Religion: Auschwitz Ire Stay-put nuns spark protests

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For the past five years, efforts to improve ties between Roman Catholicism and Judaism have been disrupted by turmoil over the presence of 14 Carmelite nuns at the site of the infamous Auschwitz death camp in southern Poland. The nuns maintain a convent just outside the camp's barbed-wire perimeter, in a red brick building that once housed canisters of deadly Zyklon B gas. Their mission: to pray for all the Nazis' victims, including the 6 million Jews who died in concentration camps. But the establishment of a Christian institution at a place that will forever symbolize Jewish martyrdom has stirred outrage among Jews.

The dispute was supposedly settled in 1987, when four Cardinals, including Franciszek Macharski, whose Cracow archdiocese encompasses Auschwitz, promised that the nuns would move to a new center by February 1989. That deadline passed, but the nuns did not budge and renovations that had begun on their convent continued. The delay provoked strong Jewish protests and demonstrations at the site. Tensions escalated last month when Polish workers at the convent roughed up seven Jewish protesters and dragged them off the property.

Last week Cardinal Macharski, citing a "violent campaign of accusations and slanders" by Jews denouncing the delay, said he was indefinitely suspending plans to construct the new center because the work could not proceed in an "atmosphere of aggressive demands." The World Jewish Congress quickly assailed Macharski's comments as "brutal and violent" and "a tragic blow" to ecumenical efforts.

Macharski's surprise action moved another of the four Cardinals, Albert Decourtray of Lyon, to issue his own declaration that the 1987 agreement must be honored. The demonstrations and hostile climate "cannot outweigh the accord," he asserted. Pope John Paul II has so far declined to intervene openly in a local Polish church matter, but behind Decourtray's unequivocating statement may be glimpsed a papal hand.