Posted on 01/09/2007 10:58:43 AM PST by lizol
Polish leader: Scandal weighs on church
RYAN LUCAS Associated Press
WARSAW, Poland - Poland faces "a national crisis" from the resignation by Warsaw's new archbishop after admitting he cooperated with the Communist-era secret police, the prime minister said Tuesday.
Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus stunned the faithful Sunday by stepping down minutes before his official installation Mass, a move that has rattled heavily Roman Catholic Poland.
Another prominent clergyman, the rector of Krakow's Wawel Cathedral, also left his post for similar reasons Monday amid warnings there may be more revelations coming.
The church is bracing for the publication of a book by a priest, the Rev. Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski, which he says will document the secret police's penetration of the church in Krakow.
A historical commission also plans to investigate how intelligence agents persecuted the Polish church in the 1980s - and is prepared to reveal any evidence it might find of collaborators among the clergy, said the Rev. Jozef Kloch, a spokesman for the commission.
Speaking on state Radio 1, Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski praised Pope Benedict XVI for accepting Wielgus' resignation, calling it "the right decision."
Kaczynski, whose conservative Law and Justice Party has sought both to purge Poland of the vestiges of Communist influence and to strengthen traditional Catholic values, also warned of the scandal's damage on the church, calling it both a religious and "national institution" in Poland.
"That's why this crisis is a national crisis, a very difficult crisis," he said.
Kaczynski stressed the church played an "unambiguously positive and heroic role" in opposing the communist regime that ruled Poland until 1989. Yet due to the current crisis, he said, the church is "almost accused of participation in the (Communist) system."
"We have to find a way out, above all, we have to very intensively make the nation aware of who the victims were and who the executioners were, and it's necessary to take care of the executioners," Kaczynski said.
He declined to specify, but said that 17 years after the fall of communism, Poland still needs to root out lingering secret police influences.
Ping
I don't see why it should be a huge a scandal. This thing got nipped in the bud, and that's a good thing. And while of course there may have been Communist gov't spies in the Church, it would be a complete rewriting of history to state that the Church and the former Pope had nothing to do with Solidarity and the overturning of Communism in Poland. I imagine that the liberal press in Poland, like here in the US, will grasp at and spin any story to put the Church in a negative light.
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