[chzvacmyye]

Has anyone ever resigned from a position of authority in the Moscow Patriarchate for collaborating with the Communists, as happened today with the Roman Catholic Church of Poland?

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INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/07/news/poland.php

Warsaw archbishop resigns
By Craig S. Smith

Sunday, January 7, 2007
WARSAW
The newly appointed archbishop of Warsaw, Stanislaw Wielgus, resigned Sunday after admitting two days earlier to having worked with Poland's communist-era secret police.

The revelation has shaken one of Europe's largest Catholic communities and refocused scrutiny on charges of Communist collaboration by some of its clergy, even as the church supported dissidents trying to free themselves from the totalitarian yoke.

The archbishop had tried to minimize reports of his collaboration, which surfaced two weeks after Pope Benedict XVI named him to the job on Dec. 6, insisting that his contacts with the country's feared Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, or security service, were benign and routine.

But Wielgus admitted to deeper involvement on Friday after documents from secret police files were published in Polish newspapers that suggested he had informed on fellow clerics for decades, beginning in the late 1960s.

Wielgus has maintained that his collaboration with the SB, as the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa is known, did not involve spying on anyone and did not hurt anyone. Nonetheless, any cooperation between the Polish clergy and the SB is troubling to Poles, as it is to people all over the former Soviet bloc, because the church under John Paul II, the Polish- born pope, was a beacon of hope and encouragement to people fighting for freedom from communist oppression.

That the leadership of the Warsaw archdiocese could fall to a communist collaborator would have been an unbearably cruel twist for many people here who remember the brutal murder of one of the diocese's most charismatic priests of the era, the Reverend Jerzy Popieluszko. One of the first priests from the influential archdiocese to visit striking Solidarity members at the Gdansk shipyards, Popileusko was beaten to death by SB agents in 1984. They dumped his body in a reservoir.

Wielgus assumed the duties of archbishop on Friday as media coverage of his past association with the SB reached a peak. The Polish church's historical commission, which Wielgus had himself asked to review evidence against him, issued a statement during the day that "numerous, substantial documents" confirmed the prelate's "willingness" to cooperate with the secret police.

That judgment forced Wielgus to issue a more contrite statement late in the day and set in motion negotiations with the Vatican that ended with his resignation Sunday.

The Vatican's diplomatic mission in Poland said in a statement Sunday that Benedict had accepted the resignation.

In Rome, a statement from the Vatican said Wielgus's appointment had been made "taking into consideration all the circumstances of his life, among them also those regarding his past." The statement said that the pope nonetheless made the appointment "with full trust, and full consciousness."

The Vatican operates far from public view, so it is difficult to understand how the appointment went forward despite apparently strong concerns in the Polish church. But the uproar seemed to echo several criticisms of Benedict following the angry reaction among Muslims to a speech he gave in September that seemed to equate Islam with violence.

The first is that although his expertise on doctrine and theology are unquestioned, some critics say he has seemed to lack a full grasp of the politics inherent in an organization as large and complicated as the Catholic Church.

And as in the controversy over the speech that mentioned Islam, there have been suggestions that the pope has either not been well served by his advisers in the broader Vatican bureaucracy, or that he has tended to make important decisions largely on his own.

The last-minute resignation scuttled a ceremonial mass at which Wielgus was to have been officially invested with his new office before Poland's president, Lech Kaczynski, who has led the country's recent resurgence of lustration. Instead, the archbishop read out his resignation at the mass. Hundreds of distraught Catholics gathered in the rain in front of Warsaw's cathedral, where the ceremony was to have been taken place.

Ian Fisher contributed from Rome.

Vatican backs resignation

The Vatican's spokesman said Sunday that the past actions of Wielgus compromised his authority and that he was right to resign, The Associated Press reported from Vatican City.

However, the spokesman, the Reverend Federico Lombardi, said such attacks seemed to be the result of a desire for revenge on the part of the church's old enemies.

The behavior of Wielgus "in past years during the communist regime in Poland gravely compromised his authority," Lombardi said in a statement to Vatican Radio. He added that Wielgus was right to resign on Sunday, "despite his humble and moving request for forgiveness."

"Renouncing of the seat in Warsaw and its prompt acceptance on the part of the Holy Father seemed like an adequate solution to counter the state of confusion that has come about in that country," Lombardi told Vatican Radio.

"It is right to note that the case of Monsignor Wielgus is not the first, and probably won't be the last, attack against a church official based on documentation" from the secret services of the past regime, Lombardi added.

Lombardi said the revelations were not necessarily motivated by a search for transparency.

"Many years since the end of the communist regime, and following the disappearance of the great and unassailable figure of Pope John Paul II, the current wave of attacks against the Catholic Church in Poland" appears to be the result of "a strange alliance between those who were once the persecutors and other adversaries," Lombardi said.

He added that such attacks seemed to be motivated by a wish for revenge on the part of those who in the past persecuted the church and were "defeated by the faith and desire for freedom of the Polish people."