Associated Press Worldstream
January 11, 2007 Thursday 9:02 PM GMT
Polish priest leads push to expose clergy who cooperated with secret
police
By VANESSA GERA, Associated Press Writer
KRAKOW Poland
The Rev. Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski was twice brutally beaten by
Poland’s communist-era secret police. Now, he’s leading the drive to
expose clergy who cooperated with the secret services, saying the
church must confess and repent to heal wounds caused by the misdeeds
of compromised priests.
Poland’s powerful Roman Catholic Church is still reeling after Warsaw
Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus’s abrupt resignation Sunday at what was
to have been his opulent installation Mass.
Wielgus’ dramatic downfall, triggered by his admitted cooperation
with the hated communist-era secret police in the 1970s, has rattled
deeply Catholic Poland, the homeland of the late Pope John Paul II.
"The whole tragedy is that the church had 16 years to take care of
the problem, and it didn’t do a thing," said Isakowicz-Zaleski, 50,
over coffee in a brick-vaulted cellar restaurant in Krakow.
"For many faithful the problem is not that a priest collaborated. If
he were to admit it and ask for forgiveness the issue would be
closed," he said. "The problem is that there is a conviction that the
church is hiding a difficult problem, and the hiding is the worst
part."
Now, church leaders are bracing for Isakowicz-Zaleski’s book due out
soon about the secret police’s penetration of the church in Krakow.
Dressed in black attire and priest’s collar and sporting a thick
beard, Isakowicz-Zaleski said he discovered in the archives 39
priests in the Krakow church who cooperated with the secret police.
Four of them, he says, are now bishops.
The widening scandal threatens to tarnish the Polish church, whose
resistance to the Communist leadership was perhaps best personified
by John Paul II the former archbishop of Krakow. His encouragement of
peaceful challenge to the regime is credited by many with hastening
its demise in 1989.
But part of the church’s reluctance to tackle the issue loops back to
the Polish-born pontiff, Isakowicz-Zaleski says.
"Some said that as long as the pope is alive, you can’t smear him.
They said the Holy Father did so much for Poland, and so you
shouldn’t reveal agents so as not to cause any unpleasantness,"
Isakowicz-Zaleski said.
He points to the fact that the first allegations of collaboration
against a Polish priest surface in late April 2005 three weeks after
John Paul’s death.
Historians with the Institute of National Remembrance, or IPN, which
holds the secret police archives, say priests were the most
persecuted group in communist Poland. Of the some 25,000 clergy in
the country, 10-15 percent are commonly estimated by church officials
and historians to have cooperated with the security agencies.
Secret police agents not only spied on the church, they also murdered
a charismatic Warsaw priest tied to Solidarity, the Rev. Jerzy
Popieluszko, in 1984.
A year later, Isakowicz-Zaleski himself was twice beaten once in
April, once in December by "unknown assailants … but it was a known
fact they were secret police agents," he said.
Isakowicz-Zaleski bushes aside questions on the two incidents saying
they were rather a warning to the main priest at Nowa Huta, the
communist-utopian industrial community near Krakow, where
Isakowicz-Zaleski was helping out. In one case the culprits burned
his chest with cigarettes.
Since 1987, he has run a foundation for handicapped people outside
Krakow. On the weekends, Isakowicz-Zaleski, whose mother was of
Armenian background, performs Mass for Armenian Catholics in several
cities in southern Poland.
Two years ago, on a train to the Baltic port city of Gdansk for a
gathering of former activists of the Solidarity trade union, a friend
told Isakowicz-Zaleski the IPN in Krakow had secret police files on
him from the 1980s.
He went to take a look.
"I was shocked," he said. "There were 500 pages of documents.
Everything passport applications, informant reports on me, secret
police reports."
For many years, church leaders underestimated the problem, believing
the assurances they received from Gen. Czeslaw Kiszczak, an interior
minister in the communist regime, that the secret police had
destroyed all the files on the church. Microfilm copies survived,
however and later helped bring down Wielgus.
Isakowicz-Zaleski says he told his superiors of what he found in his
file, but "nobody wanted to listen."
"When the bomb exploded Jan. 7 with Wielgus, it turned out I was
right," he said.
He has clashed with the church hierarchy over his upcoming book,
which looks set to be the next major revelation of compromised
clergy.
Last year, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz temporarily ordered
Isakowicz-Zaleski not to speak with the press; Poland’s primate,
Cardinal Jozef Glemp, publicly criticized him, accusing him of
"sniffing around and tracking down priests to add to his book."
"The church leaders have treated it like it was written by the devil
himself," Isakowicz-Zaleski said. "I wanted the good of the church,
and they’ve made me into an enemy of the church."
Associated Press Writer Ryan Lucas contributed to this report from
Warsaw, Poland.
From: Baghdasarian