The Convent at Auschwitz

...He promised that this evaluation would be both international, and interdenominational...

...The dispute escalated yet further after the controversial homily of Cardinal Jozef Glemp, Primate of Poland, delivered at Czestochowa, the spiritual center of Polish Catholicism...

...Ravitch's is thus a depressingly cyclical chronicle--until, that is, the 1960s and '70s, when the French church, profoundly affected by the catastrophe of Vichy and by the changes wrought by Vatican Council II, shed its traditional reflexes at roughly the same time that the repubhc shed its antiREVIEWERS MARK O'CONNOR is assistant director of the honors program at Boston College...

...The beautiful fruit foreshadows a second, better Eden...

...They reveal something of God's own attention and abounding presence...

...And these very distinct perspectives came into direct conflict when that small group of Carmelites decided to open a convent there...

...At a Kenyan girls' school (1986), fog swirls around a circle of chanting, swaying students...

...Glemp then brought the confrontation to a head by repudiating the Geneva agreement...

...Steven Englund ersailles, June 13, 1789, a choice moment in the annals of irony...

...From Aulard to Lefebvre to Plongeron they have strained to see the growing schism as contingent, unnecessary, deplorable...

...On one side stood tridentine clerical reformers, eager to purify the Eglise de France and return it to the full glory of baroque Catholicism...

...There is not the slightest doubt...

...The sun breaks through with full force from behind the tree, obliterating whole BOOKS sections where the foliage does not cover...

...For their part, the Jewish dignitaries who had negotiated the settlement, seeing no tangible progress, began to doubt that the church had ever intended to move the convent...

...His images are remarkably contemporary...

...Can Christians believe their Saviour that the power of evil will not triumph over the church," he asks, "or should they seek to buttress the church by allying it with conservative forces and institutions...

...At least, until one begins to understand, as Wladyslaw Bartoszewski does, that "the issue was not about the presence of a few nuns praying in an old dilapidated building...

...Poles arrested in German-held territories were sent to Auschwitz, where 270,000 Polish Catholics died...

...Katyn is the other...

...Rather, he speaks of "misunderstanding" at the beginning of the Estates-General (1789) that perpetuated itself through the Year II--i.e., till 1794, when even the rump "national" church (the constitutional church) was destroyed by the very (revolutionary) forces that brought it into existence...

...The lamp of the body is the eye...

...Mali, 1985: the Prodigal Son's mother...

...For Poles, Auschwitz is one crucial symbol of the destruction of the Polish intelligentsia...

...If the French view is finally changing (and it is), this is largely thanks to the work of English and American scholars such as Maurice Hutt, Timothy Tackett, and now Norman Ravitch...

...This death camp designed for their mass extermination is the huge common grave of European Jewry...

...Hope, humor, death, valor--they all have their distinct, honored place in this exhibit...

...Rabbi Avi Weiss, leader of the demonstrators, argued that Auschwitz should be placed under the control of the Israeli government...

...A piet~ without even the comfort of the corpse...

...They were forcibly removed by some laborers work440: Commonweal ing at the site...

...ROBERT E IMBELLI, a priest o f the Archdiocese of New York, is director of the Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry at Boston College...

...We come, Messieurs, preceded by the torch of reason, moved by love of the commonweal, to take our places at the side of our fellow citizens, of our brothers...

...PATRICK JORDAN Two peoples, two stories THE CONVENT AT AUSCHWITZ Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski George Braziller, Inc., $17.95, 169 pp...

...A few months later, in a gesture of support, the leader of Poland's new, non-Communist government, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, announced that the assumptions under which the exhibits of the "State Museum at Auschwitz" functioned, and which had been formulated above all to suit the needs of Poland's Communist rulers, would be reevaluated...

...For anyone interested in understanding contemporary Jewish-Catholic relations, this is a singularly important book...

...Eventually, in February 1987, an agreement was reached in Geneva...

...One gradually discerns a passionate and personal meditation underlying and guiding this work, which is dedicated "in loving memory" of the author's young son...

...His gaze is that of an eternal judge, merciful but undistracted...

...She is draped in black, and but one eye shows...

...Salgado's photographs could easily do the same for Centesimus annus...

...It would be hard to see how even a liberal or radical curg-patriote like Jallet could have effected a harmony between the Third (or Fourth) Republic and the church...

...Five weeks of fractious infighting have brought the French Estates-General to a stalemate...

...The impasse was overcome only after John Paul II became directly involved...

...The French episcopacy, as Ravitch remorselessly documents, invariably elected the conservative strategy, with the result that time and again, culminating with Vichy, it had to abandon embarrassing positions and alignments that only sullied the church and traduced the faith...

...For Jews, Auschwitz has become the symbol of the Holocaust...

...Three Poidevin priest-deputies of the First Estate decide to accept the standing invitation of the Third Estate for the orders to unite...

...Here, an Eritrean refugee, Giacomettilike, stands holding the limp skeletal form of his son...

...And yet, each child's face is not overexposed but in proper contrast and focus...

...On the other hand, Ravitch might have posed more directly than he does the question: Would it have made any difference if the church had followed a Lamennais or a Sangnier...

...The girl sells small candied apples unaware of the woman's benevolent gaze...

...In 1984-85, Salgado worked with M~decins sans Frontidres covering the great famine in the Sahel...

...Salgado's photographs, heightened by his composition and technique, are profoundly social...

...The man looks like a tribal chieftain cradling the last of his people...

...It stipulated that a center for "information, education, meetings, and prayers" would be constructed in the vicinity of Auschwitz, outside the heart of the camp, and that the nuns would move their convent into this new building...

...Looking back, it is hard to see how priests like Jallet could have long deceived themselves about Mirabeau, et al., but what is even more curious is that their tendency to self-delusion has been transmitted to posterity...

...His article "Solidarity Endures a Crisis of Conscience," appeared in the September 28, 1990 Commonweal...

...It happened here...

...I had never had the experience of standing before photographs and finding my flesh tensed almost to the point of twitching...

...Despite his poverty, the peasant sees and is seen by God...

...Thus today, when Polish Catholics and Jews from all over the world look at Auschwitz, they see two different places...

...Another major theme that emerges clearly from Ravitch's fine study is the French episcopacy's systematic choice of other stars to steer by than Lamennais or Sangnier...

...An appeal for money sponsored by a Belgian Catholic organization in the fall of 1985 brought the convent to the attention of European Jews...

...Ravitch is a Catholic of Mennaisian and Silloniste (that is to say, Commonweal) sympathies, but with no illusions about the possibility of a longterm alliance between the French Revolution and the church...

...In the rancorous atmosphere which followed, Catholics and Jews began trading ultimatums...

...Jallet, above), and to walk hand in hand with the stridently sovereign "National" Assembly...

...Bartoszewski uncovers the layers of buried issues which over time rendered Jewish and Catholic perspectives concerning the meaning of Auschwitz mutually exclusive, fueling a smoldering resentment between Jew and Pole, the Nazis' principal victims, as they each attempted to preserve what Leszek Kolakowski has termed a "monopoly of martyrology...

...It is also a beginning point for understanding why Poles, isolated from the Western community and its Jewish component since World War II, "Christianized" Auschwitz not simply to redeem their own tragic experience, but to bring to the Jew and to all who perished at Auschwitz a Christian interpretation of suffering, with its accompanying need for unconditional forgiveness, alien to the Jewish tradition...

...A Guatemalan woman (1978) watches a small girl, perhaps her daughter, from a small window within a door...

...In July of '89 a group of Orthodox Jews from New York scaled the fence surrounding the convent, and proceeded to pray and blow horns in the inner courtyard as a protest against the continued presence of the Carmelites...

...They look simultaneously like tree ornaments and candles on an inverted Menorah...

...In a photo of leprosy victims at a clinic in Chad (1985), exterior light from the right makes each face in the dark confines of the primitive waiting area distinct and discernible...

...Salgado depends on natural light, and his skill in using it is superb...

...While the core of the disagreement is rooted in history and its proper interpretation, the proximate causes of the convent controversy are theological in nature...

...He has lived and worked in Poland...

...Bartoszewski himself is secretary to the Institute for Polish-Jewish studies at Oxford, and a vital force in its superb journal, Polin...

...It was about Jews and Poles being able to preserve conflicting and essential views of history grounded in the same place...

...The diocese of Cracow, under whose auspices the center was to be constructed, requested an extension of the deadline, blaming the lack of progress on the difficulties of building anything under what was left of Polish communism...

...And so much for the controversy...

...On the other side stood deeply secular revolutionaries who intended not only to finish the absolutist monarchy's policy of perfecting state-control of the French church but also to reduce dramatically Catholicism's role in the life of society...

...This is where the controversies over the beatification of the Carmelite Edith Stein and the Carmel at Auschwitz meet...

...No less important are Bartoszewski's formidable skills of analysis...

...Will they last...

...To that end, they were prepared to speak a very untridentine language of "enlightened" reason and patriotism (cf...

...Above all The Convent at Auschwitz documents that, among the many regrettable consequences of the church's long history of antiSemitism, one especially tragic, lingering result is fostering a mutual hermeneutics of suspicion among Jews and among Catholics about their respective motivations in interfaith dialogue...

...These appear as liberated zones where the sparks of primeval creation have been made manifest...

...442: Commonweal...

...His background makes him uniquely suited to the task...

...If your eyes are bad, your whole body will be in darkness...

...And yet we now know that scores of "curg-patriotes" were from the outset having to suppress second thoughts and inner doubts as they gaped into the abyss separating their own true motivations from those of their secular revolutionary compatriots...

...When Hitler and Stalin partitioned Poland in September 1939 they partitioned the "pacification" process as well: Poles captured by the Soviets were interned in camps in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, then later murdered in 1940...

...They are interwoven with the post-Vatican II effort of the church to understand more perfectly the relation of Catholics to "our elder brothers in faith...

...Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, head of the diocese, also admitted that the process of educating Polish Catholics to the need would be slow and painful...

...Viewing "An Uncertain Grace" is both exhausting and exhilarating...

...His intervention in support of the proposed center for meetings and prayers led finally to the breaking of ground in February 1990...

...In a tree full of children in Thailand (1987), eight young boys swing from boughs in a Shaker-like tree of life...

...And we...we will never be satisfied without his verdict...

...In 1963, Pope John XXIII's Pacem in terris caused such a worldwide response that an edition of the text was published with Magnum photographs from around the world illustrating the text...

...The elder Bartoszewski was a political prisoner at Auschwitz...

...the grainy quality of the photograph makes the whole scene damp and windswept...

...Two years later the agreed-upon deadline passed without so much as ground having been broken...

...Cardinal Macharski, a signatory to the Geneva document, announced that under existing conditions it would be impossible to honor that accord...

...They "cross over...

...Upon his release he helped found Zegota, the council of aid to Jews, and served as Home Army coordinator to Jewish wartime resistance...

...Mark O'Connor n 1984 eight Carmelite nuns received permission to open a cloister in an abandoned building on the border of Auschwitz...

...The three are joined...

...Cultures are given their due...

...Worn out by sand storms and chronic infections, the eye has become nothing more than a withered, onion-like film...

...One would be hardpressed to isolate a more critical moment in the launching of what presently came to be called the French Revolution...

...A Brazilian peasant (1983), stripped to the waist, holds his naked baby daughter next to a life-size portrait of Christ...

...In subsequent days, the priests' action precipitates a hemorrhage of defections among representatives of the clergy and the nobility (the First and Second Estates), thus contributing signally to justifying the Third in its breathtaking pretension to reconstitute itself as the National Assembly of France...

...The antinomy between church and revolution goes to the very core in France...

...As for the Carmelites, they will, by the end of this year, have been moved away from the camp...

...I put that euphemistically, which is not this author's style...

...The look on the woman's face is not one of terror but of irreparable grief and separation...

...His photographs from Ethiopia startled the world...

...French historians of the revolution generally recoil at postulating any prophetic and ineluctable clash ab initio between Catholicism and revolution...

...Bartoszewski moves expertly between the broad theological issues affecting all Catholics and Jews in their search for reconciliation, and the Polish particulars...

...STEVEN ENGLUND is a freelance writer who specializes in French history and culture...

...And, of course, these theological concerns are inseparably intertwined with the Polish pope who expressed this homage during his unprecedented visit to a synagogue in 1986, but who, in the minds of many Jews, is undermining the true significance of the Holocaust by "Christianizing" it...

...On almost any telling, but surely on this author's, the evidence leaves one doubtful...

...I / CONSTANT CACOPHONY THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE FRENCH NATION, 1589-1989 Norman Ravitch Routledge, $54.95, 214 pp...

...This in turn led to a longdistance, intermittent debate involving principally three interested parties: Jewish / international organizations, the Catholic international church hierarchy, and the Polish episcopate...

...Man is made to live socially," he told Wald, "and photography is an instrument of this...

...Bartoszewski's immersion in the JewishPolish dialogue, his unmatched access to expert opinion from both faiths, his native Polish fluency, are all indispensable ele12 July 1991:441 ments to giving this complex story its proper context...

...Bartoszewski's father, whose name he bears, has dedicated a lifetime to Jewish-Polish reconciliation...

...With those words, Father Jacques Jallet greets a delighted "Commons," as the Third Estate's representatives have come to be called...

...It was at this point that confrontation replaced dialogue...

...The Catholic Church and the French Nation is a wonderful instance of balanced and complete, yet at the same time highly interpretive, history...