Past of spying haunts Poland's church

"The secret police were always in our lives," said Father Jerzy Szlezak. "They promised me a job if I wouldn't go into the seminary. Then when I was a priest, they told me not to read the bishop's letters to my congregation

Many clerics in Poland's Roman Catholic Church, however, did submit. Long revered for defying the former communist regime, the church today is enmeshed in a scandal of code names and secret meetings listed in thousands of files detailing how priests, monks and bishops succumbed to temptation and intimidation. It is an unsettling time in a nation where even on weekdays hands dip into holy water and rosaries rattle in pews.

The recent series of revelations came last month when Warsaw Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus resigned hours before his inauguration Mass after admitting that he had collaborated with communist agents decades ago.

The drama unfolded amid a campaign by Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski to expose and punish the former agents and officials in a spy network that left behind an extensive document trail.

Gripped by identity crisis

Unlike other former communist nations, Poland has yet to reconcile Cold War injustices and ease the bitterness between informers and victims more than 17 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is also gripped by an identity crisis marked by a widening divide between conservatives and liberals in a church reluctant to deal with its past while it struggles to fill a leadership vacuum left by the 2005 death of countryman Pope John Paul II.

Catholicism equates to patriotism in this country; that is why the communists sought to infiltrate the church, and why the recent disclosure of documents from generations ago has sparked such agonizing.

"I think the opening of the files should have been done right away," said Zbigniew Nosowski, editor of the Catholic monthly Wiez. "The Germans did it with the Stasi secret police files, and it was much less painful than what is now happening in Poland."