Posted on 01/04/2007 3:41:18 PM PST by lizol
Spy Charges Against New Archbishop Shake Poland
07:07 PM, January 4th 2007 by News Staff
Bells will toll Sunday when Stanislaw Wielgus is inducted as Warsaw's new archbishop, succeeding Cardinal Jozef Glemp.
But din of another kind is dominating now, and Catholic journalist Kazimierz Sowa is not alone in seeing "black clouds" hanging over Wielgus' accession to one of the most important posts in Poland's Catholic Church.
Archbishop Wielgus, 67 years old and formerly the bishop of Plock, is alleged to have spied for years on his fellow priests.
Historian and civil rights' ombudsman Andrzej Paczkowski, who set up a historians' commission to examine the secret service's documents, said Thursday he had "no doubt at all" that Wielgus was an informant.
Various Polish media say they also have proof of his involvement with the country's communist-era secret service. The news magazine Wprost reported that Wielgus had signed a pledge to work for the secret service in 1973, and in return had received a passport to study in Munich.
On Thursday, the newspaper Rzeczpospolitia said it had documents indicating that Wielgus had performed "covert, deliberate secret- service work."
"It's not too late yet," the paper wrote in an editorial, saying that Wielgus' induction should be postponed until his secret-service file had been examined and the allegations could be either substantiated or refuted.
That could happen soon. This week a commission appointed by Poland's bishops began work at the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), which is responsible for dealing with Poland's communist past and administers the archives containing the secret-service files. Wielgus' dossier is to be one of the first that is scrutinized.
Jozef Kloch, the Polish bishops' spokesman, said there would be a statement on their position on Wielgus before Sunday. Poland's PAP news agency cited anonymous Vatican sources as saying the Vatican was "analysing the situation" and was waiting for the results of the historians' investigations.
Originally the Vatican had expressed its "full trust" in Wielgus, who claimed his contact with the secret service was routine. "If you wanted a passport, you couldn't tell the secret service to get lost," he said in an interview.
Only the pope or Wielgus can decide whether or not he should take up his office, church legal expert Remigiusz Sobanski said.
Going into damage-control mode on Tuesday evening, Wielgus called for an examination of his file - too late, in the opinion of many observers, to prevent harm to his office and the church.
The controversy surrounding Wielgus is no isolated case. For more than a year, suspicions - and also proof - of clerics collaborating with the secret service have shaken the Catholic Church in Poland.
Collaboration is hardly surprising. Poland's communist-era secret service is known to have had a special section that spied on the country's powerful and influential Catholic Church.
Karol Wojtyla alone - then archbishop of Krakow and later Pope John Paul II - is said to have had about 20 informers assigned to him.
Priests who supported the trade union Solidarity and political dissidents during martial law in the 1980s, and who have discovered from their own files that fellow priests spied on them, are among those demanding an internal Church probe of secret-service links.
Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski, once Solidarity's curate in Krakow, began an investigation of his own but got a gag order from the Krakow curia.
Like many members of the episcopate, Jozef Glemp, head of the Catholic Church in Poland, had been hesitant to launch an internal probe.
Media reports about clerics having worked as secret-service informers were dismissed as attacks on the church. But then prominent priests such as Michal Czajkowski, responsible for Catholics' dialogue with Jews, were exposed as former collaborators.
The commission appointed by the bishops is now beginning poring over the secret-service dossiers.
Pope Benedict XVI gave Polish priests who had assembled in Warsaw Cathedral last May some advice on how to deal with possibly painful revelations: "One must avoid the arrogance of someone judging previous generations that lived in different times and under different circumstances."
In a radio interview on Thursday, journalist Sowa, a priest himself, expressed the hope for clarifying words from Wielgus personally as well as from the Vatican.
There is already a danger of "a certain crisis of authority," Sowa warned. "A clear position is the best solution when we're dealing with a difficult past."
This is really sad situation for the Polish Church.
**This is really sad situation**
Very sad.
"This is really sad situation for the Polish Church. " - It depends on how one looks at it. It is sad for the commie scum exposed and about to be exposed. But if looked at from a different angle, it could be seen as a joyous occasion to get rid of those who should not be there in the first place.
It's not enough to give a statement. He needs to toss down the silver pieces, find an ash tree and hang himself.
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