POLAND: Poland's papal visit hangover hit yesterday with warnings to bishops to address the growing number of revelations of priests accused of collaborating with the communist-era secret police.
Polish newspapers have compared the enormity of the looming scandal to Ireland's child abuse scandal, warning that bishops could damage the church in Poland if they repeat the denial tactics of their Irish colleagues.
Yesterday a priest spied upon by clerical colleagues threatened to publish a list of their names unless they come forward and explain themselves.
"I do not understand why Polish priests who co-operated with the secret service (SB) haven't confessed by now," said Fr Tadeusz Zaleski of Krakow's Nowa Huta parish. "The most important value is truth, and clergy in particular should remember that. That's why I'm appealing."
The Institute for National Memory, the custodian of the files, estimates that one in 10 Polish priests collaborated with the SB.
The list of apparent collaborators includes close friends of pope John Paul and one of the country's most prominent liberal priests, Fr Michal Czajkowski, who denied the claims when he was named recently.
Many church figures, including Pope Benedict last week, have warned against making revelations to damage political or clerical opponents or of jumping to conclusions about the motivations or level of involvement of priests. Many Poles were blackmailed into collaborating, they say, and not everyone classified as a collaborator was a spy.
"Publishing a statement that someone cynically had informed on his friends is more than a physical homicide, it is moral homicide," wrote Fr Ludwik Wisniewski, a leading 1970s opposition figure, in Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper.
The files pose a moral dilemma because the SB was unavoidable in communist Poland, even for parish priests seeking bricks to build a church.
But, unlike lay people, priests were never expected to sign a declaration of collaboration as an informer.
A substantial portion of the SB archive, including the files on the Catholic church, were burned in 1989.
Poland's Catholic dioceses and religious orders have ordered commissions to investigate their priests, meaning poisonous revelations may lie ahead.
"Our church is like a man with countless ampoules of arsenic in his mouth, ampoules which occasionally break," said Catholic philosopher Dariusz Karlowicz in Newsweek Polska.