The suffering of a Church

“Many years after the end of the Communist regime, and now that the great and unassailable figure of John Paul II is no longer with us, the current wave of attacks on the Catholic Church in Poland is not so much a sincere search for transparency and truth as, in many respects, a strange alliance between the Church’s former persecutors and other of her adversaries and revenge by those who had persecuted her in the past and been defeated by faith and the yearning for freedom”, said the Director of the Vatican Press Room, Father Federico Lombardi, commenting to Vatican Radio on the resignation of Stanislaw Wielgus from his post as Archbishop of Warsaw. The archbishop’s resignation was announced on 7 January, the very day on which he was due to take official possession of the cathedral in the Polish capital. The decision of the archbishop, accused of having collaborated with the Communist regime, was called “an acceptable solution” by Father Lombardi, who said that “the case of Monsignor Wielgus is not the first, nor will it probably be the last, case of attacks on Church leaders on the basis of documentation in the possession of the security services of the former regime: the material in question is vast in extent and in trying to evaluate it and draw reliable conclusions from it, we ought not to forget that it was produced by the functionaries of an oppressive and blackmailing regime”. Benedict XVI has nominated Cardinal Józef Glemp, Primate of Poland, as interim apostolic administrator of the archdiocese of Warsaw until a new appointment can be made. RESPECT FOR THE DECISION. The Polish Bishops’ Conference has issued a statement following the resignation of Monsignor Wielgus from the post of Archbishop of Warsaw in which it asks “all Catholics to accept this difficult experience in the spirit of faith and to remember the Church in Poland in their prayers”. “The Polish Church – continues the statement – must today consider with humility the truth of its own past, present and future. Msgr. Wielgus voluntarily presented his resignation from the post entrusted to him, due to the grave accusations made against him. This decision to tender his resignation, which testifies to his concern for the good of the Church, does him honour. Equally the decision of Benedict XVI to accept this resignation testifies to his concern for the serene fulfilment of the pastoral mission in Poland”. The communiqué is signed by the President of the Polish Bishops’ Conference Archbishop Józef Michalik, its Vice-President Monsignor Stanislaw Gadecki and its general secretary Monsignor Piotr Libera. The Polish Bishops’ Conference also appeals to the representatives of the media, asking them to “respect the decision of Archbishop Wielgus and avoid any exaggerated interpretations of the facts that do not conform to the truth”. An appeal for the archbishop’s decision to be respected was also made by Cardinal STANISLAW DZIWISZ , former private secretary of John Paul II and now Archbishop of Krakow. “We accept the Holy Father’s decision. For us it is not an order, but an indication. The Holy Father has taken this decision and we owe him gratitude for it”, he said at the end of Sunday Mass in the Cathedral of Warsaw. The opinions expressed by the representatives of the Polish political world on the decision of Archbishop Wielgus to present his resignation have on the whole been positive. “FORCED TO SIGN”. The accusations of collaboration with the security services of the Communist regime, first made by the media early in December 2006, coinciding with the nomination of Wielgus as Archbishop of Warsaw, were confirmed by the historical Commission established by the Polish Bishops’ Conference and by the Committee of experts set up in the Office of the Polish Ombudsman, after examination of the files of the Communist secret services in the archive of the IPN, the Institute for National Memory ( Instytut pamieci narodowej ), from which it emerges that the archbishop was a collaborator of the secret services at least during the years 1973-1978. The documentation concerning Wielgus in the archive of the IPN however is not complete. After the collapse of the Communist regime in Poland, in 1989, on the order of the heads of the security services, numerous documents were destroyed and many others were lost prior to the establishment of the IPN. On 5 January, Monsignor Wielgus himself admitted that he had been forced to sign a statement of collaboration with the intelligence services. He declared, however, “he had never betrayed Christ or His Church”. On the same day he appealed to citizens, asking to be accepted “as a brother who wishes to unite and not divide”. The archbishop’s statement, read out in the churches of Warsaw on 6 January, contains the admission of “contacts with the security services operating in the conditions of a totalitarian state hostile to the Church”. Wielgus speaks of the damage caused to the Church, but “also of another damage when, in recent days, a prey to the feverish media campaign, I denied the fact of having collaborated. This compromised the trustworthiness of the statements of churchman, and also of the bishops who expressed their solidarity with me”. On 7 January, following the statement of Archbishop Wielgus’s resignation, the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Glemp declared that, while “the Church takes into consideration any blemish among the lambs”, the accusations against Monsignor Wielgus were “a judgement based on the accusations of the gutter press”, since the work of the Institute of National Memory (IPN) had not been sufficiently scrupulous and exhaustive.