BishopAccountability.org
	Cover-Up in Poland By John McGreevy dotCommonweal [Poland] January 10, 2007 http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/post/index/697/Coverup-in-Poland More today in the New York Times about Polish priests and bishops serving as informers for the secret police during the era of Communist control. (The just-about-to-be installed archbishop of Warsaw resigned this week because of such revelations.) The Times, Richard John Neuhaus and others are comparing these revelations to the sex abuse that rocked the U.S. church, beginning in Boston five years ago . The comparison strikes me as dubious in one sense: the grey areas surrounding cooperation with, threats by and manipulation of the secret police in a dictatorship are surely more vast than those surrounding sexual relations by vowed celibates with minors or students under their supervision. I recommend Timothy Garton Ash's smart book, "The File", which details Ash's uncovering his own secret police file in East Germany. But the comparision makes a great deal of sense in another way: as in the United States the first reaction of the episcopacy is denial and cover-up in order to prevent scandal. And as in the United States the scandal now must include the cover-up and raise grave questions about the process of episcopal appointment. That John Paul II's closest advisor in his waning years, Cardinal Stanislas Dziwisz, has been less than forthright, according to the Times story, may help us better understand the feeble Vatican response in the first months of the American sexual abuse crisis.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.