Word: churchful
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After the church's silence on the topic for decades, says Zbigniew Nosowski, editor of the Catholic monthly Wiez, it has no choice but to examine its past...
...church realizes that nothing can be hidden," he says. But determining how many priests really were collaborators would be difficult. According to the government's Institute of National Remembrance (inr), 90% of the police's records on the clergy and the anticommunist opposition vanished in 1990 after the communist regime fell...
Polish Academy of Sciences historian Andrzej Friszke and others estimate that 10% of priests cooperated in some way. "When they wanted to have a street procession or to renovate a church," he says, "they had to talk to the secret service, who used such occasions to entice priests into cooperation...
Despite concerns that such an exercise would devolve into a witch hunt, he contends it may acquit rather than implicate the clergy as a whole. Given the coercive pressure that priests were under, he says, a 10% cooperation rate is surprisingly low. The Polish church, he says, may go down as "a church of martyrs - not informers." The worst part is not knowing which...
RESIGNED. Stanislaw Wielgus, 67, recently appointed Archbishop of Warsaw; in the wake of disclosures that he collaborated with the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, Poland's communist-era secret police; at a ceremony intended to mark his elevation; in Warsaw. Other clergy in the Polish church, a key backer of the pro-democracy Solidarity movement, have been linked to the S.B., but Wielgus' connection is especially painful in Warsaw, where in 1984 the S.B. infamously murdered Jerzy Popieluszko, a highly popular, anticommunist priest. With the publication of documents suggesting Wielgus had informed on clerics for years, the prelate, who maintained he never spied...