Another Catholic Coverup Or, Business As Usual

[DeSwiss]

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070111/D8MJC4K83.html">Priest Leads Push to Expose Clergy

Jan 11, 6:03 PM (ET)
By VANESSA GERAvar

KRAKOW, Poland (AP) - The Rev. Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski was tortured by Poland's communist-era secret police. Now he is leading the drive to expose clergy who cooperated with the secret services, saying the church must repent for the misdeeds of compromised priests.

Poland's powerful Roman Catholic Church is reeling from the abrupt resignation of Warsaw Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus, who admitted cooperating with the hated secret police in the 1970s. Wielgus dramatically stepped down Sunday at what was to have been his opulent installation Mass, stunning deeply Catholic Poland.

<snip>

The widening scandal threatens to tarnish the Polish church, which prided itself on its resistance to the Communist leadership personified by the late Pope John Paul II - the former archbishop of Krakow. John Paul encouraged Poles to challenge the regime peacefully, and many credit him for hastening its 1989 demise.

Yet part of the church's reluctance to acknowledge the collaboration of some priests loops back to the Polish-born pope, Isakowicz-Zaleski said. "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 noted that the first allegations that a Polish priest collaborated with the regime surfaced three weeks after John Paul's death in April 2005.

<snip>

For years, church leaders had believed the assurances from Gen. Czeslaw Kiszczak, an interior minister in the communist regime, that the secret police had destroyed all the files on the church. It turned out that microfilm copies survived - eventually helping bring down Wielgus. Isakowicz-Zaleski says he told his superiors about his own file, warning that it was an indication that documents about informant priests had also survived.

"Nobody wanted to listen," he said. Instead, church leaders pressured him to keep quiet. For a while last year, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz ordered Isakowicz-Zaleski not to speak with reporters. 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.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070111/D8MJC4K83.html

"Fear them not therefore: for there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known."Matthew 10:26