What a shock!
08 Jan '07 07:15http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/08/world/europe/08poland.html?ei=5094&en=f7c90dfd9c7901fd&hp=&ex=1168318800&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print
January 8, 2007
New Warsaw Archbishop Quits Over Communist Collaboration
By CRAIG S. SMITH
WARSAW, Jan. 7 — The newly appointed archbishop of Warsaw, Stanislaw Wielgus, abruptly resigned on Sunday at a Mass meant to celebrate his new position after having admitted two days earlier that he had worked with the Polish Communist-era secret police.
There is no direct evidence that Bishop Wielgus spied on any of his fellow clergy members. But the revelation and the resignation have shaken one of Europe’s largest concentrations of Catholics and refocused scrutiny on collaboration with the Communist government by some of the clergy in Poland even as the church was supporting dissidents trying to free themselves from that political system.
Moments before he was to symbolically ascend to his new place in the church hierarchy by taking his seat on the archbishop’s throne at St. John’s Cathedral in Warsaw, Bishop Wielgus read from a letter he had sent Pope Benedict XVI earlier in the day offering his resignation “after reflecting deeply and assessing my personal situation.”
A roar of shock arose from the crowd inside the cathedral and stunned many people watching the proceedings live on television. The Vatican had announced the resignation a half hour earlier, though few had heard the news.
“Stay with us, we want you here!” people in the church shouted as a clearly troubled Bishop Wielgus removed his glasses and sat down beside Warsaw’s departing archbishop, Cardinal Jozef Glemp.
The Vatican reappointed Cardinal Glemp to the position until a new archbishop could be found, and he took the throne instead. But Cardinal Glemp, who supported Bishop Wielgus’s promotion, was also clearly troubled by the sudden turn of events and defended him later in his homily.
The Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, who was sitting at the front of the congregation, applauded Bishop Wielgus’s resignation then stopped, apparently realizing that the commotion from the crowd was overwhelmingly against it. Mr. Kaczynski has led the country’s renewed efforts to expose former Communist secret police agents and their informants.
Outside the cathedral, scuffles erupted between supporters and detractors of the bishop among the hundreds of Catholics gathered beneath umbrellas in the rain. Some of his supporters shouted that “Jews” were trying to destroy the church. Anti-Semitism, long present in Poland, is a particular problem within some conservative branches of the Polish Catholic church.
The resignation of an archbishop, or even a bishop, so soon after an appointment is rare, if not unprecedented, and raises questions about how he could have been given the job with such serious doubts surrounding his past.
Bishop Wielgus, 67, had tried to minimize reports of his collaboration, which surfaced two weeks after the pope appointed him to the post on Dec. 6. He insisted that his contacts with the country’s feared Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, or Security Service, were benign and routine.
Bishop Wielgus may have believed that there were no longer documents linking him to the secret police. Gen. Czeslaw Kiszczak, who served as chief of secret services and minister of internal affairs during the Communist years, told the Polish clergy in the early 1990s that all files related to them had been destroyed, according to Adrzej Jonas, editor of the Warsaw Voice, a weekly newsmagazine. But microfilm of some of the documents on Bishop Wielgus survived. They do not include any reports written by the bishop, though in one document a secret police agent praised him for providing information on fellow priests while teaching at the Catholic University of Lublin. He admitted deeper involvement Friday after the Polish news media published the documents, though he maintained that he did not spy on anyone or hurt anyone. Two groups of experts, one from the church, said the documents proved his willingness to work for the secret police even though they did not prove what he did.
That judgment set in motion negotiations with the Vatican that ended with his resignation. In its statement, the Vatican said the charges surrounding Bishop Wielgus had “gravely compromised his authority.”
Allegations that the secret service archives contained incriminating documents concerning Bishop Wielgus first appeared in the Polish media in the middle of 2006, shortly after he was mentioned as a potential successor to Cardinal Glemp. The documents that led to his resignation had been located by Dec. 20, when the Polish news media began reporting their contents.
Still, the Vatican was sufficiently confident of Bishop Wielgus’s innocence to allow him to take the canonical vows for the post Friday. It even reissued a statement saying that it had taken into account “all the circumstances of his life, including those regarding his past,” and that Pope Benedict had “every confidence” in him.
Many people believe that the pope changed his mind only after personally reviewing the documents in question or at the urging of Polish government officials.
“Definitely there must have been somebody very high up, maybe the president, who was in touch with the Vatican,” said Zbigniew Lewicki, a professor at the University of Warsaw. “Otherwise, why would he have changed his mind without anything new surfacing.”
It is the second major miscalculation by Pope Benedict since he was chosen as pontiff in April 2005. In September, he caused an uproar among Muslims with a speech he gave in Germany that seemed to equate Islam with violence.
Any cooperation between the Polish clergy and the secret police is troubling to Poles because the church under the Polish-born pope, John Paul II, was considered a beacon of hope and encouragement to people opposing the Communists.
That the head of the Warsaw archdiocese could be a former Communist collaborator would have been a cruel twist for many people here who remember the murder of Rev. Jerzy Popieluszko, one of the first priests from the influential archdiocese to support the pro-democracy Solidarity movement. He was beaten to death by police agents in 1984. They dumped his body in a reservoir.
Poland screened thousands of people for past Communist collaboration in the early 1990s, but the process lost momentum until President Kaczynski revived it last year. He has argued that the country’s 1989 transition left much of the Communist apparatus in place, fueling corruption and distorting democracy. He says society cannot move forward without breaking with that past.
But many people argue that the secret police files are in many cases too incomplete or unreliable for conclusive judgments and are too easily manipulated for political ends.
It was not clear what Bishop Wielgus would do in the wake of the resignation. The bishop said his contact with the secret police started when he applied to study in what was then West Germany.
He spent 1973-75 at the University of Munich and went there again in 1978 when Pope Benedict, then Joseph Ratzinger, was teaching there. He spent the rest of his career teaching philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin, where he served three terms as rector. Pope John Paul II appointed him bishop of Plock, north of Warsaw, in 1999 and he served in that post until being appointed archbishop of Warsaw.
The drama over Bishop Wielgus was, in part, a battle between opposing forces in the Polish church — mirrored in societies across the post-Soviet bloc — between those willing to forgive and forget and those who insist that past Communist collaborators be exposed and be excluded from positions of authority.
“Today a judgment was passed on Bishop Wielgus,” said Cardinal Glemp in a homily defending the prelate that was interrupted repeatedly by applause. “But what kind of judgment was it, based on shreds of paper photocopied three times over? We do not want such judgments.”
Had the church managed to keep Bishop Wielgus in his new job, the program to purge former collaborators would have been severely weakened, Mr. Jonas of the Warsaw Voice said.
“It wouldn’t be possible to accuse somebody or blame somebody for being a spy or former member of the secret service if the archbishop of Warsaw was himself one,” he said.
January 8, 2007
New Warsaw Archbishop Quits Over Communist Collaboration
By CRAIG S. SMITH
WARSAW, Jan. 7 — The newly appointed archbishop of Warsaw, Stanislaw Wielgus, abruptly resigned on Sunday at a Mass meant to celebrate his new position after having admitted two days earlier that he had worked with the Polish Communist-era secret police.
There is no direct evidence that Bishop Wielgus spied on any of his fellow clergy members. But the revelation and the resignation have shaken one of Europe’s largest concentrations of Catholics and refocused scrutiny on collaboration with the Communist government by some of the clergy in Poland even as the church was supporting dissidents trying to free themselves from that political system.
Moments before he was to symbolically ascend to his new place in the church hierarchy by taking his seat on the archbishop’s throne at St. John’s Cathedral in Warsaw, Bishop Wielgus read from a letter he had sent Pope Benedict XVI earlier in the day offering his resignation “after reflecting deeply and assessing my personal situation.”
A roar of shock arose from the crowd inside the cathedral and stunned many people watching the proceedings live on television. The Vatican had announced the resignation a half hour earlier, though few had heard the news.
“Stay with us, we want you here!” people in the church shouted as a clearly troubled Bishop Wielgus removed his glasses and sat down beside Warsaw’s departing archbishop, Cardinal Jozef Glemp.
The Vatican reappointed Cardinal Glemp to the position until a new archbishop could be found, and he took the throne instead. But Cardinal Glemp, who supported Bishop Wielgus’s promotion, was also clearly troubled by the sudden turn of events and defended him later in his homily.
The Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, who was sitting at the front of the congregation, applauded Bishop Wielgus’s resignation then stopped, apparently realizing that the commotion from the crowd was overwhelmingly against it. Mr. Kaczynski has led the country’s renewed efforts to expose former Communist secret police agents and their informants.
Outside the cathedral, scuffles erupted between supporters and detractors of the bishop among the hundreds of Catholics gathered beneath umbrellas in the rain. Some of his supporters shouted that “Jews” were trying to destroy the church. Anti-Semitism, long present in Poland, is a particular problem within some conservative branches of the Polish Catholic church.
The resignation of an archbishop, or even a bishop, so soon after an appointment is rare, if not unprecedented, and raises questions about how he could have been given the job with such serious doubts surrounding his past.
Bishop Wielgus, 67, had tried to minimize reports of his collaboration, which surfaced two weeks after the pope appointed him to the post on Dec. 6. He insisted that his contacts with the country’s feared Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, or Security Service, were benign and routine.
Bishop Wielgus may have believed that there were no longer documents linking him to the secret police. Gen. Czeslaw Kiszczak, who served as chief of secret services and minister of internal affairs during the Communist years, told the Polish clergy in the early 1990s that all files related to them had been destroyed, according to Adrzej Jonas, editor of the Warsaw Voice, a weekly newsmagazine. But microfilm of some of the documents on Bishop Wielgus survived. They do not include any reports written by the bishop, though in one document a secret police agent praised him for providing information on fellow priests while teaching at the Catholic University of Lublin. He admitted deeper involvement Friday after the Polish news media published the documents, though he maintained that he did not spy on anyone or hurt anyone. Two groups of experts, one from the church, said the documents proved his willingness to work for the secret police even though they did not prove what he did.
That judgment set in motion negotiations with the Vatican that ended with his resignation. In its statement, the Vatican said the charges surrounding Bishop Wielgus had “gravely compromised his authority.”
Allegations that the secret service archives contained incriminating documents concerning Bishop Wielgus first appeared in the Polish media in the middle of 2006, shortly after he was mentioned as a potential successor to Cardinal Glemp. The documents that led to his resignation had been located by Dec. 20, when the Polish news media began reporting their contents.
Still, the Vatican was sufficiently confident of Bishop Wielgus’s innocence to allow him to take the canonical vows for the post Friday. It even reissued a statement saying that it had taken into account “all the circumstances of his life, including those regarding his past,” and that Pope Benedict had “every confidence” in him.
Many people believe that the pope changed his mind only after personally reviewing the documents in question or at the urging of Polish government officials.
“Definitely there must have been somebody very high up, maybe the president, who was in touch with the Vatican,” said Zbigniew Lewicki, a professor at the University of Warsaw. “Otherwise, why would he have changed his mind without anything new surfacing.”
It is the second major miscalculation by Pope Benedict since he was chosen as pontiff in April 2005. In September, he caused an uproar among Muslims with a speech he gave in Germany that seemed to equate Islam with violence.
Any cooperation between the Polish clergy and the secret police is troubling to Poles because the church under the Polish-born pope, John Paul II, was considered a beacon of hope and encouragement to people opposing the Communists.
That the head of the Warsaw archdiocese could be a former Communist collaborator would have been a cruel twist for many people here who remember the murder of Rev. Jerzy Popieluszko, one of the first priests from the influential archdiocese to support the pro-democracy Solidarity movement. He was beaten to death by police agents in 1984. They dumped his body in a reservoir.
Poland screened thousands of people for past Communist collaboration in the early 1990s, but the process lost momentum until President Kaczynski revived it last year. He has argued that the country’s 1989 transition left much of the Communist apparatus in place, fueling corruption and distorting democracy. He says society cannot move forward without breaking with that past.
But many people argue that the secret police files are in many cases too incomplete or unreliable for conclusive judgments and are too easily manipulated for political ends.
It was not clear what Bishop Wielgus would do in the wake of the resignation. The bishop said his contact with the secret police started when he applied to study in what was then West Germany.
He spent 1973-75 at the University of Munich and went there again in 1978 when Pope Benedict, then Joseph Ratzinger, was teaching there. He spent the rest of his career teaching philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin, where he served three terms as rector. Pope John Paul II appointed him bishop of Plock, north of Warsaw, in 1999 and he served in that post until being appointed archbishop of Warsaw.
The drama over Bishop Wielgus was, in part, a battle between opposing forces in the Polish church — mirrored in societies across the post-Soviet bloc — between those willing to forgive and forget and those who insist that past Communist collaborators be exposed and be excluded from positions of authority.
“Today a judgment was passed on Bishop Wielgus,” said Cardinal Glemp in a homily defending the prelate that was interrupted repeatedly by applause. “But what kind of judgment was it, based on shreds of paper photocopied three times over? We do not want such judgments.”
Had the church managed to keep Bishop Wielgus in his new job, the program to purge former collaborators would have been severely weakened, Mr. Jonas of the Warsaw Voice said.
“It wouldn’t be possible to accuse somebody or blame somebody for being a spy or former member of the secret service if the archbishop of Warsaw was himself one,” he said.
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