In a statement, the group said it received the attacks on Ryś with “distaste and indignation” and expressed solidarity with the Polish Bishops’ Conference.
It said the criticism and mockery directed at the cardinal showed disregard for the teaching of Poland’s Catholic bishops, because the message had been adopted by the conference as a whole, not issued by Ryś alone.
The dispute followed a pastoral letter that the bishops asked to be read in churches on Sunday, March 22.
The text marked the 40th anniversary of St. John Paul II’s historic visit to Rome’s Great Synagogue in 1986, a landmark moment in modern Catholic-Jewish relations.
The bishops recalled the late pope’s words that Judaism is not external to Christianity, but “in a certain way intrinsic” to it.
The letter also said the Jewish people remain “beloved by God” and referred to Israel as the chosen people, language that drew criticism from some right-wing politicians and from some priests on social media, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
Some critical voices argued that the timing was inappropriate because of the war in the Middle East and civilian deaths in the region. Others said the wording did not reflect Catholic teaching.
The Jan Karski Society rejected that criticism. It said the bishops’ message contained nothing new, and was a concise restatement of long-standing Church teaching on Jews and on Christianity’s roots in Judaism, including the teaching of John Paul II.
It added that recognizing antisemitism as a sin is based on religious and moral principles, not political calculation.
The group warned against treating the bishops’ position as a political statement. It said attempts to question the shift in Christian-Jewish relations that followed the Second Vatican Council were dangerous, because they distorted a moral and religious teaching into a partisan dispute.
In a particularly sharp passage, the society compared the uproar around the letter to the campaign waged by Poland’s communist authorities in 1965 against the Polish bishops’ reconciliation letter to their German counterparts.
That message, sent two decades after World War II, became one of the most important documents in postwar Polish-German reconciliation.
The latest controversy came after the bishops encouraged Catholics to visit a synagogue on April 13, following John Paul II’s example, and where possible to meet Jewish “sisters and brothers.”
The appeal fits into the broader line of Catholic teaching shaped by Nostra Aetate, the 1965 Second Vatican Council declaration that rejected hatred, discrimination and persecution on religious grounds and opened a new chapter in the Church’s relations with non-Christian religions.
The Jan Karski Society, which aims to promote tolerance and Polish-Jewish dialogue, said the issue should be understood in that religious and historical context, rather than through the lens of day-to-day politics.
Founded in 2011, the Jan Karski Educational Foundation, with sister organizations in the United States and Poland, carries forward the legacy of the wartime Polish officer, underground courier, and later university lecturer in the United States, who risked his life to tell the Western allies about Nazi terror in occupied Poland, including the mass murder of Jews in the mid-1940s.
(rt)
Source: PAP