Poland's bishops will apologize at a religious ceremony this month for the 1941 massacre of Jews in northeastern Poland, a spokesman said this week.
The Roman Catholic Church has been blamed for fueling anti-Semitic fervor that led to pogroms like the one in Jedwabne on July 10, 1941, in which 1,600 Jews were slain.
The bishops will apologize "for the sins or the evil done in this painful event concerning Polish-Jewish relations, which recently has been revealed as a murder of Jews in Jedwabne," the Rev. Adam Schulz, spokesman for the bishop's conference, told the PAP news agency.
Schulz later told a news conference that the Polish bishops would apologize "for all the evil done by Catholics during World War II," as part of the church's efforts to examine its past actions. Last year, the bishops issued a letter apologizing for the church's tolerance for anti-Semitism.
"We will apologize to God and people who suffered from this evil," Schulz said.
The ceremony will be held May 27 at the All Saints' Church, which in Nazi-occupied Warsaw was located just on the border of Warsaw's Jewish ghetto.
Revelations in a book published last year that Polish neighbors carried out the Jedwabne pogrom prompted pledges from President Aleksander Kwasniewski and Roman Catholic leader Cardinal Jozef Glemp to issue apologies on the anniversary of the massacre.
The book, called "Neighbors," sparked a nationwide debate about Poles' attitudes during World War II and touched a raw nerve among Poles, who were taught to believe they were always heroic victims — never collaborators — in Nazi-era atrocities.
A government investigation also has been launched to see if charges should be brought against any living participant.
Schulz said the bishops' prayers will be offered not only for the victims of the massacre in Jedwabne, but also for all the "painful events of World War II, both on Jewish and Catholic sides."
"We should commend to God also those people who were killed helping Jews," the spokesman said.
Poland had 3.5 million Jewish citizens before the war, comprising 10 percent of the population. Some 3 million were killed in the Holocaust, along with more than 3 million non-Jewish Poles. Most Jewish survivors fled in the 1950s and 1960s amid communist-sponsored anti-Semitic propaganda. Some 20,000 Jews live in Poland now.