http://www.omanobserver.com/Daily/World/World5.htm
Crisis as communist spy becomes Polish archbishop WARSAW --- The Church in overwhelmingly Catholic Poland was plunged yesterday into a crisis without precedent as Stanislaw Wielgus, a self-admitted collaborator with the hated communist-era secret police, took up the post of archbishop of Warsaw. "This is the deepest crisis ever faced by the Polish Church," the conservative Dziennik daily said. "This is a crisis for the archdiocese of Warsaw and beyond," said Wieslaw Chrzanowski, former speaker in the Polish parliament and a recognised Roman Catholic scholar. "The coming months and possibly years will be difficult not only for Cardinal Wielgus but also for the faithful," he added. Shortly after Wielgus was consecrated at a closed-door religious service on Friday, the new archbishop of Warsaw, who replaces ardent anti-communist Cardinal Jozef Glemp in the post, confessed that he had erred in the past by working with the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa (SB), the communist-era secret police. "I confess before you today the mistake that I made in the past, as I have already confessed to the Holy Father," Wielgus said in a statement which will be read from Warsaw's pulpits today, when he will be consecrated as archbishop in a public mass. The admission brought to a head a scandal that blew up last year, when the Church in Poland, which was one of the ramparts of opposition to the communists who ruled post-war Poland until 1989, admitted that clergymen had been linked to the SB. Last month, after the Vatican announced that Wielgus had been chosen to replace Glemp, right-wing Polish newspaper Gazeta Polska said it had proof he had actively collaborated with the SB secret police. Those accusations were reiterated in several Polish newspapers just days before Wielgus took up his high religious office. Gazeta Polska on Thursday posted on its website a 68-page file on the new archbishop held by the National Remembrance Institute (IPN), which was set up in 1998 to prosecute Nazi and communist crimes in Poland. The documents showed that Wielgus was recruited by the secret police in 1967 when he was a 28-year-old philosophy student, and collaborated with the reviled SB for two decades. A special commission which Wielgus himself had asked the Church to set up to look into the accusations concluded on Friday that Warsaw's new archbishop had indeed worked with the communist secret police, but stopped short of saying his collaboration had "harmed anyone". Few in eastern and central Europe's former communist bloc were left untouched by the secret police forces set up throughout the region after World War II. In Poland, where 90 per cent of the population of 38.5 million profess to be Catholic, the clergy were particularly targeted by the secret police, which often tried to recruit clerics to inform on their religious colleagues and parishioners. +++ -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods, techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
