A right-wing faction of the Catholic Church has been agitating to prevent the transfer of the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, and the Jewish community of Italy is asking the Vatican to intercede against it.
The schismatic church group, the Union of the Nations of Christian Europe, has called on “all Christians of Europe to oppose the transfer of the Carmelite convent from the camp of Auschwitz,” according to Tullia Zevi, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities.
Such a demand would “be harmful to the agreements reached regarding the convent with the Catholic Church,” Zevi said in a letter to the the Vatican secretary of state, Angelo Sodano.
Zevi specifically asked the Vatican to protest a rally that the Union of Nations planned to stage Wednesday at the convent site.
The demonstration was to be an anti-abortion rally and would follow a pilgrimage to the Jasna Gora monastery in Czestochowa, Poland, the site of the so-called Black Madonna.
A similar rally organized by the group last year was canceled at the last moment after massive protests from Jews as well as non-Jews.
Zevi wrote that such linkage of issues “tends to trivialize the specific nature of the Shoah and create ambiguous situations that are offensive to the memory of millions of men, women and children who were victims of Nazi-fascist barbarism.”
Zevi pointed out that the right-wing group is composed of disciples of the late Cardinal Marcel LeFebvre, an anti-Semitic French cleric who challenged the Vatican’s authority.
Moreover, it includes a deputy to the European Parliament from Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far-right National Front in France and the president of the National Front of Belgium.
The convent at the site of the former Auschwitz death camp has been a painful issue in Catholic-Jewish relations since 1987.
Present plans call for the convent to be moved later this year to an ecumenical center under construction across the road from the Auschwitz site.
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