Agence France Presse — English
January 11, 2007 Thursday 12:34 PM GMT
Polish priest leads lonely crusade to get Church to come clean about
past
by Maja Czarnecka
WARSAW, Jan 11 2007
Roman Catholic priest Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski is waging a lonely
battle to get the Church in Poland to tell the whole truth about
clerics who collaborated with the communists.
The 50-year-old priest of Armenian origin launched his crusade in
October 2005, when he had access to the file that the communist-era
secret police, the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa (SB), had kept on him when
he was chaplain in the 1980s for the Solidarity trade union branch in
Nowa Huta, a working class suburb of the southern city of Krakow.
"I discovered that, among those who informed on me, there were
priests. It came as a shock," recalled the bearded cleric, who was
badly roughed up twice by the reviled SB for his anti-communist
activities.
Zaleski took his grim discovery to his superiors in Krakow, to warn
them that the information in the archives "was a true time-bomb" for
the Church, long seen as a pillar of resistance to the communists in
Poland.
"But the Church didn’t do much," he said.
Numerous commissions were set up "but they accomplished nothing."
"A resolution passed in August last year, calling for a collective
mea culpa, has remained a dead letter," he lamented, adding that all
of Poland’s bishops had signed it, including Stanislaw Wielgus, who
on Sunday stood down after two days as archbishop of Warsaw amid a
furore over his past.
To Zaleski’s mind, the scandal surrounding Wielgus — the 67-year-old
resigned as archbishop of Warsaw on Sunday after belatedly conceding
that accusations he had collaborated with the communist SB were true
— was proof that his quest to make the Church come clean was just.
"The Polish Church is going through its worst crisis now since the
fall of communism. And it could have been avoided," Zalewski said.
His own refusal to give in and collaborate with the SB meant that
Zaleski was never granted a passport in the 1980s, and was therefore
unable to travel abroad to study.
He also recounts how he was conscripted into a demining unit when he
did his military service. The communist-led military often placed
priests in tough units as a means of getting them to shelve plans to
pursue a career in the Church.
Not only did the Church hierarchy ignore Zaleski’s warnings about the
dangers lurking in the communist archives, but the crusading father’s
higher-ups also tried to dissuade him from going further with his
campaign.
"Some advised me to burn everything," he said, referring to the
manuscript of a book he has written about the communist-era archives.
Zaleski was dubbed an enemy of the Church, an inquisitor, even a
"super-spy" for the communist police by the Primate of Poland,
Cardinal Jozef Glemp.
"The Primate later apologised," Zaleski said.
Archbishop of Krakow Stanislaw Dziwisz, the long-time personal
secretary of the late pope John Paul II, ordered Zaleski to
temporarily halt his research into the Church’s communist past. The
priest obeyed his superior.
The Church is against Zaleski’s mission because it believes that
before attention is turned on collaborators — seen as victims of
communism — all officials of the totalitarian regime that ruled
Poland from the end of World War II until 1989 must be brought to
justice, Zaleski said.
"Those who bear true guilt are living blessed lives today," said
Zaleski, who says that revealing now, amid feverish media coverage,
the collaboration of a very few high-ranking clerics served only to
detract from the stalwart role the Church played in Poland’s long
fight against communism.
In his book, which is due to be published in the near future,
relations between the Church and the communist secret police are
broached only as of the seventh chapter. The greater part of the book
is dedicated to those who did not cave in to pressure from the
communists.
"The Church has nothing to fear. Only 10 percent of priests
collaborated. The others came out of the communist regime, their
heads held high."
According to the Polish media, Zaleski names and shames 39 Roman
Catholic clerics, including four bishops, in his book.
"There was a time a few years back when we could have calmly admitted
to having had these few collaborators, and asked forgiveness, which
society would certainly have given.
"Ten years ago, when a priest confessed to having informed on me, I
didn’t hesitate to forgive him. Our faith is based on mercy and
truth," he said.