By Craig S. Smith
dotCommonweal [Poland]
January 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/10/world/europe/10poland.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=world
Krakow, Poland, Jan. 9 — Poland was convulsed in finger-pointing and recrimination on Tuesday as more allegations of former secret-police collaborators among the Roman Catholic clergy members spilled onto the country's front pages, sullying an institution that for decades was considered spotless in its fight against Communism.
And the stream of disclosures now promises to become a torrent: here in Krakow, the Rev. Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski is preparing to publish a book that will identify 39 priests whose names he found in Krakow's secret police files, three of whom are now bishops in the Polish church.
Perhaps the most explosive assertion by people in the church is that the taint of collaboration was known for decades but kept quiet out of respect for — or perhaps even at the behest of — the Polish-born Pope John Paul II, who died in 2005.
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| The Rev. Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski of Krakow, center, plans to publish a book that will identify 39 priests listed in the city’s secret police files. Photo by Anna Kaczmarz/Dziennik Polski |
"The church didn't want to hurt the pope, but actually, more harm was done by keeping silent," Father Zaleski, 50, said in an interview at the hilltop compound of a charity he runs outside Krakow.
The sudden focus on the fallibility of a church thought to be heroically anti-Communist followed the Vatican's choice of Bishop Stanislaw Wielgus as archbishop of Warsaw despite clear signals of his ties to Poland's secret police. Bishop Wielgus resigned Sunday after admitting his secret past.
"There is a sort of unholy alliance in Poland that has been present for many years, but is fully visible only recently, that is based on a culture of mendacity," said Andrzej Zybertowicz, professor of sociology at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, the heart of the Polish church's most conservative camp.
He argued that there were three elements of this alliance: former members of the secret police and the Communist Party who are now active in business and politics; apologists who wanted to forgive and forget past collaboration; and an influential part of the hierarchy of the Polish church.
Collaboration in the clergy is not unique to Poland. Church officials across the Communist world were commonly bent to ignoble service. Some of that has come to light as Eastern bloc countries have peered into their secret police archives.
But Poland is unique in that the church remained stronger there than elsewhere in the Communist world. That was largely because Poland's primate at the time, Archbishop Stefan Wyszynski, agreed to cooperate with the Communist authorities, preaching compromise — up to a point, beyond which he said the faithful should not yield.
Most researchers who have delved into the archives of the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, or Security Service, estimate that thousands of the country's priests, monks and nuns at the time — as many as 10 percent of the total — collaborated with the secret police to some degree.
Poland's current primate and archbishop of Warsaw, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, told an Italian news agency last year that the overall percentage was 15 percent. The percentage was likely to have been much higher in major cities and university towns, some historians say, where surveillance was heavier.
But the most troubling aspect of the recent allegations is how high past collaborators have climbed in the church hierarchy. On Tuesday, the Dziennik newspaper, the third largest daily in the country, reprinted excerpts from a secret 1978 police document concerning a dozen high-ranking church officials — at least one of whom was a bishop at the time — indicating that the secret police tried unsuccessfully to influence the appointment of a new primate of Poland, the highest position in the Polish church.
The document gave only code names, like Ramses (cited as a bishop), Professor and Shepherd, but the newspaper promised to disclose those identities soon.
The disclosures have gripped this deeply religious nation — the largest bloc of devout Roman Catholics left in Europe — and sparked anger toward the church for letting the frenzied news media disclose them, rather than researching the archives and reporting the findings on its own.
"The church is guilty because it had the possibility to cleanse itself by publishing honest data about the clergy's activities during the Communist time," Father Zaleski said. The church argues that coming to terms with the past is a matter of personal sin that should be handled within the church in a spirit of forgiveness. It also argues that the public disclosure of secret service files on clergy members could do the church harm because many of the documents are false or misleading.
But many people say the church has been overly cautious for fear of tarnishing its Communist-era image as a champion of freedom.
But the church is caught in the dilemma of risking a loss of trust whether it explores the collaboration or continues to treat it as an internal matter. The results could be as bad for the Vatican as they are for the Polish church, because Rome had hoped the church could keep this bastion of the faithful in an otherwise fast secularizing Europe.
Church officials now say that collaboration by some of the Polish clergy members was a quietly understood fact of life under the Communist government that ran Poland from 1944 until 1989.
That was obscured while the pope was still alive. But not even two weeks after his death, in April 2005, the Institute of National Remembrance published documents that showed that the Rev. Konrad Stanislaw Hejmo, a Dominican priest posted to the Vatican, passed information to the secret service's antichurch branch. Father Hejmo admitted giving the information but denied that he was a spy.
During the 25th anniversary celebrations for the Solidarity trade union in Gdansk that August, a friend told Father Zaleski that there was a secret police file on him in Krakow. When he returned to the city, Father Zaleski visited the archives and was stunned to find a file crammed with 500 pages of documents about him.
"I was shocked by that," Father Zaleski said in his garret office. He was even more troubled when he read that two priests had provided the secret police information on his activities. Though the priests were identified only by code names, they were described so precisely, he said, that he knew who they were.
"I just couldn't imagine that there were priests who had cooperated with the secret police," he said.
He sought guidance from the Krakow archbishop, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, a longtime personal secretary to Pope John Paul II. But Father Zaleski said he was at first ignored and then told to pray. Eventually, his superiors advised that he burn the documents.
"They weren't interested at all in knowing anything about this," he said, rifling through a stack of photocopies stamped by the Institute of National Remembrance.
In a meeting with former Solidarity members at a Krakow-area steel mill last January, Father Zaleski suggested that the church authorities engage in "lustration," as the process of vetting people for past Communist collaboration is known in the former Eastern bloc.
Journalists attending the meeting wrote about Father Zaleski's suggestion. "It started a storm among the church authorities in Krakow," he recalled. "The archbishop's office published an open letter condemning my activities." He decided to undertake the project alone and promised to publish his findings.
The church, meanwhile, publicly acknowledged that some of its clergy members had collaborated and issued an apology for their sins in March. It called on priests, monks and nuns who had collaborated with the secret services to confess — to the church if not publicly. Seven of the country's 41 Roman Catholic dioceses have since set up commissions to help priests review their files. But none of the commissions has issued a report on its findings.
The disclosures continued, each more shocking than the last. In May, the Rev. Michal Czajkowski, co-president of Poland's Council of Christians and Jews, was accused of having spied for the secret police for 24 years. He resigned his posts and issued an apology.
Next, the press accused the Rev. Mieczyslaw Malinski, a close lifelong friend of Pope John Paul, of collaborating under the code name Delta. Father Malinski admitted having had contacts with the secret police but denied that he was a spy.
When Father Zaleski decided to begin publishing disclosures in May, Cardinal Dziwisz forbade him to do so or to speak to the press because it would undermine "love for the church and Christ." The cardinal issued an order prohibiting any member of the clergy from delving into Krakow's secret police archives without his authorization.
But after he met with Cardinal Dziwisz in June, the archbishop agreed to let him proceed on the condition that Father Zaleski seek comment from the clergymen he intended to identify.
Cardinal Dziwisz could not be reached for comment.
The Rev. Jozef Kloch, the Warsaw episcopate spokesman, said that while Father Zaleski "can publish whatever he likes, he and his editorial office will be responsible for the consequences."
Father Zaleski found the 39 priests identified as "TWs," short for tajny wspolpracownik, or secret collaborator. Four of them are now bishops.
Of the 39, 22 answered his request for comment, the majority denying that they were collaborators, and 4 admitting that they were. One of those who he wrote to was the Rev. Janusz Bielanski, who resigned as rector of Wawel Cathedral here on Monday, citing the allegations.
Only one of the bishops responded, and he supplied Father Zaleski with documents that showed he had refused to cooperate with the secret police. But the three bishops who did not respond, along with the other priests, will be identified in his book, which goes to print in mid-February.
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