ADL leaders met with the Pope and senior Vatican officials to raise the matter of the Vatican's record during the Holocaust in January.

When the long-awaited Vatican document, "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah," appeared, ADL was blunt in expressing disappointment. We commended the strides made by Pope John Paul II in improving

A recent issue of DIMENSIONS, published by ADL's Braun Holocaust Institute, focused on the churches and the Holocaust. Dimensions goes to public school and college-level educators, libraries, Holocaust museums and memorials.ADL's Southwest Regional Office sponsored Coalition for Mutual Respect, a community-wide effort to encourage pulpit exchanges between congregations of different faiths.

relations with Jews, but criticized the Vatican for downplaying the degree to which traditional Christian theological anti-Judaism contributed to the Holocaust, and for equivocating on the actions of Pope Pius XII during the period.

Another dispute arose when the Church canonized Edith Stein, the Jewish-born writer who became a Carmelite nun. Edith Stein died at Auschwitz, where her Nazi captors regarded her as a Jew. ADL criticized the canonization as "another step in the process of Christianization of the Holocaust, demonstrating that Auschwitz, the very symbol of Jewish martyrdom, was not essentially a Jewish event . . . but to be remembered as a place of Christian suffering."

ADL remains committed to the ongoing dialogue with the Church, and took out an advertisement in the diocesan newspaper Catholic New York that praised the Pope on the 20th anniversary of his pontificate. The text said in part: "His deep commitment to the meaningful rapprochement between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people has been fundamental to his papacy."