All Polish bishops to face spy inquiry

POLAND:Every Polish bishop is to be investigated to see whether he collaborated with the communist secret police, as the Catholic Church tries to restore public confidence after the archbishop of Warsaw admitted he had been an informer and resigned from his post.

After an extraordinary meeting of senior clergymen, Archbishop Jozef Michalik, the head of Poland's council of bishops, said a special church commission would examine the past of all Polish bishops and send its findings to the Vatican.

"The church is not afraid of the truth," he said after the 45 bishops gathered to consider what Polish prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has called a "national crisis".

Bishop Piotr Libera said a final decision on which of Poland's 133 bishops would be allowed to remain in office will be taken in Rome.

"After the historical commission and experts have submitted their reports, the information will be sent to the Holy See.

"There is no court in Poland that is qualified to pass judgment on a bishop. A bishop can only be judged by the Holy Father or by a Vatican tribunal," he said.

Church officials said a letter explaining the decision would be read out at Masses across Poland tomorrow, and the rest of the country's bishops would have the opportunity to approve the move at a conference in March.

Poles were stunned last Sunday when Stanislaw Wielgus resigned as archbishop of Warsaw just two days after taking office and minutes before his inauguration Mass, amid reports that he was an agent of the communist secret police for more than 20 years.

His admission that he did co-operate with the security services was the most shocking in a series of revelations about collaboration among clergymen, which has led historians to estimate that about 10 per cent of Polish priests were informers.

Another prominent priest, the rector of Krakow's historic Wawel cathedral, resigned the day after Bishop Wielgus amid similar allegations.

With Pope John Paul acting as an inspiration to pro-democracy groups such as Solidarity, communist secret police were determined to infiltrate and undermine the church in Poland during the late 1970s and 1980s. The issue of collaboration was largely considered off-limits until after John Paul's death in 2005.