Polish Scandal Has Echoes of U.S. Clergy Sex Abuse

c. 2007 Religion News Service VATICAN CITY _ The abrupt resignation of a top Polish prelate, amid allegations that he collaborated with Poland’s Soviet-era secret police, has once again shined a spotlight on the reluctance among Roman Catholic officials to confront scandal within their ranks. Five years after the clerical sex abuse scandal rocked the […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ The abrupt resignation of a top Polish prelate, amid allegations that he collaborated with Poland’s Soviet-era secret police, has once again shined a spotlight on the reluctance among Roman Catholic officials to confront scandal within their ranks.

Five years after the clerical sex abuse scandal rocked the church in the United States, observers say the church is again facing a crisis that undercuts the credibility of its leadership.


More significantly, they say, both scandals expose a common fault line in the Catholic hierarchy: the tendency to ignore inconvenient truths until they boil over in the form of full-blown public scandals.

The crisis in Poland came to a head Sunday (Jan. 7) when Stanislaw Wielgus, the archbishop-designate of Warsaw, abruptly resigned during a Mass intended to celebrate his inauguration as Poland’s top prelate.

The spectacle capped weeks of acrimony in which Wielgus and his supporters, including the Vatican, tried to fend off allegations in the Polish press that the prelate had collaborated with Poland’s feared communist-era “Secret Service.”

Senior church officials, such as Cardinal Jozef Glemp, Warsaw’s outgoing archbishop, have continued to defend Wielgus, arguing that his collaboration was nominal _ perhaps even routine _ and did not compromise his ability to lead.

Wielgus initially tried to deny the allegations. But after a church historical commission confirmed evidence of his collaboration, Wielgus acknowledged a 1978 collaboration agreement that allowed him to pursue studies in West Germany.

Wielgus has argued that his contacts did not harm anyone. Studies of Soviet records, in fact, indicate as much as 10 percent of Poland’s 30,000 clergy members are suspected of having ties to secret police. A day after Wielgus resigned, a second prominent Polish clergyman in Krakow resigned under similar allegations.

Wielgus’ rise and fall is exceptional, observers say, only for the fact that it reflects a climate of denial among church leadership in Poland and, to some extent, in the Vatican as well.


“Some may try to deny the reality, but, like the sexual-abuse scandal, this story too will have legs,” said the Rev. Richard McBrien, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame.

In the American abuse scandal, the most intense anger was focused on church leaders who critics said either knew of wrongdoing and failed to stop it, or were not aware but should have been.

What troubles many church insiders is that, like the American scandal, the troubles in Poland were unearthed by the media while hierarchs either denied knowledge or tried to downplay its impact. The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of the conservative journal First Things, called that “deeply disappointing.”

“It is not entirely inappropriate to see some parallels with the negligence and evasion of American bishops in connection with the sex-abuse scandals in this country,” Neuhaus wrote in the journal’s online edition this week.

Also troubling, Neuhaus and others say, is that the scandal erupted in Poland, long trumpeted as one of the church’s great success stories. It was in Poland, after all, that the church mounted its historic challenge to Soviet Russia, producing one of communism’s greatest foes: Pope John Paul II.

That legacy, however, did not spur John Paul to address the issue during his 26 years as pope. Writing in La Repubblica of Rome, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, who served as John Paul’s chief spokesman, reported that it was “very clear” to the late pope that collaboration with the secret police was widespread among Polish clergy.


A Rome-based Polish priest who knew John Paul and requested anonymity because he was not authorized to give interviews on this topic said the late pope was reluctant to address issues he considered divisive.

“It wasn’t in the Holy Father’s character to get mixed up in this kind of mess,” he said.

It is still unclear to what extent the Vatican was aware of Wielgus’ contact with the secret police before his appointment. In a statement issued prior to his resignation, Wielgus said he was candid about his “life history to the Holy Father and the appropriate (departments) of the Holy See, including this part of my past which comprised being entangled in the contacts with the secret services of the past times.”

A statement the Vatican issued before Wielgus resigned appears to back his claim. The Holy See, the statement read, “took into consideration all the circumstances of his life, including those regarding his past. This means that the Holy See nourishes complete trust in Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus and, in full awareness, has entrusted him with the mission of pastor of the Archdiocese of Warsaw.”

However, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the Vatican official who oversees the appointment of bishops, has denied having any knowledge of Wielgus’ ties to the secret police.

“When Archbishop Wielgus was nominated,” Re said in an interview with Corriere della Sera of Milan, “we did not know anything about his collaboration with the secret service.”


KRE/PH END MEICHTRY

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