Polish Scarlett Pimpernel (8)

Both the Vatican and the head of the Church in Poland this week blamed the Church's ‘adversaries’, the media and even some lay Catholics for the deeply embarrassing resignation last Sunday of Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus of Warsaw.

The prelate, pictured here, 67, dramatically stepped down minutes before what was supposed to be his installation Mass after he admitted, under a barrage of accusations in the Polish press, that he had been an informant for the Communist secret police (the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa or SB) from the 1960s until the end of the totalitarian regime in 1989. And on Monday, Janusz Bielanski, a priest at Krakow Cathedral, resigned.

‘There is an organised media programme against the Church, which is worrying a lot of people,’ Cardinal Jozef Glemp (pictured alongside) said in a Polish TV interview on Tuesday. ‘I'm not saying the lay Catholics had bad intentions. But they did surrender to the atmosphere of pressure, which gave Archbishop Wielgus no right to defend himself according to civilised standards.’

The director of the Holy See press office, Fr Federico Lombardi, (pictured here) said on 7 January that the ‘behaviour’ of Archbishop Wielgus during the Communist years had ‘gravely compromised his authority’ and said his resignation was ‘an adequate solution’ to the confusion the incident had caused Polish Catholics.

But the spokesman went on to say that the archbishop had been a victim of ‘attacks on a Church personality based on documentation ... produced by functionaries of an oppressive and blackmailing regime’. Fr Lombardi warned that other churchmen would probably be targeted in the future.

As Poland’s Catholic bishops entered a special meeting on Friday, January 12, new allegations about clerics’ collaboration with Communist secret police were illustrating the intensity of a growing scandal.

The Polish hierarchy planned to devote the day’s closed-door session entirely to a discussion of the crisis that erupted when Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus was forced to resign just before his installation as the head of the Warsaw archdiocese.

The accusations that had been aired against Archbishop Wielgus have produced a spate of angry charges and counter-charges, with new accusations being aired against other prominent clerics. The rector of Krakow’s cathedral has already resigned his post in the face of collaboration charges. The most recent priest to be accused is Fr Michael Jagosz, a canon of the basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome and the head of the historical commission investigating the cause of the beatification for Pope John Paul II.

‘We cannot live like this,’ said Fr Jozef Kloch, a spokesman for the Polish bishops’ conference, in briefing reporters prior to the Friday meeting. ‘Every week we hear a new name.’

In the most recent edition of the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, Archbishop Jozef Zycinski of Lublin took a step to expose his own past, publishing material about his contacts with the secret service during the Communist era.

The city of Lublin has been at the centre of the recent scandals. It was while teaching there that Archbishop Wielgus reportedly acted as a Communist informer-- although the extent of his cooperation with government agents remains a matter of lively dispute. If he had been an active government informer, the future archbishop should have given authorities information about one of his faculty colleagues, Fr Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II. No evidence has surfaced to indicate that Wielgus made any such report.