Another Communist Agent: The Archbishop of Warsaw

The history of Catholic opposition to Communism has been greatly exaggerated. "How many divisions has the pope," Stalin, in one of his frequent fits of hubrisitic stupidity, once remarked, thus arming half a century's worth of cold warriors — and the now the mournful obituarists of Pope John Paul II — with their favorite irony. Never mind that Communism had begun rotting from within well before the Georgian monster regurgitated a small fraction of the blood he'd sucked out of Russia and Eastern Europe. The best leftist response to the triumphalist credit still being awarded to les clercs for bringing down the Berlin Wall came from the brilliant Marxist historian Perry Anderson, who, tweaking Timothy Garton Ash, asked, "How many masses has Kremlin?"

Graham Greene split his loyalties between Rome and Moscow and may have once been approached by a charismatic whorehouse-frequenting KGB agent in Estonia to do some "dry work" in England and elsewhere. The same liturgical socialism infected, to varying degree, the literary theorist Terry Eagleton, who remains fond enough of the totalitarian mindset to place the crown of thorns upon the heads of Al-Qaeda and compare suicide bombers to Rosa Luxemburg in the pages of the Guardian.

I bring this up because it appears that Holy Mother Church is intent on replaying a miniature in-house version of the Hitler-Stalin pact. The divine election of a pope who was once a member of the Nazi Youth was first; now comes the news that the Archbishop of Warsaw was an informant for Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa (S.B.), Poland's Communist secret police apparat:

Archbishop Wielgus acknowledged today that in 1978, he signed a cooperation statement with the secret police — under pressure, he said, from a “brutal intelligence officer” — when he was seeking permission to travel to Munich, Germany. He insisted that the only cooperation he ever gave was to inform the secret police of his agenda during foreign academic meetings and to promise not to take part in anti-Communist activities.

“That was my moment of weakness,” he wrote in his statement today.

The documents published by Rzeczpospolita and other newspapers suggest a much greater role for Father Wielgus. They indicated that he was recruited by the S.B. more than a decade earlier — in 1967, when he was a philosophy student at the University of Lublin in eastern Poland. It cited other documents in which the S.B. claimed Father Wielgus gave them information about activities at the university, where he later taught medieval philosophy.

The newspapers claimed that some of the documents refer to Father Wielgus by the code names Grey, Adam and Adam Wysocki. They said he received training from the S.B. and was rewarded for his collaboration with a grant to study in Munich.

Whoops.