Spy Charges Against New Archbishop Shake Poland
Bells will toll Sunday when Stanislaw Wielgus is inducted as Warsaw’s new archbishop, succeeding Cardinal Jozef Glemp. But din of another kind is dominating now, and Catholic journalist Kazimierz Sowa is not alone in seeing “black clouds” hanging over Wielgus’ accession to one of the most important posts in Poland’s Catholic Church. Archbishop Wielgus, 67 years old and formerly the bishop of Plock, is alleged to have spied for years on his fellow priests. Historian and civil rights’ ombudsman Andrzej Paczkowski, who set up a historians’ commission to examine the secret service’s documents, said Thursday he had “no doubt at all” that Wielgus was an informant.
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The New York Times reports that he denies that he was an informant:
Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus, the new Catholic prelate of Warsaw who is caught in eastern Europe’s widening hunt for former collaborators with the Communist-era secret police, denied today that he had ever spied for Poland’s Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, the security service known by its initials. He insisted that recently uncovered files naming him as an informant were filled with fabrications.