Jews oppose priest’s path to sainthood

WARSAW, Poland — Pope Francis’ decision to move the Second World War-era head of Poland’s Catholic Church a step closer to possible sainthood has hit a stumbling block, after two leading Jewish organizations called him out for anti-Semitic views.

It’s not clear if the protests will derail the sainthood cause of Cardinal August Hlond, but in the past the Vatican has taken such protests seriously and put cases up for closer review.

In May, Francis approved a decree recognizing Hlond’s “heroic virtues.” Now the Vatican must confirm a miracle attributed to Hlond’s intercession for him to be beatified, and a second one for him to be made a saint.

Hlond, born July 5, 1881, was the highest-ranking church official in Poland from 1926 to his death in 1948. He is highly respected in the overwhelmingly Catholic country for having rejected Nazi Germany’s proposals for a collaborative government, and for protecting the church’s independence during the first years of communism.

In its protest, the American Jewish Committee pointed to a passage in a 1936 pastoral letter by Hlond, who was Poland’s primate then, that showed his attitude toward Jews and echoed the line of the Catholic Church of the time. The disputed passage in Hlond’s letter reads: “It is a fact that the Jews are fighting against the Catholic Church, persisting in free thinking, and are the vanguard of godlessness, Bolshevism and subversion.” It has frequently been cited as evidence of the Catholic Church’s institutional anti-Semitism prior to the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

The group criticized Hlond’s failure to condemn the killings of at least 40 Jews in Poland in 1946 by a mob and secret security. It argued that moving forward with the canonization process will be seen as an “expression of approval of Cardinal Hlond’s extremely negative approach toward the Jewish community.”

“It’s very difficult to see how you can still claim that the man was a paragon [of saintliness] when the data is so explicit,” said the AJC’s director of interreligious affairs, Rabbi David Rosen.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Nazi-hunting body, said making Hlond a saint would “further embolden” Poland’s right-wing government in its “efforts to rewrite Polish activities from that tragic era.”