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Author Topic:   Warsaw archbishop resigns
jwhop
Knowflake

Posts: 2787
From: Madeira Beach, FL USA
Registered: Apr 2009

posted January 08, 2007 12:59 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for jwhop     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Warsaw archbishop resigns
By Craig S. Smith Published: January 7, 2007


WARSAW: The newly appointed archbishop of Warsaw, Stanislaw Wielgus, abruptly resigned Sunday at a Mass meant to celebrate his new position after admitting two days earlier that he had worked with Poland's Communist-era secret police.

The revelation has shaken one of Europe's largest concentrations of devout Catholics and refocused scrutiny on charges of Communist collaboration by the some of its clergy even as the church supported dissidents trying to free themselves from the totalitarian yoke.

Moments before he was to sit on the archbishop's throne at Warsaw Cathedral, symbolically taking his new place in the church hierarchy, Wielgus read a statement saying that he had offered his resignation to Pope Benedict XVI earlier in the day "after reflecting deeply and assessing my personal situation."

The Vatican had announced the resignation a half-hour earlier, saying that the charges surrounding Wielgus had "gravely compromised his authority."

But Wielgus's announcement stunned many people in the crowded cathedral.

"Stay with us," some shouted as Wielgus took his seat beside Warsaw's outgoing archbishop, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, who then took the throne instead. The Vatican has appointed Glemp as archbishop temporarily until a new one can be found.

President Lech Kaczynski, who has led Poland's renewed efforts to expose former Communist secret police agents and their informants, applauded.

The archbishop had tried to minimize reports of his collaboration, which surfaced two weeks after the pope had named him to the job on Dec. 6, insisting that his contacts with the country's feared security service — the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, or SB — were benign and routine.

But Wielgus admitted to deeper involvement on Friday after documents from secret police files were published in newspapers that suggested he had informed on fellow clerics for decades, beginning in the late 1960s.

Wielgus has maintained that his collaboration with the SB did not involve spying on anyone and did not hurt anyone. Nonetheless, any cooperation between the Polish clergy and the service is troubling to Poles, as it is to people all over the former Soviet bloc, because the church under John Paul II, the Polish- born pope, was a beacon of hope and encouragement to people fighting for freedom from Communist oppression.

That the leadership of the Warsaw archdiocese could fall to a Communist collaborator would have been an unbearably cruel twist for many people here who remember the brutal murder of one of the diocese's most charismatic priests of the era, Reverend Jerzy Popieluszko. One of the first priests from the influential archdiocese to support striking Solidarity members at the Gdansk shipyards, Popieluszko was beaten to death by SB agents in 1984. They dumped his body in a reservoir.

Wielgus assumed his duties as archbishop on Friday as media coverage of his past association with the SB reached a peak. The Polish church's historical commission, which the country's bishops — including Wielgus — had asked to review evidence against him, issued a statement during the day that "numerous, substantial documents" confirmed the prelate's "willingness" to cooperate with the secret police.

That judgment forced Wielgus to issue a more contrite statement late in the day and set in motion negotiations with the Vatican that ended with his resignation Sunday.

The Vatican's diplomatic mission in Poland said in a statement Sunday that the pope had accepted the resignation.

In Rome, a statement from the Vatican said Wielgus's appointment had been made "taking into consideration all the circumstances of his life, among them also those regarding his past." The statement said that the pope nonetheless made the appointment "with full trust, and full consciousness."

The Vatican operates far from public view, so it is difficult to understand how the appointment went forward despite apparently strong concerns in the Polish church. But the uproar seemed to echo several criticisms of Benedict following the angry reaction among Muslims to a speech he gave in September that seemed to equate Islam with violence.

The first is that although his expertise on doctrine and theology are unquestioned, some critics say he has seemed to lack a full grasp of the politics inherent in an organization as large and complicated as the Catholic Church.

And as in the controversy over the speech that mentioned Islam, there have been suggestions that the pope has either not been well served by his advisers in the broader Vatican bureaucracy, or that he has tended to make important decisions largely on his own.

The last-minute resignation turned the ceremonial Mass into a commemoration of Glemp, who led the archdiocese during the last years under Communism and was regarded a champion of the pro-democracy movement. Hundreds of distraught Catholics gathered in the rain outside the cathedral.

Glemp, who had supported Wielgus throughout the weeks of scrutiny, delivered a homily defending the prelate and warning against passing judgment based on incomplete and flawed secret police archives.

The documents are often elliptical and incomplete, and were sometimes embellished by secret police officers eager to impress their superiors, experts say.

"Today a judgment was passed on Bishop Wielgus," Glemp said. "But what kind of judgment was it, based on some documents and shreds of paper photocopied three times over? We do not want such judgments."

Glemp's comments highlighted a deep division within the Polish church, one that is mirrored in societies across the post-Soviet bloc, between people who are willing to forgive and forget and those who insist that past Communist collaborators be exposed and be excluded from positions of authority.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/07/news/poland.php

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jwhop
Knowflake

Posts: 2787
From: Madeira Beach, FL USA
Registered: Apr 2009

posted January 10, 2007 02:55 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for jwhop     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Some things never change. In the 1920s and 1930s, the New York Times acted as the mouthpiece for the communists of Russia. In the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the New York Times acted as the mouthpiece for every communist nation on earth..including the Communist Soviet Union, Communist China, Communist North Korea, Communist North Vietnam and Communist Cuba. In this century, the New York Times led the effort to save the sorry ass of their little communist buddy Saddam Hussein. They feted the little Communist bast@rd Daniel Ortega of Communist Nicaragua and the equally offensive brain dead moron Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

Now, we find the New York Times bitcching and moaning when communist collaborators within the Catholic Church are exposed.

The New York Times has truly become the Communist Newspaper of Record...and should identify themselves as such.

Covering for the Kremlin's Archbishop
By Lloyd Billingsley
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 10, 2007

Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus has resigned after revelations he cooperated with the secret police of Poland's Communist regime. Such clerical collaboration with Communism, an anti-religious movement, is a subject of considerable interest but consider the way the New York Times spun it. Here is the lead from the Times' January 5 story by Craig S. Smith, filed not from Warsaw but Paris:

"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."

The operative phrase here involves the "widening witch hunt," a curious way to describe a matter of obvious fact, confirmed by the collaborator himself. This was not something invented by New York Times fabricator Jayson Blair.

With militant Islam on the march, it may have escaped notice that for nearly half-a-century Soviet colonialism imposed Communist dictatorships on the half of Europe it controlled. These dictatorships made life difficult for everyone except Communist Party bosses. Such was the repression that people would flee at the first opportunity, risking their lives and leaving loved ones behind. East Germany, which called itself the German Democratic Republic, walled in the people and made emigration an exciting experience by shooting those who tried to vote with their feet and leave.

Poland, an overwhelmingly Catholic country, suffered under simultaneous invasions by Hitler and Stalin. The Communist postwar regime imposed martial law to fight the Solidarity movement and cultivated collaborators among clergy. Such collaboration had consequences. Among other crimes, in 1984 the SB abducted, savagely beat and murdered a priest, Jerzy Popieluszko. The story became a 1988 film, To Kill a Priest, with Ed Harris, one of the few films about Communist repression anywhere. Plot line: A young priest speaks out against the Communist regime in Poland and is killed for it.

The Communist regimes of Eastern Europe all fell, and the freed inmates demolished the Berlin Wall. But that does not end the story. Poles have a collective memory and are unwilling to let those who collaborated off the hook. They understand that this is a matter of justice.

In 1998, the Poles set up the National Remembrance Institute (IPN), to prosecute Nazi and Communist crimes. According to the IPN, more than 10 percent of Polish priests collaborated with the Communists. Who these priests are, what they did, and what they are doing now are vital questions. The IPN revealed that the Communists gave Wielgus special training for agents and that, as a reward, they allowed him to study in Munich.

Wielgus says his collaboration, which he previously denied, did not hurt anyone. But he stepped down nonetheless, and the Vatican accepted his resignation. What nobody should accept is the designation "witch hunt" for the effort to reveal those who collaborated with loathsome regimes.

"Witch hunt," as it happens, comes straight out of the tactical lexicon of the Communist Party USA, which used it as an incantation to ward off any attempt to uncover Stalinist agents in American government and society. Such agents, it might be recalled, were responsible for handing American nuclear secrets to the worst mass murderer in history.

In 2007, the American newspaper of record can use "witch hunt" in the lead of a story about an actual case, not a rumor, of collaboration with Communism. No editor at the Times chose to strike out "witch hunt" and that is ultimately no surprise. This is the same newspaper which, at the nadir of Stalin's forced famine in Ukraine in 1932-33, in which millions perished, told the world not only that all was well in Ukraine, with bounty everywhere and apple-cheeked dairymaids dancing in the streets, but that famine itself was impossible under Stalin's supposedly scientific form of government.

Milan Kundera, author of the Unbearable Lightness of Being, wrote that "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." That is why the National Remembrance Institute and other groups should not only continue their investigations but expand them. A lot remains to be explored.

The Soviets freighted the World Council of Churches (WCC) with agents and informers, and the National Council of Churches (NCC) in America has functioned as an alibi armory for totalitarianism, and more. The NCC acted as a de facto agent for the Communist regime of Fidel Castro during the Elian Gonzalez incident. The Chinese Communist regime has its approved puppet church and Christians in North Korea live in constant peril.

Religious believers in Communist lands have shown extraordinary bravery and often laid down their lives for their faith, the true concept of martyrdom. The victims of Communism deserve better than to have efforts to expose their persecutors written off in obscurantist left-wing boilerplate in the pages of the New York Times.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=26366

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