Warsaw, Poland - A new book by a Polish priest examines the communist-era secret police's alleged infiltration of the Roman Catholic Church, offering the first such account by a church insider.
The Rev. Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski alleges some 30 priests — including four bishops — once tied to the church in Krakow, where Pope John Paul II once served as archbishop, were registered as informants with the secret police in the decades before communism fell in 1989.
Released to media on Monday, the book, "Priests In The Face Of The Security Services" coincides with a surge of interest in the issue stoked by the shock resignation in January of Warsaw's archbishop over his communist-era past.
Isakowicz-Zaleski, who was twice beaten by the secret police, has become one of the leaders of a drive to expose clergy who cooperated with the secret services, saying the church must confess and repent to heal wounds.
In the introduction to the book, which goes on sale Wednesday, Isakowicz-Zaleski says he started researching the problem of compromised priests knowing that it "sooner or later will become a public problem."
"The church's avoiding of the problem could lead to irreversible harm," he writes. "Above all, it will cast a shadow on those clergy (and they were the vast majority) who never cooperated with the secret police."
He scoured the former secret police archives, stored at the Institute of National Remembrance, to find what he said is evidence of the secret police's links to four bishops: Rzeszow Bishop Kazimierz Gorny, former Poznan Archbishop Juliusz Paetz, Tarnow Bishop Wiktor Skworc and Olsztyn Archbishop Wojciech Ziemba.
Officials at the Krakow diocese and the other dioceses whose bishops were named could not be reached for comment Monday.
According to Isakowicz-Zaleski, the secret police registered Archbishop Paetz as an informant under the code name "Fero" in March 1978 when Paetz worked at the Vatican.
The communist authorities broke off contact with Paetz after he returned to Poland in 1983 to become the bishop of Lomza, he adds. In 2003, Paetz resigned as Archbishop of Poznan after being accused of making sexual advances on young clerics.
On Monday evening, Paetz denied the allegations.
"I did not undertake any form of cooperation with the communist secret police," Paetz read in a statement on TVN24 television.
According to the book, Bishop Skworc agreed to cooperate with the secret police in 1979 after being caught with a large stash of food in the trunk of his car. The police threatened to blow up his alleged "speculating" into an anti-church propaganda campaign.
Skworc bowed to the blackmail, was given the code name "Dabrowski" and agreed to pass on information about the attitudes of church officials toward the regime, Isakowicz-Zaleski says. He allegedly cooperated until 1989.
Archbishop Ziemba never agreed to cooperate, Isakowicz-Zaleski says — and yet the secret police registered Ziemba as agent "Wojtek" March 1979 after he applied for a passport to travel abroad.
After two years of sharp refusals by Ziemba to cooperate, the secret services closed his file "admitting defeat," Isakowicz-Zaleski says.
Stories of compromised priests largely lay dormant until after John Paul's death in 2005, with some saying people were reluctant to raise the issue of collaboration in the Polish church for fear of embarrassing him.
But widening disclosures that priests did indeed cooperate have threatened to shake the widely held belief that the church acted as a courageous opponent of communism.
The heaviest blow came last month, when Warsaw Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus abruptly resigned after admitting having cooperated with the secret services.
Church officials and historians say that, while the church was a pillar of resistance, about 10 percent to 15 percent of Poland's priests were pressured into informing or otherwise cooperating with the secret police.