Polish bishops to bare souls for Catholic Church probe into communist past
Pastor Dale Morgan
Saturday January 13, 4:04 AM
*Polish bishops to bare souls for Catholic Church probe into communist past*
Polish bishops agreed to bare their souls and allow a special commission
to delve into their pasts to see if they were communist agents, as the
Catholic Church scrambled to resolve the worst crisis in its recent history.
At an emergency meeting to try to resolve a crisis sparked Sunday when
Stanislaw Wielgus resigned as archbishop of Warsaw after confessing to
collaborating with the communist secret police, the 45-member bishops'
council also set the Church the gargantuan task of looking into the
pasts of all Poland's 27,000 priests and countless other clergy and
religious.
"We will ask a special commission to check the past of all our bishops,"
the head of the council of bishops, Jozef Michalik, told reporters after
the emergency meeting.
The bishops who attended the closed-door meeting have agreed to be
investigated, and the episcopate will formally widen the probe to
include all of Poland's 133 bishops when it holds a plenary meeting in
March, Bishop Piotr Libera of the bishops' council said.
The final decision as to whether a bishop will be allowed to remain in
office will be taken by the Vatican, Libera said.
"After the historic commission and experts have submitted their reports,
the information will be sent to the Holy See. There is no court in
Poland that is qualified to pass judgment on a bishop. A bishop can only
be judged by the Holy Father or by a Vatican tribunal."
Investigations would also be set up "at diocese level to check priests
and other clergy members", Libera said, but the effectiveness of such a
huge task was doubtful.
The so-called historic commissions that conduct probes into a cleric's
past can only be set up at the behest and with the agreement of the
person who is to be investigated.
Some dioceses have already set up historic commissions to look into the
still painful issue of whether members of the Roman Catholic clergy
collaborated with the hated communists, but others have refused to do so.
The probes threaten to open a Pandora's Box in Poland and further
tarnish the long-held image of the Church as a rampart in the fight
against communism, led by pope John Paul II, the former archbishop of
Krakow Karol Wojtyla.
Historians' estimates that one in 10 clergy members collaborated with
the detested Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa communist police have already
besmirched the image of the Church in this country where some 90 percent
of the population of 38.5 million profess to be Catholic.
Many Poles clung steadfastly to their faith during communist rule, which
lasted from the end of World War II until 1990.
Wielgus' resignation on Sunday, during what was supposed to be his
formal induction into office in an opulent service in Warsaw Cathedral,
has already lifted the lid on a shadowy past that the Church would have
preferred to keep a secret.
As the bishops' council met in private Friday, a publishing house in
Krakow announced that it will next month publish a book by Roman
Catholic priest Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski, in which dozens of clerics
are expected to be named and shamed as communist collaborators.
The 50-year-old Zaleski penned his book after having access in 2005 to
the file kept on him by the communist secret police, when he was
chaplain in the 1980s for a branch of the Solidarity trade union.
"I discovered that, among those who informed on me, there were priests.
It came as a shock," recalled the bearded cleric, who was badly roughed
up twice by the reviled SB for his anti-communist activities.
Zaleski took his grim discovery to his superiors, to warn them that the
information in the archives "was a true time-bomb" for the Church.
"But the Church didn't do much," he said.
Cardinal Jozef Glemp, whom Wielgus was to have replaced as Archbishop of
Warsaw, has said an organised "smear campaign" was being waged against
the Church.
But on Friday, Michalski insisted the Church "is not afraid of the
truth, no matter how difficult or shameful it might be."
"The quest for the truth is sometimes painful," he added.