From Catholic News Service

Priest says Auschwitz visit to highlight unhealed wounds

By Jonathan Luxmoore, Catholic News Service

WARSAW, Poland (CNS) -- A German priest who works at the Auschwitz death camp said Pope Benedict XVI's visit in late May will highlight the church's awareness of "still unhealed wounds" between Christians and Jews.

"The Holy Father's visit isn't intended to end the past -- just the opposite, it will recall what was done here," said Father Manfred Deselaers of Germany's Aachen Diocese, who has worked at Auschwitz since 1990. "Benedict XVI, a son of the German nation, is coming above all as pope, as a witness to faith. This pilgrimage will have great significance for Germans."

In an interview with Poland's Catholic information agency, KAI, the priest predicted the pope's brief visit would be a "summons to peace" for Catholics worldwide.

"Auschwitz is still an open wound between the Polish and German and German and Jewish peoples, as well as between Christianity and Judaism," and the fact that the pope wants to visit the death camp shows he is aware of this, said the priest, who works at Auschwitz's Center for Dialogue and Prayer. "Auschwitz represented the total destruction of interhuman relations. The wound to the German spirit lies in the problem of guilt and fear that this guilt from the past will burden future relations."

Pope Benedict is scheduled to visit the former Nazi-run death camp May 28, at the end of his May 25-28 trip to Poland. He is also scheduled to visit the Marian shrines of Jasna Gora and Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, as well the Wadowice birthplace of Pope John Paul II, who prayed at Auschwitz in 1979.

The camp, 90 percent of whose estimated 1.5 million victims were Jewish, has been a focus of periodic Catholic-Jewish disputes since the late 1980s, when a Carmelite convent was temporarily located there.

In his KAI interview, Father Deselaers said the church still needed to atone for past Jewish sufferings, despite its condemnation of anti-Semitism at the Second Vatican Council and subsequent expressions of regret in 2000.

"The final word at Auschwitz belonged not to Hitler, but to God. I think that's the message the pope will bring with him," said the priest, whose father was a Nazi and German armed forces member.

Besides Jewish victims, around 100,000 mostly Catholic Poles also were killed at Auschwitz, which was one of many death camps in Poland after the country's 1939 invasion by Germany.

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