (and was by many Jews) to imply that the sisters were praying for the conversion of the Jews...

...Lastly, there is the failure of the Jewish media to establish any adequate distance from the recent protest tactics of Rabbi Weiss...

...But Catholics must recognize that the lion's share of the blame must be placed on the two Polish cardinals, Glemp and Macharski...

...In the first instance, they failed to consult with the international Jewish community before the convent was established to explore ways of properly commemorating both the Jewish and the Polish victims at Auschwitz...

...Other factors intruded...

...Subsequently the cardinal has published an interview in an Italian journal in which he declared the original signatories to the Geneva Accord "incompetent...

...On August 26 the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Joseph Glemp, delivered a major address at the shrine of the Black Madonna in Czestochowa, Poland's most sacred shrine, in which he asserted somewhat bitterly that Jews were endangering hard-won Polish sovereignty through their attacks on the Auschwitz convent...

...The relevant question now is, what must be done to break the deadlock...

...Whatever their original intent, the materials had done damage...

...Claiming that the sisters had refused to meet with them to listen to their demands, several of the Weiss group mounted the convent fence and made their way into the inner grounds...

...After consulting with Cardinals Lustiger and Danneels, he released a statement reaffirming the validity of the 1987 agreement...

...It served as the primary camp for the systematic extermination of the Polish leadership (artists, intellectuals, clergy) in the Nazi campaign to reduce the Polish nation to perpetual servitude...

...Calls went out from Jewish community leaders in France and Italy, joined by the World Jewish Congress with headquarters in Geneva, for the church to remove the convent from the actual grounds of the concentration camp...

...The Carmelite convent has existed at the Auschwitz memorial site for some five years...

...This will require courageous steps by both Catholic and Jewish leaders...

...The Weiss demonstration made the Auschwitz convent a central issue for American Jewry in a way that had not previously been the case...

...The announcement was disturbing to Jews generally, and to Cardinal Decourtray of Lyon as well...

...Cardinal Glemp's address elicited an exceptionally pointed response from Cardinal O'Connor of New York, who described Glemp's remarks as "distressing" and "harmful...

...Jews simply do not think it proper to build chapels in graveyards...

...Both these statements insisted on continued implementation of the Geneva agreement...

...There should have been prior communication with the other signatories, as well as careful consideration of the language of the statements...

...A careful reading will show that the cardinal did not go quite that far...

...Finally, their recent statements were issued much too hastily...

...Organization spokespersons later maintained that the term referred to those who had demonstrated against the pope in the streets of Holland during the papal visit of 1985...

...A comment in the Jerusalem Post (July 7, 1989) is typical: "Nor can the recent violent attack by Polish workers on a visiting group of protestors at the site be disconnected from the gruesome historical background of centuries-old Polish anti-Semitism...

...Auschwitz is a national issue in Poland, not one confined to the archdiocese of Cracow...

...The statement did not seem to rule out resumption of the Geneva plan if the current tensions could be reduced...

...It must also be said that the Vatican made a strategic error in having only a single Polish cardinal sign the accord...

...The agenda should include the earliest possible implementation of confidence-building measures...

...And disagreement also surfaced regarding the proper way of memorializing the dead...

...No land in the town had actually been designated for the center, something that happened only on June 15...

...for his part, Cardinal Glemp must understand that his words have brought pain to Jews and shame to Catholics, so that a conciliatory message from him is an obligation...

...Neither preliminary design plans nor a scheme for financing the project had been proposed...

...Moral integrity and the mandate of Nostra aetate demand that the church abide by this agreement, and it is up to Catholic leaders in all parts of the world to make this point clearly to Cracow...

...The relocation of the Carmelite convent was to be accomplished within two years...

...But as more time passed with little or no apparent movement, the pressure from the Jewish side intensified...

...Some Jews felt a special resentment toward Poland, where they or their families had experienced pronounced anti-Semitic discrimination in the period between the two world wars...

...The document also acknowledged the murder of Poles, Gypsies, and Russian prisoners of war at the camp...