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The Auschwitz Convent Controversy
| Article
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19256 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
7,422 Words |
| Author
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Richard L. Rubenstein
Richard L. Rubenstein is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished
Professor of Religion at Florida State University and
president of the Washington Institute for Values in Public
Policy. He is the coauthor (with John K. Roth) of Approaches
to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and its Legacy |
The painful controversy over the location of a Carmelite convent within a few yards of Auschwitz has brought to the surface many of the persistent wounds of the still-unmastered trauma of World War II. Some of the most difficult aspects of Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Polish relations were once again made manifest. Fortunately, communication did not break down, and the dispute appears to be on its way to a resolution--albeit a less than perfect resolution.
To deepen my understanding of the controversy, I visited the city of Krakow and the nearby sites of Auschwitz and Birkenau during the week of December 11, 1989. As I will explain, although I understand and share the feelings that compelled leaders of the Jewish community to request that the convent be relocated, the visit convinced me that it would have been better had there been no such request. However, after emotions had become inflamed and unduly harsh words were uttered, honoring the February 22, 1987 agreement of Catholic and Jewish leaders to relocate the convent a short distance away from the main camp, as well as to establish an interfaith center, became the only way to calm the situation; indeed, it had gotten so badly out of hand as needlessly to jeopardize the very real progress in Jewish-Catholic relations made since Vatican II.
Jewish-Christian relations carry a special burden in the post-Holocaust era of the global electronic village. Both traditions make claims to exclusive knowledge of God's revealed will. Unfortunately, the claims are contradictory. Each tradition finds itself in the position of disconfirming that which the other takes to be decisive and nonnegotiable in the divine-human encounter. Moreover, because of Christianity's supersessionary claims concerning Judaism, far more is at stake in the differences between the traditions than between either tradition and Hinduism, Buddhism, or Shinto.
In the past, the Christian church has used whatever strategies were necessary to maintain its cognitive monopoly within the territories in which it was dominant. To the extent that Jews were permitted domicile, it was only under conditions in which the Christian cognitive monopoly was not seriously challenged. Very often, negative images of the Jew, which were largely a consequence of church teaching and the relegation of Jews to occupations regarded as degraded in premodern societies, served to reinforce the cognitive monopoly.
Given the global proliferation of low-cost communications media, no institution, political or religious, can any longer maintain a
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