Pope Condemns Hostility Toward Jews, Denouncing Brutality of the Nazis

Pope John Paul II issued a ringing denunciation of anti-Semitism this weekend, in an apostolic letter addressed to all Catholics.

“I want to restate with force that hostility and hate toward Judaism are in complete contradiction to the Christian vision of the dignity of man,” the pontiff declared.

The 20-page letter was released to mark the 50th anniversary of the start of World War II, when Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939.

It spoke at length and with poignancy of the horrors of the Holocaust and the particular sufferings of the Jews of Poland, where this pope was born.

The letter could be taken as an attempt to ease the tensions between the Catholic Church and world Jewry over a convent on the grounds of the former Auschwitz death camp, which the church promised more than two years ago to relocate but never has.

Jews also have been dismayed by a recent series of sermons by the pope implying that Jewish “infidelities” caused God to revoke his special covenant with them.

While the letter stressed that all groups persecuted by the Nazis should be remembered, the pope was especially eloquent about Jewish suffering.

“Among all anti-human measures, there is one which remains forever a disgrace for humanity: the barbaric plan which was ruthlessly launched against the Jewish people,” the letter said.

“Object of a ‘final solution’ devised by an aberrant ideology, the Jews underwent privations and brutality difficult to describe.

“The Jews of Poland, more than others, lived through that calvary: The images of the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto, like what we know about the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Majdanek or Treblinka, go beyond that which is humanly possible to imagine,” the letter said.