The Polish Church is convulsed by revelations about collaborators among their bishops, priests and nuns during the communist era. What a mess. Until these details started emerging the Church was generally accepted to have been heroic in its stance against communist tyranny. John Paul II was obviously the leader of that effort, but there were other lesser known acts of defiance by priests towards the regime. The most well known of of these priests was Father Popieluszko, who was murdered by the secret police.
Now the lid has been lifted on all sorts of pro-regime activities by thousands of priests. The international trigger for interest in this story was the resignation of Warsaw's new archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus on Sunday.
I can't believe the Polish Church authorities & the Pope didn't conduct an investigation as soon as all those secret police files came to light. Why didn't they want to know who among them was untrustworthy? Who had betrayed them? Did they really think that nobody would ever start digging? Didn't they realize that there was every possibility that a situation such as has arisen with regards to Bishop Wielgus would arise?
In some ways its analogous to the bishops' response to the sex abuse scandals we've seen here. They only saw the individual sin and the need to forgive those who are truly sorry. And they didn't want any public scandal. They didn't see that others would quite likely see this a serious political issue that needs to be addressed. They also never seemed to consider that their collaboration with an evil regime was more than a personal sin. They had betrayed the people. At a minimum the Church should have outed these people. Then the Church could have argued for forgiveness when the people had learned what it was these traitors had done.
There should be no place for those who would collaborate with tyrannical regimes in the Church whether we're talking about Nazis, fascists or communists.
