NEWS & VIEWS
from a CATHOLIC perspective

      WARSAW (CWNews.com) - An Israeli lawmaker visiting Poland this week said on Friday that Poland should move faster on their demands that hundreds of crosses erected by grassroots Catholic groups at the Nazi-era Auschwitz death camp.

      Israeli Parliament speaker Dan Tichon told reporters that Polish government officials were sympathetic to his country's demands. "Polish officials very sharply criticized those who erected the crosses. This is a controversy and misunderstanding which fringes on anti-Semitism," he said. Polish Catholics began erecting hundreds of crosses in a field near the death camp earlier this year in protest of plans to remove a cross erected at the spot where Pope John Paul II prayed in 1979. The Catholic groups also said they wanted to remember the thousands of Catholics who were also killed by the Nazis.

      Jewish groups want to the crosses removed because they say the presence of religious symbols at the site of so many Jewish deaths is an affront to their memory. The Polish government and the country's Catholic bishops said they want to remove all of the crosses except for the papal cross. But Tichon indicated the even the papal cross is a source of disagreement. "We are against all the crosses erected at the site, but we hope that in the first stage all but the big one will be removed," Tichon said. "There will still be time to talk about the large cross."