POLAND:Pressure is building on the Catholic church in Poland over allegations that the man set to be sworn in next Sunday as Archbishop of Warsaw was the country's leading clerical informer to the communist authorities.
Senior figures in the Polish church and the Vatican have rallied to the defence of Stanislaw Wielgus after the right-wing Gazeta Polska printed the allegation that he had spied for 22 years under the codename "Adam".
Stung by the staunch defence of the bishop and criticism of its motives, the weekly is planning to publish this morning what it says is evidence of Weilgus's collaboration with the authorities.
"We are very sure that these materials are real. He was one of the most important collaborators of the communist intelligence in the Church," said Mr Tomasz Sakiewicz, editor-in-chief of Gazeta Polska, on Polish radio.
Bishop Wielgus has rejected as groundless the newspaper's claims that he informed on church affairs and figures to retain permission to travel abroad for academic research.
He said he never worked as an informer and that his only contacts with the secret services were when he applied to do research in Germany.
The Polish bishop's conference supported him in an open letter. "The simple fact of a conversation taking place between a priest and members of the communist security services cannot of itself prove immoral collaboration," it wrote, saying that such contacts were normal in the period.
Bishop Wielgus, announced as the next Archbishop of Warsaw last month, is viewed as a centrist figure in the church between the rival liberal and conservative wings. A professor of philosophy, he spent most of his academic life at the Catholic University in Lublin, where he served as rector for nine years to 1998.
A special historical committee of the Polish episcopate is due to meet later today to consider the claims about the bishop's past, the latest in a series of allegations about prominent members of the Polish clergy.
Unlike Germany, attempts to evaluate Poland's secret police files has been haphazard and politically motivated.
Supporters of the greater evaluation of the files, a process known as "lustration", say it is a necessary, overdue step towards normalising Polish life by exposing still hidden former collaborators.
Critics argue that it is irresponsible to place too much faith in files that are often incorrect or incomplete, having been compiled by secret police officials, a discredited regime. They say the work should be done by historians and not journalists drip-fed information by politically motivated officials.
Newsweek Polska columnist Tomasz Terlikowski says the current scandal is just the price being paid for not properly evaluating the files in the 1990s.
"You can have the impression that most priests collaborated with the Communists when in fact only a small number of them did," he said.
Poland's Institute for National Memory estimates that one in 10 priests had contact with the SB secret police.