NEWS & VIEWS
from a CATHOLIC perspective

      JERUSALEM (CWNews.com) - The president of Poland, touring the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem on Sunday, said he hopes a new law will solve a dispute over crosses placed by grassroots Catholic groups near the Auschwitz death camp.

      President Aleksander Kwasniewski said the Polish parliament will consider a law to preserve the Nazi-era concentration camps as memorials and empower authorities to intervene if any controversy regarding the sites appears. Catholic Poles began placing hundreds of crosses in a field near the Auschwitz camp after rumors circulated that a large cross erected at the site where Pope John Paul II prayed in 1979 would be removed. Jewish groups have protested the placement of any religious symbol near the camps as an affront to the nearly 1 million Jews killed there.

      Kwasniewski also said he hopes a dispute over a former Carmelite convent near the site will also be soon resolved. He did not promise explicitly that the convent -- now converted into a church -- would be closed, but he said "Poland feels responsible that the memory of the Holocaust victims be properly protected." The country's bishops have said they believe all of the crosses except for the large papal cross should be removed and that the church should be allowed to remain.