Polish church confronts ghosts of past: fallout from revelations of collaboration parallels U.S. abuse crisis

Watching the current crisis in the Polish church, American Catholics may be forgiven a sense of deja vu. Over the past month, media leaks and rumors of clerical misconduct have brought angry denials from officialdom, followed by mounting evidence of wrongdoing and, finally, a spectacular fall from grace. The subject matter is collaboration with Poland's communist-era secret police rather than sexual abuse, but the pattern is hauntingly familiar.

The crisis claimed its most prominent casualty to date Jan. 7, when the incoming archbishop of Warsaw, Stanislaw Wielgus, arrived at what was to be his installation Mass, only to announce his resignation instead. The move followed disclosures that Wielgus had been recruited by the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, the much-feared secret police, as a 28-year-old junior cleric and philosophy student in 1967, and collaborated with them off and on for more than 20 years.

As is also familiar from the American experience, no end to the scandal seems to be in sight. As of this writing, one other senior Polish clergyman has resigned, a bishop who died in 1991 has been implicated, and more damaging disclosures are on the horizon. From a certain point of view, it could hardly be otherwise; efforts by the Polish communists to penetrate the Catholic church have been described as "colossal," with every priest in the country assigned his own "shadow" who would try to recruit him as a young man and groom him as he moved up the clerical ladder. Estimates from the Institute of National Memory, created in 1998 by the Polish government to study the archives, are that 10 percent of Polish clergy collaborated with the communists, and others put the figure closer to 20 or even 30 percent.

Whatever the real numbers turn out to be, and however much Poles may always have suspected something like this, the disclosures nevertheless represent a serious blow to the self-image of Polish Catholicism, which has long prided itself on its anticommunist heroism. One activist priest, Fr. Jerzy Popieluszko, was kidnapped and murdered in 1984, and Pope John Paul II's support of the Solidarity movement played a key role in setting off the chain reaction that led to the collapse of the entire Soviet system.

For a church already struggling with deep internal divisions and creeping Western-style secularization, confronting the reality that for every martyr there may have been a collaborator is a gut-wrenching exercise.

For non-Poles, the crisis may have broader lessons, beginning with how bishops are selected. As it turns out, there were clear warnings that Wielgus' appointment was a train wreck waiting to happen. Senior officials from the Institute of National Memory visited Cardinal Jozef Glemp of Warsaw in the fall of 2006, as rumors of the Wielgus' appointment first began to circulate, to alert Glemp that the archives contained damaging information about his potential successor, but these warnings were apparently ignored. That failure, and its devastating consequences, may generate pressure for a new system of "vetting" episcopal nominees, and may also fuel deeper questions about accountability in church governance.

Finally, the story may hint at evolving Vatican attitudes on crisis management. In Poland, it's taken for granted that Pope Benedict XVI defied Glemp and other intransigents in the Polish hierarchy in speedily accepting Wielgus' resignation. (Glemp blasted the resignation as a concession to schemes "to exert pressure on the church.") Moreover, while a Vatican spokesperson did finger a "strange alliance" of ex-communists and their former adversaries for pursuing a "vendetta" against the church, there have been no attempts from Rome to minimize the extent of the problem or to blame the press for raising it, and the Vatican spokesperson openly acknowledged that Wielgus' past, and his lack of candor about it, "gravely compromised his authority," saying resignation was "the right choice."

In comparison with the Vatican's initial reaction to the sexual abuse crisis, all this may suggest a growing, albeit grudging, willingness to confront the ghosts of the past.

The nomination of Stanislaw Wielgus to become the next archbishop of Warsaw was announced Dec. 6. It's easily the most important job in the Polish church, since the occupant is considered the primate of Poland and de facto the leader of the Polish hierarchy, which still wields vast influence in this nation of 39 million, 96 percent of whom are at least nominally Catholic.

The appointment was carefully considered in Poland and in Rome, not least because Glemp, who has held the post for a quarter-century, was often a lightning rod for deep divisions in the Polish church. When the communists imposed martial law, he urged Poles to "subordinate themselves to the new situation," which some criticized as too soft a stance, yet he also defended Solidarity activists; the Poles invented a phrase, "to Glemp," which meant, "to have it both ways." Glemp initially defended the planting of crosses by Polish Catholics at Auschwitz in 1998, yet in the end ordered them to stop.