Hat tip to Hilary for sharing this article.
Things in Poland are heating up. Will this lead to other countries as well?
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.
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(T)he 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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(Fr. Zaleski) 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.
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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.
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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.
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