Waldheim Invited by Pope; Jewish Leaders Angered

VATICAN CITY —  Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, who has been barred from the United States because of his Nazi past, will fly here next week to meet with Pope John Paul II, the Vatican announced Wednesday.

News of the Pope’s decision to grant an audience to Waldheim drew an angry response from Jewish organizations and appeared to jeopardize possible meetings between the pontiff and Jewish leaders during his visit to the United States this fall.

It will be Waldheim’s first official trip outside Austria since he was elected to the largely ceremonial presidency last year in a heated campaign that was marked by allegations of his participation in war crimes as an officer of the German Wehrmacht during World War II.

Since the Austrian election, the former U.N. secretary general has endured a form of international isolation, with few governments willing to receive him.

U.S. Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III, who, ironically, is attending a U.N. conference on drug abuse in Vienna this week, put Waldheim on the American “watch list” of undesirable aliens in April, thereby denying him a U.S. visa if he applies for one.

The Vatican did not say who initiated the invitation to meet with the Pope next Thursday, but Waldheim’s spokesman, Gerold Christian, was quoted in Vienna as saying that the Austrian president received the invitation weeks ago. He said that Waldheim, a Roman Catholic, will fly to Rome on June 24, the day before the papal audience, and return to Vienna on June 27.

The visit will be an official one, marked by a formal ceremony with an exchange of public speeches, according to Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro Valls. A spokesman for the Italian Foreign Ministry said that no official visit to Italy has been scheduled to coincide with the Vatican visit.

The U.S. Embassy to the Holy See was uncertain how it will respond if, as is customary, Ambassador Frank Shakespeare is invited to attend the Thursday ceremony along with the rest of the Vatican diplomatic corps.

“The U.S. Embassy has not yet been informed of an invitation, and when it receives one it will inform the Vatican of its decision,” said the embassy spokesman.

The United States snubbed Waldheim last November when Secretary of State George P. Shultz and some other foreign dignitaries refused to meet with him at the opening of the 35-nation Conference on European Security and Cooperation in Vienna.

The papal invitation appeared to be a major breakthrough for the Austrian president, whose only other invitations abroad have come from smaller countries including Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Libya and Uganda.

‘Put in Perspective’

“With this visit, things are being put in perspective,” said a spokesman for Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock, who will accompany Waldheim to the Vatican.

In New York, the World Jewish Congress, which has made many of the allegations against Waldheim, said his scheduled visit with John Paul is “a tragedy for the Vatican and a sad day for Catholic-Jewish relations.”

“This is the Pope who met with (Palestine Liberation Organization chief Yasser) Arafat. This is the Pope who refuses to recognize Israel,” said a statement from the congress. “This is not the first unsavory character whom the Pope has received in audience.”

Rabbi Gilbert Klapperman, newly elected president of the Synagogue Council of America, said the pontiff’s meeting with Waldheim “will cause us to reassess the entire Catholic-Jewish relationship. And it might endanger our visit (with the Pope) in Miami. It is a terribly unsettling development.”

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said that John Paul’s invitation was “an offensive act against all those who opposed and suffered under the Nazis. . . . Through this invitation, the Pope has de facto become a leading force in the attempt to morally and politically rehabilitate Kurt Waldheim.”

Austria has recently intensified its diplomatic drive to win acceptance of Waldheim among Western governments that were put off by disclosures concerning his war record.

End to Ban Sought

Tuesday, in two diplomatic notes handed to the U.S. State Department in Washington, Austria urged the Reagan Administration to drop its ban on Waldheim’s entering the country and also asked that the United States refrain from sending suspected war criminals to Austria.

Among the accusations that led to Waldheim’s banishment were charges that while he served with Nazi forces in Yugoslavia and Greece, he was involved in reprisals against hostages, deportation of civilians to concentration camps, deportation of Jews from Greece, mistreatment of Allied war prisoners and the use of anti-Semitic propaganda. Waldheim, 68, who served as U.N. chief from 1972 to 1982, has denied the charges.