Reactions of the Polish Catholic Church towards the Holocaust

We rarely find the Polish Catholic Church, as an institution, dealing with the Holocaust. This is an enigma which I will try to confront in my paper. When we consider that the Second World War was, and still is, an important element for contemporary Polish identity and for the Catholic Church, the absence of an institutional response becomes all the more perplexing. Also in postwar Poland, the Shoah was rarely taken into account as a part of the history of Western Christianity. The Polish Catholic Church, in its theological and historical reflections, remembered only its own martyrology. During the war, there were some priests involved in helping Jews, such as Kazimierz Kucharski in Vilnius, Stanisław Bajko in Turkowice and Jan Zieja in Warsaw, but their help was as individuals and not as representatives of the Church. After the political transformation in 1989 in Poland, the Holocaust became a topic openly discussed from different perspectives, but in Polish Catholic theology it is rarely the subject of official teaching. Apart from the Polish Pope John Paul II, who mentioned the Holocaust on many occasions, but as the official head of the Catholic Church, there were some Polish priests involved in Jewish-Christian dialog, for example the Jesuit Stanisław Musiał, who was very active in the so called “the papal cross controversy in Auschwitz”, Michał Czajkowski, and Wojciech Lemański. However, they were and are marginalized by the hierarchical Church. In this paper, I will reflect on this problem.