The World - News from Sept. 19, 1989

New York Cardinal John J. O’Connor says he supports Jewish efforts to get a Roman Catholic convent moved away from the former Auschwitz death camp in Poland, but he said that a number of his fellow Catholics are prejudiced against Jews. The fight over the convent has put “fuel on the fire,” O’Connor said on a weekend television program in New York. “I think there are many Catholics who are anti-Semitic. . . . It’s deep within them, and this kind of thing then just throws up the flames. Simultaneously there are Jews who live in fear of Catholic anti-Semitism and consequently . . . it feeds the fear,” O’Connor said. The convent is seen by many Jews as an intrusion at a site where 2.5 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis in World War II.