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_WORLD WATCH______________________________
________________Poland_______________
Bishops apologize to Jews
Admit Catholic wrongdoing in World War II
Poland’s Catholic bishops have asked for forgiveness from God and from the world’s Jews for wrongs committed by Catholics against Jews during World War II. The bishops particularly mentioned a 1941 massacre of Jews in northeastern Poland that had until recently been blamed on the Nazis.
Cardinal Józef Glemp of Warsaw led about 100 bishops in a ceremony in which they sought forgiveness on behalf of the country’s Catholics. “We want, as pastors of the Church in Poland, to stand in truth before God and people, but mainly before our Jewish brothers and sisters, referring with regret and repentance to the crime that in July 1941 took place in Jedwabne and in other places,” Bishop Stanislaw Gadecki said.
In July 1941, as many as 1,600 Jews were massacred in the town of Jedwabne. A recent book dispelled the myth that the killers were exclusively Nazis. “Among the perpetrators were also Poles and Catholics, baptized people,” said Bishop Gadecki, who chairs the Polish bishops’ commission for inter-religious dialogue. “We are in deep sorrow over the actions of those who over history, but particularly in Jedwabne and in other places, have inflicted suffering on Jews, and even death.”
After an hour of prayers and solemn religious music in All Saints Church, at the edge of the Warsaw Ghetto, Cardinal Glemp finished the ceremony by reading a prayer written by the Pope last year, calling for more understanding of the Jewish people.
Rabbi Michael Schudrich, leader of Poland’s Jewish community of about 20,000 people, said the gesture had “the potential to be one more very important step” in reconciliation between Polish Catholics and Jews since the end of Communist rule in 1989. He had declined to attend the ceremony because it fell on the first day of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot.