Tuesday, October 09, 2007
FR. RYDZYK - MORE CHARGES OF ANTI-SEMITISM
A delegation from the New York-based World Jewish Congress (WJC) met with the supreme Roman Catholic pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI, in Vatican City on Monday. At the top of the agenda was a resurgent anti-Semitism in Europe, including the part played by Tadeusz Rydzyk, an influential Catholic priest and radio broadcaster in Poland.
According to a statement, World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder expressed his appreciation for the Pope's efforts in support of the Jewish people. Pope Benedict said that the issue of Catholic-Jewish relations was very close to his heart. "We have made such great progress over the last four decades that it should be possible to work even more closely together," Lauder told the pontiff.
WJC delegates said that the Pope expressed his awareness of growing anti-Semitism and his hope that it could be defeated through greater education. Neither the Vatican nor the WJC revealed if the pope made any specific commitment regarding the anti-Semitic radio broadcasts of Father Rydzyk in Poland. The WJC statement said that the delegates "called on the Pontiff to take action against those in the Church who wanted to do damage to the close and positive relationship between Christians and Jews."
Read the rest...
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a Jewish organization, offers the Jewish view of the situation:
About a month after the June arrest of the neo-Nazi Bialobrzegi worker, a national furor erupted over the anti-Semitic remarks of a Catholic priest who has built a nationalist media empire in Poland. Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, speaking in a private lecture to the journalism college he started, attacked right-wing premier Lech Kaczynski, saying he was a "swindler" who had succumbed to Jewish pressure to compensate Holocaust victims who lost their property during World War II.
"You know that it's about giving $65 billion" to the Jews, he said, according to a tape recording obtained by the weekly magazine Wprost. "They will come to you and say, 'Give me your coat. Take off your pants. Give me your shoes.'"...
Father Rydzyk, who also runs a television station, a newspaper and a major radio station called Radio Maryja, went on to call the premier's wife a "witch" who should kill herself because she has supported limited abortion rights. But Kaczynski declined to counterattack Rydzyk, who had been a major political supporter.
The Israel Hasbara Committee Reports:
8. The European Union last week proposed to donate 15 million euros to a Polish college whose Catholic priest director, Tadeusz Rydzyk, is routinely charged with spreading antisemitism. Rydzyk’s radio station, which is affiliated with the college, has been accused of welcoming Holocaust deniers to speak on its programs. The priest’s broadcasted antisemitic remarks have been covered by the press. In addition to charges of antisemitism, the institution is widely considered to be one of the European Union most antagonistic and vocal opponents. The only reason given as to why the EU would be so generous to an obvious foe is it is hopes to placate and silence this annoying if not dangerous enemy.
At the website of Sunday Catholic Weekly, a Polish publication, in an interview with the President of the Polish Bishop's Conference, we get the view from Poland. Responding to a question about Fr. Tadeusz Rydzyk:
as far as Father Director is concerned – he is also sometimes very tired, living in constant stress and has gaffes that should be eliminated but has great achievements as well – he has become a public person and has taken on obligations. I mentioned that in my homily in Kalwaria Paclawska (it is a proof that the bishops do not remain silent), I said that a hunted man defends himself spontaneously, sometimes reacts nervously, inappropriately, and the task of the Redemptorists’ Provincial is to admonish, be watchful, help. It is also true that this broadcasting station and the newspaper are constantly under fire of frequent vulgar, harmful and unfair attacks. Sometimes they are even grotesque. Are we allowed to close a Catholic broadcasting station when every paper and television station passes judgement on religion and the Church? Would it be fair and morally justified to destroy the Catholic media environment that has been created and has been effective? If there is some lack one should repair it, improve the work, but not to eliminate it. And the Church has its ways to find a remedy. If society is terrified by the level of the programme broadcasted by this station, what social repairers claim, I will wait when this allegedly complaining society wakes up and begins appealing to eliminate at least two television programmes that are conducted by morally, and certainly mentally unbalanced people, whose norm is to humiliate the head of the state and the people who serve common good. It is waste of time speaking about demoralisation, which simply flows from the screen. Why is the part of society that is allegedly disgusted by Radio Maryja silent concerning this matter?
The other thing is that Radio Maryja cannot divide the Church in Poland into ‘ours’ and ‘yours’. It has signed agreements with most dioceses and should set the principles of the activities of the Radio Maryja Circles and should join the pastoral programme in particular years but these are after all internal matters, which journalists are not interested in. Let us say it honestly. Radio Maryja has become a social power in Poland and it has the right to be so but it will be wrong, and this is my personal conviction, if the radio wanted to be directly a political power. I will leave it to readers’ consideration.
An article at www.haaretz.com indicates that the EU funding has been withdrawn:
Representatives of the European Commission and the Polish government met last Wednesday, and decided that only institutions with graduate programs would receive funding ? thus excluding Rydzyk's college. ...
The Commission official said the decision to require graduate programs may have been designed to specifically torpedo the college's request.
The article also adds more details to the objectionable comments made by the priest:
Rydzyk has recently received press for several anti-Semitic statements he has made on the radio station and at the college, which he founded and heads. He recently told students that Jews use the American financier George Soros' money to seize control of Poland, and regularly blames Jews of being greedy.
"Public figures in Poland have expressed sorrow for the pogrom after the war against the Jews in Jedwabne only because they received Jewish bribes ... All of the claims by Jews of the injustice that was caused to them had one goal: to extort money from the Polish," Rydzyk has been quoted as saying.
The Polish weekly Wprost published excerpts from a lecture Rydzyk allegedly delivered at the college, where he is quoted as criticizing Lech Kaczynski, the president, for bowing to pressure to compensate people - many of them Jews - for property nationalized by the postwar communist government, and for donating land for a future Jewish museum when Kaczynski was Warsaw's mayor.
Ironically nothing I've found so far has called the priest wrong. The objection seems to be based solely on the fact that he says these things, not on the fact that he is telling lies.
Is George Soros financing Jewish power brokers in Poland?
