The Sins Of The Fathers

For years, “lustration” has applied to the efforts of some historians in old Soviet-bloc countries to expose former communist collaborators. The word derives from the Latin for purification but, as the dramatic defenestration of two high-ranking Polish priests over charges they cooperated with communist police has demonstrated, it’s a messy business.

The messiness looks likely to continue. Until recently, the Polish Catholic Church had remained immune from scrutiny, but that taboo has crumbled in recent weeks as anticommunist newspapers began printing accusations about Warsaw Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus and, later, a senior Cracow priest, Janusz Bielanski. A new report in a right-wing daily lists the pseudonyms of 12 bishops allegedly recruited by the secret police in the late 1970s.

After the church’s silence on the topic for decades, says Zbigniew Nosowski, editor of the Catholic monthly Wiez, it has no choice but to examine its past.

“The church realizes that nothing can be hidden,” he says. But determining how many priests really were collaborators would be difficult. According to the government’s Institute of National Remembrance (inr), 90% of the police’s records on the clergy and the anticommunist opposition vanished in 1990 after the communist regime fell.

Polish Academy of Sciences historian Andrzej Friszke and others estimate that 10% of priests cooperated in some way. “When they wanted to have a street procession or to renovate a church,” he says, “they had to talk to the secret service, who used such occasions to entice priests into cooperation.”

According to Marek Lasota, a historian at the inr, a reckoning is overdue. It is prerequisite, he says, for “a full knowledge of our own history.”

Despite concerns that such an exercise would devolve into a witch hunt, he contends it may acquit rather than implicate the clergy as a whole. Given the coercive pressure that priests were under, he says, a 10% cooperation rate is surprisingly low. The Polish church, he says, may go down as “a church of martyrs — not informers.” The worst part is not knowing which it is.