Warsaw Archbishop Denies He Was an Informant

Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus, the new Catholic prelate of Warsaw who is caught in eastern Europe’s widening hunt for former collaborators with the Communist-era secret police, denied today that he had ever spied for Poland’s Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, the security service known by its initials. He insisted that recently uncovered files naming him as an informant were filled with fabrications.

“The personality ascribed to me in the intelligence service documents is so far from the truth that I would never have recognized myself,” Archbishop Wielgus wrote in a statement issued today.

The Warsaw archbishopric is a particularly symbolic institution in the former Soviet bloc, because the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, together with the Polish-born Pope John Paul II, gave crucial support to the pro-democracy Solidarity movement, which helped bring down the totalitarian system and end the Cold War.

Suggestions that the new archbishop had collaborated with the S.B. are particularly troubling in Poland, because the S.B. murdered a charismatic anti-communist priest from the archdiocese, the Rev. Jerzy Popieluszko, in 1984. The retiring archbishop of Warsaw, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, was a tireless opponent of the Communist Party in those years.

Still, many historians say that a significant portion of the clergy in Poland and other Eastern-bloc countries collaborated to varying degrees with the secret services in the Communist years. Priests have recently been added to the other segments of civil society who are under scrutiny in several of the countries.

Two years ago, files surfaced showing that the Rev. Mieczyslaw Malinski, a Catholic priest who had been close to the late Pope John Paul II, worked for the S.B. in the 1980s. Several other prominent priests have since been accused of having once been S.B. informers, and some have acknowledged links to the old secret police. The Catholic Church in Poland publicly apologized last year for collaboration by some of its priests, but has tried to keep their names secret.

The uproar over Archbishop Wielgus’s past began shortly after the current pope, Benedict XVI, chose him to succeed Cardinal Glemp as Warsaw’s prelate beginning early last month. The Polish daily newspaper Gazeta Polska reported in December that Archbishop Wielgus, who is 67, spied on dissidents and fellow priests for more than two decades before the collapse of Communism in Poland in 1989.

Archbishop Wielgus denied the report at the time, saying that his only contacts with the S.B. had been routine interviews that were required for Poles wishing to travel abroad. Leading members of the Polish clergy denounced the accusations against him over the Christmas holidays.

But Poland’s human rights ombudsman, Janusz Kochanowski, said on Thursday that there was evidence in the secret police archives that Archbishop Wielgus knowingly cooperated with Communist authorities. Rzeczpospolita, one of Poland’s most respected newspapers, published some of the documents, which appeared to show that the Archbishop met with police agents more than 50 times in one five-year period.

Even Poland’s Catholic Church Historical Commission issued a statement today saying that “there are numerous, substantial documents confirming Stanislaw Wielgus’s willingness to a conscious and secret cooperation with the Communist security forces.”

Even so, the commission said, there was no evidence that Father Wielgus’s actions harmed anyone. It said the documents would be sent to the Vatican for further study.

Archbishop Wielgus acknowledged today that in 1978, he signed a cooperation statement with the secret police — under pressure, he said, from a “brutal intelligence officer” — when he was seeking permission to travel to Munich, Germany. He insisted that the only cooperation he ever gave was to inform the secret police of his agenda during foreign academic meetings and to promise not to take part in anti-Communist activities.

“That was my moment of weakness,” he wrote in his statement today.

The documents published by Rzeczpospolita and other newspapers suggest a much greater role for Father Wielgus. They indicated that he was recruited by the S.B. more than a decade earlier — in 1967, when he was a philosophy student at the University of Lublin in eastern Poland. It cited other documents in which the S.B. claimed Father Wielgus gave them information about activities at the university, where he later taught medieval philosophy.

The newspapers claimed that some of the documents refer to Father Wielgus by the code names Grey, Adam and Adam Wysocki. They said he received training from the S.B. and was rewarded for his collaboration with a grant to study in Munich.

The Vatican, meanwhile, continued to support the embattled prelate.

“The Holy See, in deciding the nomination of the new archbishop of Warsaw, took into consideration all the circumstances of his life, including those regarding his past,” the Vatican said in a statement today that repeated the position it has taken for the past month.

The statement said that Pope Benedict XVI “has every confidence in Monsignor Stanislaw Wielgus and in full conscience entrusted him the mission of pastor of the archdiocese of Warsaw.”

Archbishop Wielgus assumed his new duties today and will be officially recognized Sunday at a ceremonial ingress at St. John’s Cathedral in Warsaw’s old town.

Source:nytimes.com