Letter from Krakow Dan McLaughlinAs Poland marks a year since the death of Pope John Paul, who was the embodiment of its struggle against Soviet domination, the country is coming to terms with a bitter truth - thousands of its clergymen were communist agents, and some spied on the pontiff himself.
Working through security service files from Poland's five decades as a Soviet satellite, Prof Ryszard Terlecki and his colleagues have concluded that more than one in 10 Polish clerics collaborated with the dreaded KGB-trained secret police.
"The Church is in a very difficult situation," says Prof Terlecki of the Institute for National Remembrance (IPN), which maintains and investigates the vast archives of Poland's communist security services.
"It fears that its heroic reputation as the heart of resistance to the communists will be tarnished forever, or completely destroyed."
In Krakow, Prof Terlecki is working through declassified files that would stretch for seven kilometres if lined up together - a sea of documents that comprises less than a tenth of the entire archive that is now in the possession of the institute. The files tell mostly bleak human tales from a pitiless time.
"The secret police would work on human weakness," says Prof Terlecki. "If they found a priest who was having an affair or was homosexual, they would blackmail him into giving information; they would simply pay someone to collaborate; or, most effectively, they would play on personal rivalries and unfulfilled ambitions in the church or in a single order - there was always someone willing to denounce a rival."
Persistent Soviet-backed attacks on the church as a bastion of Polish national identity intensified after 1978, when the archbishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla, became pope and inspired the Solidarity movement that openly opposed communist rule.
"The church was the communists' main enemy, and everyone in the church was the subject of a secret police file - not just every monk, nun, priest, and seminarian but vergers and caretakers - anyone who might have access to church secrets," he says.
"We also discovered that there were people - agents - around Karol Wojtyla when he was archbishop of Krakow, and we passed the information to the Vatican." Poland's domestic security service, the SB, strove particularly hard to create a rift between the then archbishop of Krakow and Stefan Wyszynski, archbishop of Warsaw and Poland's primate from 1948 until his death in 1981, he says.
"The secret police knew that Wojtyla was very important and when he was archbishop they had a special eye on both him and Wyszynski. They tried to create conflict between them - but they failed." The IPN also unearthed spies within the Vatican.
Shortly after John Paul's death a year ago today, the institute alleged that for a decade one of Poland's best-known priests had passed information on the pontiff to his communist "handlers".
Fr Konrad Hejmo ran the Polish Pilgrimage House in Rome, a hostel for Poles visiting the Vatican. He also arranged for some of them to have a papal audience and gave the media in his homeland regular updates on the pontiff's health.
"The case of Fr Hejmo was a great shock. He is very well known here and many pilgrims met him," says Prof Terlecki.
"But we have also been shocked by files showing that Solidarity activists were agents. If we are to uncover the truth, we can make no exceptions."
Growing pressure on the Polish church has forced Stanislaw Dziwisz - John Paul's private secretary for 26 years and now archbishop of Krakow - to set up a "remembrance and care" commission to examine communist collaboration in its ranks.
He was present at a recent conclave of bishops that issued the church's first formal apology for members of the clergy who spied for the enemy.
Under communism, "a system that crushed consciences, some men of the church also breached the trust placed in them", the bishops said. "We regret that and apologise, particularly to those who suffered harm and distress," they added, while warning against "creating an atmosphere of sensationalism and accusations". Prof Terlecki says the church is right to emphasise that while perhaps 15 per cent of its clergy succumbed to secret-police pressure to inform, the vast majority held firm.
"From 1945 to 1989, perhaps 3,000 to 4,000 clergy collaborated," he says. "But for comparison, you have to remember that in the 1980s, the Polish secret police had about 100,000 agents." However, there may be more unpleasant surprises to come as IPN researchers trawl through the miles of Polish security service files, Prof Terlecki warns.
"The church didn't want to talk about this, or admit that it had agents in its midst," he says. "Now it has no choice."