MyWay News has an embarrassing story on the Catholic Church in Poland. Turns out that a number of bishops were collaborators or agents of the communist secret police. Portions of the story follow:
WARSAW, Poland (AP) - A special commission of Poland's Roman Catholic Church said Wednesday that documents in secret police files showed "about a dozen" living bishops had ties to the communist-era secret services.
After six months of work, the commission said that among Poland's 132 bishops "about a dozen were registered by the security services of communist Poland as 'secret collaborators' or 'operational contacts,'" while one was registered as an "agent" of the intelligence service.
Back in January, the New York Times reported:
Warsaw’s new archbishop, Stanislaw W. Wielgus, caught in Eastern Europe’s widening witch hunt for former Communist secret police informers, admitted Friday that he had collaborated with the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, or Security Service, known as the S.B.
Wielgus (pictured above) ultimately resigned. It should be no surprise that an institution that covered up the sexual abuse of children world wide also cooperated with repressive secret police agencies. I can only wonder how many lives they damaged in this manner. This same wonderful institution currently is working overtime to deprive gays in Poland of civil legal rights.
2 comments:
Here's an interesting take on what's happening in Poland under the right wing Kaczynski brothers. Not to excuse the bishops, but it sounds like a purge is going on there.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20331
Yes, scary stuff happening there.
And I'm never surprised to hear of more scandal involving that bunch of creepy old men in the catholic church.
Perhaps another country will take in the GLBT community as political refugees?
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