Polish bishops have admitted that some clergymen collaborated with the communist era secret police and has apologized for any harm they may have caused.
Michal Kubicki has more.
10.03.06
In recent months the Polish media has highlighted several cases of alleged collaboration by clergymen. Several dioceses have appointed special committees to study the documents and the bishops’ statement is the first time that the issue has been confronted at the highest level in the Polish Church. The bishops admit that under communism some men of the Church breached the trust placed in them. The spokesman for the Episcopate Father Kloch stresses that the Church is committed to confront the truth
“The Church does not avoid questions relating to the most painful episode in Polish history but it is against creating an atmosphere of sensationalism and unverified accusations.”
The bishops’ statement has been welcomed within the Church and among observers of the Polish scene.
Father Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski, a former Solidarity union chaplain in Krakow has learnt several names of clergy agents while reading his own secret police file.
“I am extremely happy that the Episcopate has adopted such a clear-cut stand. It is my duty to keep on reminding people that we have to be concerned above all about those who experienced harm and distress under communism.”
According to Robert Strybel, who reports from Warsaw for the Polish media in the United States, the statement is primarily a symbolic gesture.
It’s a very symbolic gesture. Of course those who were harmed by those people may have a moral satisfaction of knowing who it was that was denouncing them, betrayed them behind their backs. This move is typical of the position that the Catholic Church has taken under the last two popes, asking for forgiveness for the Jews, the Arabs, this goes in the general trend of asking forgiveness for past wrongs.
The issue of priests who collaborated with the secret police under communism is very sensitive in Poland, Jonathan Luxmoore, a prominent writer on religious affairs in Central Europe, explains why
”The Church’s current position and prestige is built very substantially on its role during the communist period and its heroic stance, particularly in the later years in the defense of human rights and drive for freedom so anything which contradicts that, which presents an alternative picture of that reality is obviously something which the Church will have to treat very carefully and might indeed be reluctant in purely human way to confront as openly as it should.”
During the communist period, all priests and seminarians were under strict secret police surveillance. It is estimated that around 10 percent of them collaborated with the secret police in one-way or another.
Robert Strybel again
”Many of those people were blackmailed into this because the regime had all kinds of ways of blackmailing, forcing them to collaborate. In a totalitarian state there are thousands of ways of making innocent people do dirty things.
Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, former aide to Pope John Paul II who was recently nominated as cardinal, is believed to be among the strongest supporters of the Polish Church’s apology over collaborator priests.
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