Warsaw, Poland - After the newly appointed archbishop of Warsaw was forced to step down this week amid allegations that he worked as an informant for the communist-era secret police, Poland's bishops announced Friday that they would ask a panel of historians and legal experts to vet the files of all current bishops.
The unanimous decision was made at a special meeting of the Polish Bishops Conference.
"The bishops have confirmed the will to carry out a full verification of the truth about ourselves and about the people of the church," said Archbishop Jozef Michalik, chairman of the conference.
But instead of making a public disclosure of the findings, the results will be forwarded to the Vatican.
"Nobody in Poland has the authority to judge and assess a bishop, only the Holy See has such authority," Michalik said. "This is painful and a humiliation but it is also a process of maturing for the church in the new reality."
Warsaw Archbishop Stanislaw Weilgus' resignation last Sunday, just hours before his inaugural mass, has stunned Poland. Wielgus, in a statement, admitted that in "a moment of weakness" he signed a letter of collaboration with the secret police but insisted he never cooperated with them.
"I never informed on anyone and never tried to hurt anyone," he said.
But a lay commission appointed by the church reviewed the files and concluded that Weilgus had provided "conscious and secret cooperation with security organs of communist Poland."
As proof of their commitment to resolve the crisis, the bishops' conference invited the participation of Rev. Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleska, a priest who has delved into the historic record of church collaboration but was told by his superiors to burn his research.
Isakowicz-Zaleska refused to abandon his work and is preparing to publish a book that identifies 39 collaborators, including three bishops. One of those bishops, he says, participated in Friday's conference.
But the bishops also seemed eager to excuse Weilgus, issuing a statement of "regret" that Weilgus had not been given the presumption of innocence or a fair opportunity to defend himself before he was forced to step down, apparently at the urging of the Vatican.
Last month, when the allegations first became public, Pope Benedict XVI defended Weilgus, and during a May 2006 visit to Poland he warned against passing judgment on those who had made compromises with totalitarian regimes.
"We must guard against the arrogant claim of setting ourselves up to judge earlier generations who lived in different times and in different circumstances," said the pope, who as a 14-year-old in Nazi Germany was obliged to join the Hitler Youth organization.
But the failure of the Polish bishops and the Vatican to look more carefully into Weilgus' past has resulted in a major embarrassment for the church in this country, which is 91 percent Roman Catholic and reveres the late Pope John Paul II for his role in bringing about the collapse of communism.
Janusz Kurtyka, a historian who heads the Institute of National Remembrance, the agency responsible for archiving the secret-police files, told the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita on Friday that all the documents relating to Weilgus had been available in the institute's library for at least two months but that nobody from the Polish church or the Vatican had bothered to take a look.
That some priests collaborated with the communist regime police has been assumed for more than a decade, although the files were not made available to researchers until 2004. Last year, the Polish church issued a formal apology for the "sins" of clergy members who collaborated, and several dioceses established commissions to review the files. Thus far, however, there have been few public disclosures.