To the Editor:

So many vile things were in the Sept. 3 Op-Ed article by Leon Wieseltier (''At Auschwitz, Decency Dies Again'') that I am hesitant to take up, as inconsequential, his malicious distortion of my words.

He described the Carmelite convent there as ''morbid,'' the shadow of the cross of Christ over Auschwitz as ''sickening.'' He slandered Pius XII (''evidence of the Vatican's indifference to the fate of the Jews is overwhelming'') and indicted Christianity for the Holocaust: ''The Jews of Europe were almost completely exterminated by Christians who called themselves Christians.''

Remarkable. As a boy, I recall my father driving us to the depot to say goodbye to my mother's four brothers as they went off to war. Not until reading Mr. Wieseltier did I realize that the Nazis they fought - Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich and Hess - were not racist pagans at all, but fellow ''Christians who called themselves Christians.''

Mr. Wieseltier charges that I ''wrote that those who call for sensitivity to the Jews'' - in the convent controversy - ''are guilty of a 'blood libel' against Catholicism.'' That is a lie. What I called blood libel was the charge that Pope Pius XII, and my church, were moral accessories to mass murder.