Poland Enters `National Crisis’ As Scandal Rocks Catholic Church
WARSAW, Poland _ The stunning resignation of Warsaw’s newly appointed archbishop just hours before his inaugural mass, followed by warnings of more disclosures about senior clerics who collaborated with Communist-era authorities, has rocked the foundations of this most Roman Catholic of European countries.
The prime minister called the scandal a “national crisis.” Many of the faithful are worried that the moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church will be compromised in the country where a young archbishop named Karol Wojtyla openly opposed the communist regime from his base in Krakow before he took the throne of St. Peter as Pope John Paul II.
The revelations and subsequent resignation of Bishop Stanislaw Wielgus were for many Poles a painful reminder of the days when they feared their government, and a bitter confirmation that thousands of those who consoled them from the pulpit may have in fact been informing on them.
Opinion polls indicated that most people want the church to reveal still more about its past. Church leaders asked a panel of experts Friday to examine the files of the country’s bishops, but said they would only turn over their findings to the Vatican “to judge and assess.”
Archbishop Jozef Michalik, chairman of the Polish Bishop’s Conference that made the decision, called the issue “painful and a humiliation” but also “a process of maturing for the church in the new reality.”
The fact that several thousand priests served as informants has been part of the historical record for years. This was almost inevitable given that the enemy Poland’s communist leaders most feared was the Catholic Church, especially after 1978 when the Archbishop of Krakow became Pope John Paul II.
Janusz Kurtyka, the young historian who heads the Institute of National Remembrance, the agency responsible for investigating the secret police files, compared the situation to a Greek tragedy.
“The church was an institution like any other, and it was infiltrated with agents just like any other,” he said in an interview with the Tribune just before the present scandal broke. “But the church was also an institution without which our march to freedom would have been impossible.”
When the communist regime fell in 1989, Poland’s new democratic leaders decided that the best way to proceed was to draw “a thick line” separating the present from the past. The hope was that time would heal the wounds, and all the betrayals would recede softly into the mists of history.
That turned out to be overly optimistic. The former communists _ now reformed communists _ proved to be nimble in recovering their position at the top of the political and economic ladder. Corruption became rife in the new free-market Poland, and the resentment of ordinary people, especially the 10 million who had been members of the Solidarity movement, grew.
Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the piously Catholic identical twins who serve, respectively, as Poland’s president and prime minister, were carried to power in the 2005 election on a promise to root out “the post-communist monster” that many believe haunts the country.
Last month, President Kaczynski signed a new “lustration” bill that opens millions of volumes of communist-era secret police files to public scrutiny. No one doubted that files would contain embarrassing information about church collaboration.
“The communists considered the church their No. 1 enemy,” said Kurtyka. “So one can assume the degree and the mechanisms of infiltration were particularly nasty.”
Poland’s secret police, the SB, opened a filed on every seminarian. Every priest had an agent assigned to his case. To recruit collaborators and informants, the SB used a range of carrots and sticks.
In the case of Bishop Wielgus, the man at the center of the present controversy, his weak spot was an ambition to study medieval philosophy at German universities.
As a doctoral student at Lublin’s Catholic University in the late 1960s, the young priest was eager to pursue his studies abroad. In order to obtain a passport and permission to travel, he agreed to cooperate with the SB. The “cooperation” lasted for at least a decade, according to two panels that examined the IPN files after a Polish newspaper first raised doubts about Wielgus.
Both panels _ one appointed by the Polish bishops and the other by the state ombudsman _ reached the same conclusion: “Numerous, essential documents exist that confirm Rev. Stanislaw Wielgus’ willingness for conscious and secret collaboration with the security organs of communist Poland,” according to the bishop’s panel.
When confronted with these findings, Wielgus claimed he signed one document of collaboration “in a moment of weakness” after he was “forced with fists,” and that he never harmed anyone. He also said he that he disclosed this information to Pope Benedict XVI, but the Vatican says the pope knew nothing of Wielgus’ past at the time the appointment was made.
Zbigniew Nosowski, a member of the ombudsman’s panel, said it was possible the infamy suffered by Wielgus as a result of the disclosures “may not be proportional to his sins” as a collaborator.
“I compare this story with the American debate about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. It’s not so much about whether he did or did not have sex, he did not tell the full truth when he was asked,” said Nosowski, the editor of Wiez, a respected Catholic magazine.
Others who have seen the files say there is some evidence that while Wielgus agreed to serve as an informant, he failed _ perhaps purposely _ to deliver much.
But that misses the point, said Nosowski. “The SB was interested not only in information, they also were interested in weakening the church by compromising its priests,” he said. “Most priests refused. It was not so difficult to say no.”
The revelations about Wielgus inevitably raise questions about how much Pope John Paul II knew about the collaboration of the Polish clergy, and whether he should have been more forceful in insisting that the church acknowledge its failings. Historians are likely to be forgiving in their judgments: by the time the secret records became legally available to researchers in 2004, the pope was a dying man of diminished capacity.
No one who has had access to the files has ever claimed to have found anything damaging to John Paul II.
The details of Wielgus’ collaboration were first published by Gazeta Polska, a weekly newspaper that is generally sympathetic to the Kaczynskis’ conservative Catholic agenda. The story came out on Dec. 20, two weeks after Wielgus’ appointment was announced by the Vatican.
Tomasz Sakiewicz, the paper’s editor, said he was presented with Wielgus’ file by a confidential source, and decided to publish the story after concluding that the archbishop’s collaboration was much more extensive than a one-off moment of weakness.
According to Sakiewicz, SB summaries of its contacts with Wielgus suggested that he secretly tape-recorded fellow priests and steered SB agents to others who might be recruited.
Before publishing its first story, the newspaper confronted Wielgus with its findings.
“He responded the way SB agents are trained to respond. He said that everything was untrue,” said Sakiewicz.
Sakiewicz, who considers his newspaper to be part of Poland’s independent Catholic press, said it was “a miracle” that prevented “one of the most important communist spies in the church from becoming the most important bishop in Poland.”
Fallout from the story has rocked the church hierarchy, the faithful and Poland’s political leaders.
At least one member of parliament from the Kaczynskis’ Law and Justice Party has demanded the arrest of the Gazeta Polska journalists who published the story, but others from the party have been quietly supportive, according to Sakiewicz.
Last Sunday, at the mass that was supposed to have marked Wielgus’ elevation to the archbishop’s throne but instead produced his dramatic downfall, two of Sakiewicz’s reporters were roughed up by church-goers. In another city, a Gazeta Polska journalist was severely beaten by skinheads.
The mass was attended by President Kaczynski, who applauded when Wielgus announced his resignation from the altar, but he quickly stopped when he heard the cries of support for the archbishop from the back of church.
For the Kaczynskis, the scandal poses a tricky dilemma. They came to power by promising to settle scores with the old regime. They certainly understood that this would involve some collateral damage to the church, but they expected that delving into the SB files would focus the spotlight on those who ran the system, not on their collaborators, who in many cases could be seen as victims.
Opinion surveys show that Poles, by a 2-1 ratio, agree that Wielgus’ resignation was necessary. They also want the church to come clean about its past. But the minority who see the disclosures as an unfair attack on the church tend to be the rural Catholics who voted for the Kaczynskis or for their coalition partner, the Catholic nationalist League of Polish Families.
Radio Maryja, a notorious but influential ultra-Catholic radio station favored by the Kaczynskis, claims the revelations about Wielgus are part of a media conspiracy.
Cardinal Jozef Glemp, the man Wielgus was supposed to replace, also blames the messenger. Glemp, who established a reputation for being politically tone-deaf during his 26 years as primate of Poland, was dismissive of the evidence in the SB files, calling them “scraps of paper and documents photocopied for a third time.”
But others say the church has no choice but to come clean if it hopes to maintain its position of moral authority in Poland.
“What’s at stake . . . is the credibility of the church,” said Nosowski, the Wiez editor. “If the church demands high standards of morality from those in public life, it has to demand even higher standards of itself.”
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