Communist-era Links Force Out New Polish Archbishop

One of the most senior clerics in Poland's Roman Catholic church was forced to resign yesterday 48 hours after becoming archbishop of Warsaw because of revelations that he had collaborated with communist security services for decades.

Draped in gold vestments and wearing a bishop's mitre, Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus told hundreds of worshippers at Warsaw's St John's Cathedral that he was stepping down, a decision applauded by the Vatican only a month after Pope Benedict XVI appointed him.

The cathedral Mass was to have been a ceremony of investiture for the cleric who took up the post on Friday.

The denouement to a fortnight of disclosures in the Polish press made the bishop the most prominent casualty of the centre-right government's determination to root out former communist collaborators in Poland, a campaign that has been criticised by liberals as a witchhunt.

Bishop Wielgus was forced to admit his relationship with the communist secret services until the collapse of communism in 1989 after initially denying newspaper allegations last week. The collaboration scandal also represented a fiasco for the Vatican which had initially sought to defend the appointment, but yesterday confirmed the bishop was right to resign.

Only on Friday the Vatican announced it had "every confidence" in the bishop, named last month by Pope Benedict to replace the Polish primate, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, as the archbishop of Warsaw.

Since the Pope appointed Bishop Wielgus as archbishop early last month, the Polish press has published copious detail on his alleged collaboration with the communists, said to have started in the 1960s when the clergyman was a student at the Catholic University of Lublin, an institution he later headed.

The respected newspaper, Rzeczpospolita, published documents from secret police archives showing that the bishop held dozens of meetings with communist security servicemen. The documents alleged he had reported on fellow clerics to the communists and a Polish church inquiry last Friday concluded there was "substantial" evidence Bishop Wielgus had shown "willingness for conscious and secret collaboration".

Until then, the bishop had denied the allegations. On Friday he admitted a track record of informing, regretted the earlier denials, but insisted his actions had not harmed anyone. He had talked to the communist services purely to be allowed to study abroad.

Broadly seen as a patriotic bulwark that rallied Poland to defeat the communists, the Polish church has been rocked since John Paul's death in 2005 by revelations of how the communists penetrated the Vatican under the Polish pope.

Cardinal Glemp sought to defend the bishop, telling the congregation "Wielgus was forced by harassment, shouts and threats to become a collaborator. Today a judgment was passed on Bishop Wielgus. But what kind of judgment was it, based on some documents and shreds of paper photocopied three times over? We do not want such judgments."