Bloomberg.com reports (h/t Stuart):
Stanislaw Wielgus, the metropolitan archbishop of Warsaw, resigned today to applause and shouting at a special Mass meant to install him to the post, having confessed he collaborated with the secret service during communist rule in Poland.
Wielgus appeared to fight back tears as he made the announcement in Warsaw Cathedral to shouts of “no” and “stay with us.” Pope Benedict XVI accepted the resignation, according to a statement half an hour earlier from the Vatican’s mission in Poland.
The archbishop said yesterday he talked with Poland’s secret police in the communist era out of a lack of “prudence, courage and determination,” and because he had wanted to continue his academic studies. He denied being a spy.
“It’s one case to pastor the flock when they listen and it’s another when they feel aversion,” said Cardinal Jozef Glemp, Wielgus’s predecessor, at the ceremony. “The Church took this fact into consideration.”
More than half of Poles were against Wielgus’s nomination after learning about his collaboration with the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa secret police, according to a survey of 1,024 Poles conducted yesterday for TVN.
“The attitude of Archbishop Wielgus during the past years of communist regime hurt his authority,” Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said in a statement on the Vatican Radio Web site today. “That’s why, despite his humble and moving request for mercy, the resignation from the service in Warsaw and its fast acceptance by the Holy Father seemed the right solution.”
Obviously, a person with such a personal history should – perhaps sadly because it does not take into account the kind of person he is today – not be Archbishop.
Ed Morrissey comments:
However, even if all sides had forgiven themselves for their transgressions, it would still be difficult to see how a collaborator that acted as a spy within the Church could ever hope to lead it, even twenty years later. Those who openly served the Communist regime could eventually be forgiven their misguided judgment, but those who informed in secret against their friends and colleagues in a church that actively pursued the nation’s liberation could hardly find trust among its members and leaders afterward.
The Vatican appears to have trusted Wielgus a little too much in his initial denials. They made the right decision when further evidence arose that, as during his period as a collaborator, Wielgus proved unworthy of the church’s trust. It may cause them some discomfort now, but better a little embarrassment over a forced resignation than an exposure of a cover-up to avoid it.
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