Warsaw, Poland - Poland's top Roman Catholic leader faced criticism Monday for defending an archbishop who resigned over ties with the communist-era secret police - a stance that put him at odds with the Vatican and many Polish faithful.
The Dziennik daily wrote that it was a "huge mistake" for Cardinal Jozef Glemp, the country's primate, to defend Stanislaw Wielgus, the Warsaw archbishop who resigned Sunday amid revelations that he cooperated with the hated secret police of the communist era.
Wielgus yielded the archbishop's throne during a Mass in Warsaw Sunday that was supposed to have been his installation as the retiring Glemp's replacement. The dramatic turn of events came only two days after Wielgus was formally made archbishop in a closed-door ceremony.
Glemp will hold the office until another successor is found.
Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Wielgus was right to go because his past actions had "gravely compromised his authority."
But Glemp, who has served as Warsaw archbishop for the past 25 years, delivered a homily defending Wielgus. He called him "God's servant" and warned of the dangers of passing judgment based on incomplete and flawed documents left behind by the communist authorities.
"The primate stood before the faithful to tell them clearly that 'if it were up to me, Wielgus would have become archbishop,'" Dziennik's editor-in-chief Robert Krasowski wrote on the paper's front page.
"He presented Wielgus as a victim of an assault, an innocent, hunted person. He didn't even mention that the archbishop lied to the last minute. That he lied to the pope, bishops and faithful."
Allegations that Wielgus was involved with the secret police were first raised by a Polish weekly on Dec. 20. But the case blew up into a crisis Friday when a church historical commission said it had found evidence that Wielgus had cooperated.
Wielgus initially denied that, but then acknowledged that he did sign an agreement in 1978 promising to cooperate with the security force in exchange for permission to leave Poland to study in West Germany.
However, he stressed that he did not inform on anyone or try to hurt anyone, and he expressed remorse for both his contacts with the secret police and his failure to be forthcoming from the start.
Pawel Lisicki, editor-in-chief of Rzeczpospolita, a leading daily, said that Glemp's homily "sounded almost like a call to disobedience and indirectly meant rejecting what had been established by the church's historical commission."
"The public undermining of the decision of the Holy Father, and widening the divide among faithful, does not seem like the task of the primate of Poland," Lisicki wrote.