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1. Poland's Communist security service said 12 bishops "cooperating" in 1978
"Any hope that the departure of Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus would lay to rest controversies over the alleged collaboration of Polish clergy with the Communist-era security forces quickly dissolved on Monday, as another senior Polish cleric stepped down under the weight of similar allegations, and a major newspaper disclosed a memo from senior officials of the security service, dated 1978, which asserted that twelve Polish bishops were cooperating at that time in plans to influence the Catholic church," John Allen notes in his daily National Catholic Reporter column. "In yet another shocking disclosure, the Polish weekly Wrpost unearthed documents claiming that a Polish auxiliary bishop had reported on meetings of the Polish bishops to the secret police from 1963 to 1970, including discussions of the Polish contingent at the Second Vatican Council."

It's not just a historical matter, nor is it one isolated to Poland, Robert T. Miller writes on the First Things website:

[E]ither the Vatican knew about Wielgus' past when it appointed him, as Wielgus says and as the Vatican's statement in December strongly suggests, or else it did not, as [Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the Prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for Bishops] now maintains. If the [latter], then the Vatican's investigation of Wielgus prior to the appointment was grossly negligent, failing to discover information that was readily available in Poland. If the [former], as seems much more likely, then the Holy See exercised very poor judgment in making the appointment in the first place and even worse judgment in attempting to ram it through even after the truth about Wielgus became public. Even worse, it stood by Wielgus while it knew he was lying to the faithful by denying the allegations. Many faithful Catholics looking at this situation will think that our bishops, rather than their critics, are the ones doing the real harm to the Church here.

Also on the First Things website, Richard John Neuhaus worries that the Wielgus case will "detract from the heroic record of Stefan Cardinal Wyszinski of Warsaw and Karol Cardinal Wojtyla of Cracow, later Pope John Paul II, under the communist regime. … Compared to other countries behind the Iron Curtain, such as what was then Czechoslovakia, they and other leaders were remarkably successful in resisting the infiltration of the Church by the state."

Actually, the Institute of National Memory (IPN) archives that are the source of all these revelations serve as a reminder of the resistance of Wyszinski and Wojtyla. The document that lists the 12 cooperating bishops (by code names only) also "describes efforts by the security agency to influence the selection of a successor to Wyszynski … known as the 'Primate of the Millennium' for his staunch resistance to the Communists," Allen writes. "The Communists were particularly eager that Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow … not be given the job."

Allen spoke to Wojtyla's / John Paul II's biographer, George Weigel, in an earlier column on Wielgus, and late yesterday Weigel's analysis appeared on Newsweek's website:

The Catholic Church thus has everything to gain by turning the Wielgus affair into an opportunity to deal with the IPN archives in a serious way, making a clean breast of its modern history while helping shape a sophisticated public understanding of the nature of life under totalitarianism—which is already being forgotten among too many Poles (not to mention Westerners). By the same token, Polish Catholicism has a lot to lose, if it does not take the responsibility to tell the full truth about its recent history—and the potential damage reaches far beyond the court of public opinion.

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January (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51