VATICAN CITY (RNS) A Polish Catholic bishop who has been denounced for calling the Holocaust a “Jewish invention” distanced himself from the statement on Tuesday (Jan. 26), saying that he had been misunderstood.
In an interview published Monday (Jan. 25) on an Italian Catholic Web site, Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek was quoted as saying that Jews had “appropriated” the Holocaust for propaganda purposes.
“It’s undeniable that most of the dead in the concentration camps were Jews, but the list also includes gypsies, Poles, Italians and Catholics,” Pieronek said. “Therefore it is not licit to appropriate that tragedy to make propaganda. The Shoah (Holocaust) in that sense is a Jewish invention. … It’s used as a propaganda weapon and to obtain advantages that are often unjustified.”
Jewish groups swiftly denounced Pieronek’s remarks, noting that the interview was published two days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Wednesday, the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
“The false accusations made by Bishop Pieronek once again show the underlying anti-Semitism that still lingers among some European clergymen in the Catholic Church — especially in regards to the Holocaust,” said Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress.
On Tuesday, Pieronek did not deny the statements, but insisted that they did not express his true views.
“Either I expressed myself wrongly or (the reporter) misunderstood me,” he told Anna Artymiak of the Gaudium Press news agency. “I have spoken with a Polish rabbi and my other Jewish friends. They understand and know me, that I haven’t changed my opinion and friendship with Jews.”
By Francis X. Rocca
Copyright 2010 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be distributed or reproduced without written permission.
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posted January 26, 2010 at 8:26 pm
Sounds like he suffers from “foot in mouth disease”. He said it doesn’t express his true beliefs? Then why did he say it????
posted January 26, 2010 at 8:47 pm
A friend is one who will risk your offended wrath rather than let you go on making an ass of yourself. Perhaps the bishop is a friend to Jews.
posted January 26, 2010 at 10:07 pm
I’m with the Bishop on this one. The gypsies and others who also perished do indeed get shoved aside in a lot of those observances. It was horrible but it’s being used too much now to excuse things like the ongoing Israeli theft of Palestinian land.
He should have stuck to his guns, because he was right, so far as I can tell from this article.
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posted January 27, 2010 at 1:04 am
Here we go again.
posted January 27, 2010 at 1:10 pm
What the Bishop said was true (and the world has begun to spin in the opposite direction because I’m actually defending a Catholic Bishop). There were 14 million people killed in the camps. 6 million of them were Jews, but that leaves 8 million others.
The Nazis were equal opportunity butchers.
posted January 27, 2010 at 8:05 pm
It always seems that the other 8 million didn’t matter, according to the jews.
posted January 27, 2010 at 11:46 pm
Here’s a pertinent column from the Israeli paper Haaratz, where they have more freedom to talk about such things than we do here:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1145670.html
posted January 31, 2010 at 7:19 pm
I agree with this Holy Bishop 100%. By the way more Germans were killed by Stalin than Jews by Hitler. Stalin’s genocide began before Hitler’s. And yet a communist is not marginalized the way a Nazi is in our society.