A 2nd blow to the Roman Catholic Church in Poland

A second prominent Polish clergyman left his post Monday amid allegations he collaborated with secret services of the Communist era, a day after Warsaw's newly appointed archbishop resigned in a similar scandal that shocked the nation.

The Reverend Janusz Bielanski resigned as rector, or head priest, of Krakow's prestigious Wawel Cathedral, burial place to Polish kings and queens, according to Robert Necek, a spokesman for the Krakow church.

Bielanski submitted his resignation to Krakow's archbishop, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, "in connection with repeated allegations about his cooperation with the secret services" of the Communist era, Necek said.

Dziwisz, longtime secretary of the late Pope John Paul II, "accepted the resignation," Necek added. John Paul served as priest and later archbishop of Krakow before his election as pontiff.

The move comes a day after Stanislaw Wielgus, archbishop of Warsaw only since Friday, stepped aside in a dramatic announcement made during what was supposed to have been his installation Mass. The revelations about him, and his sudden resignation, have rattled Poland and revealed deep divisions within the church.

Also Monday, Poland's top bishop, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, faced media criticism for defending Wielgus — a stance that put him at odds with the Vatican and many Polish faithful.

A Vatican spokesman, the Reverend Federico Lombardi, said Wielgus was right to resign because his past actions had "gravely compromised his authority."

But Glemp, who has served as Warsaw archbishop for the past 25 years and will continue in office until a successor is found, delivered a homily defending Wielgus. He called him "God's servant" and warned of the dangers of passing judgment based on incomplete and flawed documents left behind by the Communist authorities.

The Dziennik daily called Glemp's defense a "huge mistake."

"The primate stood before the faithful to tell them clearly that 'if it were up to me, Wielgus would have become archbishop,'" Dziennik's editor-in- chief Robert Krasowski wrote on the paper's front page. "He presented Wielgus as a victim of an assault, an innocent, hunted person. He didn't even mention that the archbishop lied to the last minute. That he lied to the pope, bishops and faithful."

Wielgus, 67, had tried to minimize reports of his collaboration, which surfaced two weeks after the pope named him to the job on Dec. 6. He insisted that his contacts with the country's feared Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, or Security Service, were benign and routine.

Wielgus may have believed that there were no longer documents linking him to the secret police. General 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 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 Polish media published the documents, though he maintains that he did not spy on anyone or hurt anyone.

Two groups of experts, one from the church, said that the documents proved Wielgus's willingness to work for the secret police even though they do not prove what he did.

That judgment set in motion negotiations with the Vatican that ended with his resignation Sunday.

Any cooperation between the Polish clergy and the Communist-era secret police is troubling to Poles, as it is to people all over the former Soviet bloc. The Polish church under John Paul was considered a beacon of hope and encouragement to people opposing the Communists.

Poland screened thousands of people for past Communist Party collaboration in the early 1990s, but the process lost momentum until President Lech Kaczynski revived it last year. He has argued that the country's 1989 transition left much of the former Communist apparatus in place, fueling corruption and distorting democracy. He says that Polish society cannot move forward without making a clean break 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.

Wielgus 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 Josef 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. John Paul appointed him bishop of Plock, north of Warsaw, in 1999 and he served in that post until being named archbishop of Warsaw.

The drama over 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 Glemp in a homily defending the prelate at the Mass on Sunday. "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 Wielgus in his new job, the program to purge former collaborators would have been severely weakened, said Jonas 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.

Source:International Herald Tribune, iht.com