Representatives of world Jewry and Vatican officials will travel together in Eastern Europe next month to implement a 1990 landmark agreement to purge anti-Semitism from Catholic teachings.
The agreement, known as the Prague Declaration, came out of a September 1990 meeting of Jewish and Vatican leaders in the Czechoslovak capital, the first between the two sides after three years of strained relations.
The final document condemned anti-Semitism as a sin against God and humanity and called for systematic efforts to uproot religiously inspired anti-Semitism in liturgy, textbooks, seminary training and Catholic media.
The trip, scheduled for Feb. 15-23, will create Jewish-Catholic liaison committees in each of the four cities the group will visit. The committees will then oversee the day-to-day implementation of the measures to eradicate any vestiges of anti-Semitism.
Five representatives of IJCIC, the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations, and three senior Vatican officials will visit Warsaw, Krakow, Prague and Budapest.
They will also stop at Auschwitz, to check on the progress of the new Carmelite convent being built a short distance away from the notorious death camp. The nuns now living in a former storehouse on the Auschwitz grounds are to be moved into their new quarters by October.
In each city they visit, the delegation members will meet with Jewish community leaders, local and national Catholic authorities, members of local Christian-Jewish cooperative organizations, and government officials in charge of interreligious affairs.
GROUP MAY MEET WITH GLEMP
One of the Catholic officials with whom the IJCIC representatives may meet is Cardinal Jozef Glemp, Poland’s Catholic primate, who was at the center of controversy for several years after he made remarks Jews considered anti-Semitic.
When Glemp visited the United States last October, he apologized to American Jewish leaders for the hurt that he said he may have caused, but fell short of promising to repeat his statements of retraction and regret to his countrymen in person once he returned to Poland.
The statements he made while in the United States, though, were published in the Polish press.
While some American Jewish leaders were satisfied with Glemp’s efforts to patch ties, many were ambivalent and others were unhappy.
It is not yet known precisely which Polish Catholic leaders the IJCIC-Vatican delegation will be scheduled to meet with, but if Glemp is one of them, it will be up to each member of the Jewish group to decide whether or not he wants to participate, according to a spokesman for Edgar Bronfman, IJCIC’s chairman.
“We are not telling the Catholic side who their representatives are, just as they are not telling us who ours are,” said Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress and a spokesman for Bronfman, who is president of the WJC.
IJCIC was “not willing to let this mission be sidetracked” because of the Glemp controversy, Steinberg said.
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