Visit to Auschwitz marred by hat tip to Islam

Since being elected as the leader of the world’s roughly 1.2 billion Roman Catholics in 2013, Pope Francis has not shied away from breaking with traditional Catholic dogma by speaking his mind. 

Two week ago, Francis made his first official visit to Poland and visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The pontiff was joined on the solemn visit — which included a meeting with a dozen concentration camp survivors — by Jewish leaders, including Chief Rabbi of Poland Michael Schudrich and Rabbi David Rosen, international director of Interreligious Affairs at the American Jewish Committee. 

“The visit was an important reminder for the world of the depths of inhumanity that are possible and of how Jewish history uniquely testifies to this,” Rosen told Reuters.

“What also was unique was that the only public words heard here were Psalm 130 and Kaddish, emphasizing the unique Jewish significance of this site,” Rosen said.

Rosen later told JNS.org that he, along with Rabbi Schudrich and other leaders in the Jewish community of Krakow, also met with local Catholic Church officials, including Archbishop Henryk Muszynski, the primate emeritus of Poland as well as Vatican officials, including Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with Jewry, and they discussed “how to advance the promotion of Holocaust education and the mission of the Centre.”

“The input from the rabbis was important for them [Catholic Church officials] as they seek to be a place of reconciliation for other groups from conflict zones and to explore more universal messages without losing sight of the Jewish particularity of the site,” Rosen said.

Although Rosen was very appreciative of Francis’s visit to Auschwitz, he said that he could not fully embrace the pontiff’s comments on Islam following his tour of the concentration camp.