Archbishop tied to secret police quits in Warsaw

BERLIN -- The new archbishop of Warsaw resigned yesterday after admitting that he cooperated with secret police of the country's former Communist regime, the latest episode in a fast-moving drama that has rattled the powerful Polish Catholic Church.

Stanislaw Wojciech Wielgus, yielding to a media campaign and instructions from Pope Benedict XVI, announced his resignation at a special Mass in Warsaw Cathedral hurriedly convened to replace the ceremony in which he was to have been officially sworn into the influential post. Many had expected the archbishop to try to ride out the controversy.

"I submit to your Holiness my resignation as Metropolitan Archbishop of Warsaw," Wielgus read from a formal letter to the pope.

Late last week, Wielgus conceded that Polish news reports alleging he had cooperated with secret police were accurate . He insisted, however, that he "did not inform on anyone nor deliberately try to hurt anyone."

Church authorities, however, after examining Communist-era documents and other evidence, concluded that Wielgus "during the Communist regime in Poland gravely compromised his authority," said the Rev. Frederico Lombardi, spokesman for the Vatican. He gave no specifics, but the evidence was damning enough, apparently, that the pope had no choice but to ask the new archbishop to step down.

As Mass was celebrated, some communicants beseeched Wielgus not to surrender the office. "No! No! Stay with us," they cried.

The murkiness of the allegations against Wielgus has caused many faithful Poles to believe he was the victim of a witch hunt.

Poland's governing conservatives have vowed that rooting out the Communist pasts of individuals still holding positions of authority will be a national priority.

Lombardi, speaking to Vatican Radio in Rome, called the archbishop's resignation "a moment of great suffering for the church."

But, adding to the confusion, Lombardi also suggested that the documents used to embarrass Wielgus may have been leaked by disgraced former Communist officials pursuing a "vendetta" against the church.

"The wave of attacks on the Catholic Church in Poland, rather than a sincere quest for transparency, has many aspects of a strange alliance between the persecutors of the past and their old adversaries," he said, apparently referring to former officials helping reporters from right-wing newspapers find obscure documents proving his collusion with secret police.

Poland is one of the last countries in Europe where the Roman Catholic Church holds enormous political, social, and religious sway. The furor surrounding Wielgus's appointment has caused major embarrassment for the Vatican, which last week permitted the archbishop to take canonical vows ahead of the installation ceremony.

Part of the church's stature in Poland stems from the unwavering support given by Catholic clergy and Polish-born Pope John Paul II to the Solidarity labor movement, which helped topple the Communist government in 1989 and led the nation to democracy.

Wielgus's admission Friday that he helped the dreaded Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa may hurt Catholicism's moral authority in the nation of 38.5 million at a time when church influence is dramatically waning in Europe and North America. "I confess to the mistake," he wrote in an open letter to Polish Catholics.

Until Saturday, the 67-year-old cleric apparently hoped the storm would pass and that he would be permitted to ascend to the prestigious office, according to Polish news reports. Instead, the pontiff "strongly requested him to submit his resignation," according to a spokesman for the Vatican's diplomatic mission in Warsaw.

Citing documents from the Communist era, the newspaper Gazeta Polska in mid-December alleged that Wielgus had for two decades, starting in 1967, spied on dissidents and fellow clerics for the totalitarian regime. Details are vague, however.

Wielgus and the Vatican at first suggested his activities were fairly innocuous. For example, he agreed to describe the agendas of academic conferences he attended on trips abroad and also gave authorities a secret pledge not to participate in anti-Communist activities.

But a church commission on Friday said a deeper look into the documentation confirms "Wielgus's willingness . . . to cooperate" to a more serious extent, although it provided no hard details. The report appears to have convinced the pope that the archbishop must resign.

Wielgus taught philosophy at Catholic University in Lublin before becoming bishop of the Polish center of Plock in 1998. As an academic, he was one of the few Poles allowed to regularly travel abroad.

Historians and other analysts believe that substantial numbers of Catholic clerics in Poland and other Eastern Bloc countries cooperated to some degree with police in Soviet puppet states. The Polish church publicly apologized last year for priests who served as informants for the secret police.

"The Polish Church has long been aware that it's sitting on a 'time bomb' with regard to Communist-era collaborators," John Allen, a specialist on the Vatican with the US weekly National Catholic Reporter, wrote on his website. He quoted Tomasz Pompowski, an editor with Poland's influential Nowy Dziennik newspaper, as saying the newspaper has details of secret cooperation by 20 current bishops in Poland.

Wielgus on Friday said he signed an agreement in 1978 to cooperate with secret police after coming under pressure from "a brutal intelligence officer," implying violence was used as coercion.

The Vatican said the Archdiocese of Warsaw would be temporarily administered by Cardinal Jozef Glemp, who is also primate of Poland.

Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, urged people to pray for the Polish Church during this rocky transition.

"We hope the Polish Church will know how to live through and overcome this difficult period with courage and clear-headedness," he said.