Polish Archbishops on Jan Gross’s Fear

http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2967

The Krakow archbishop and close cooperator of the late Pope Jon Paul II, Stanislaw Dziwisz, has written a letter to the chairman of the ZNAK publishing house, saying that reading Jan Tomasz Gross’s Fear filled him with great pain.

He stressed that a publishing house should “propagate historical truth, not “awake anti-Polish and anti-Semitic demons.”

Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz by controversial sociologist Jan Tomasz Gross claims that Polish anti-Semitism was responcible for the violence against Jews in the post-war period, including the pogrom in Kielce in 1948.

The Polish language version of Fear was released in Poland last Friday.

In his letter, Archbishop Dziwisz refereed to the opinion of Doctor Jan ¯yran that http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1252 archbishop also added that the publishing houses, “Should look more carefully at the intentions of authors and more cautiously decide about printing them, in the name of the greater responsibility for good, which is called Poland.”

Other archbishops also criticize the book – during a Mass on January 13, Lublin archbishop Józef ¯yciñski said that many expressions in Gross’s book “hurt and divide, often without reason,” and that the book contains, “a dose of emotion and aggression, which divides instead of unites”.

http://www.polskieradio.pl/thenews/culture/?id=73625

2008-01-22