VATICAN'S `REPENTANCE' FOR HOLOCAUST CRITICIZED.

Byline: Celestine Bohlen The New York Times

The Vatican issued a document Monday that it described as an ``act of repentance'' for the failure of Roman Catholics to stop the mass killing of Europe's Jews during World War II. But the document skirted the painful issue of the Vatican's long silences during the Nazis' reign of terror.

The document, under preparation for 11 years, was greeted with cool appreciation and guarded disappointment by Jewish leaders, some of whom criticized the Vatican for not judging those Catholics who collaborated with the Nazis or those - including Pope Pius XII - who kept silent about Nazi atrocities.

Cardinal Edward Cassidy, the Australian head of the Vatican Commission on Religious Relations with the Jews, which produced the 14-page statement, told reporters at a Vatican news conference Monday morning that it was written as a teaching document for the worldwide church and represented ``more than an apology.''

``This is an act of repentance,'' he said.

The document said, in part: ``In the lands where the Nazis undertook mass deportations, the brutality which surrounded these forced movements of helpless people should have led to suspect the worst. Did Christians give every possible assistance to those being persecuted, and in particular to the persecuted Jews? Many did, but others did not.''

The delay in producing the document has been attributed by many observers to divisions in the Vatican over to what extent the church, its leaders and its teachings contributed to the vicious anti-Semitism of the Nazis. Speakers at the news conference said the process had required waiting for the church itself to mature.

Rabbi David Rosen, director of the Israel office of the Anti-Defamation League and its co-liaison with the Vatican, said, ``It is a very important statement, but it is disappointing in certain respects.'' He noted that Catholic bishops' conferences in France, Germany, Hungary, Poland and other countries have gone further in acknowledging a deeper responsibility for the moral climate that allowed Nazism to dominate much of Catholic Europe.

The document carries an introductory letter from Pope John Paul II, who, as 2000 approaches, has been leading the church through ``an examination of conscience,'' reviewing sins, crimes and errors that have been committed in its name through the centuries.

In his preface, the pope, who as a young man living under Nazi occupation in Poland witnessed the deportation of Jewish friends, colleagues and neighbors, referred to the Holocaust as an ``unspeakable iniquity.'' He expressed a ``fervent hope'' that the Vatican document will ``help to heal the wounds of past misunderstandings and injustices'' committed by Christians against Jews.

The document examines the ``catastrophe'' of the Holocaust, when Jews were persecuted and massacred ``for the sole reason that they were Jews.'' But it also examines the ``tormented'' history of Christian-Jewish relations, worsened by ``erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament'' - a phrase used last year by John Paul in addressing a Vatican-sponsored symposium on the origins of anti-Semitism.

``Despite the Christian preaching of love for all, even for one's enemies, the prevailing mentality down the centuries penalized minorities and those who were in any way `different,' '' the document stated.

But to the dismay of some Jewish commentators, the document makes the distinction - first made by the pope himself in October - that holds that while the church in the past helped foster religious prejudice against Jews, it bore no responsibility for the racial theories that guided Nazism.

``We cannot ignore the difference which exists between anti-Semitism, based on theories contrary to the constant teaching of the church on the unity of the human race and on the equal dignity of all races and peoples, and the longstanding sentiments of mistrust and hostility that we call anti-Judaism, of which, unfortunately, Christians also have been guilty,'' the document said.

The Roman Catholic bishops of Germany, in a statement on the Holocaust issued in 1995, spoke of the church's ``co-responsibility'' for the tragedy, echoing a phrase used by the Protestant Church of the Rhineland in 1980. Last year, the French bishops conference asked the Jewish people for forgiveness for the church's failure to defend Jews during the Nazi occupation of France.

Several Jewish commentators Monday were critical of the Vatican document for failing to produce a similar accounting of the church's record during the Nazi era, and for offering a vigorous defense of Pope Pius XII, a dour figure who has become the historical lightning rod for debates about the church and the Holocaust.

The document ignores the frequent accusations made against Pius XII, dwelling instead in a long footnote on detailed recollections from the many Jews who were saved by Catholic churches, monasteries and convents during the war, and on the words of praise for the wartime pope issued by Jewish leaders.

But the document also says: ``We cannot know how many Christians in countries occupied or ruled by the Nazi powers or their allies were horrified at the disappearance of their Jewish neighbors and yet were not strong enough to raise their voices in protest. For Christians, this heavy burden of conscience of their brothers and sisters during the Second World War must be a call to penitence.