The ghosts of past betrayals haunt Polish Catholic clergy

The Catholic Church in Poland is in crisis over revelations that priests informed on fellow clergy to the country's former communist government.

More than 15 years after the collapse of communism, a feverish debate has erupted over the dubious role of certain clerics within the state's vast network of spies and informants.

Close colleagues and friends of the late Pope John Paul II are among those who have found their way into the headlines.

During more than 40 years of communist rule, the Catholic Church in Poland was a kind of resistance to the political authorities, a haven for persecuted dissidents.

In this deeply religious country, where more than 90 percent of the population is Catholic, the communists were unable to co-opt the Church.

An attempt to create the first totally communist city at Nowa Huta, laying out this new part of Krakow without providing for a church, failed completely.

After years of passive resistance, the residents pushed through the construction of one of Poland's biggest churches.

It was consecrated by Karol Wojtyla, the archbishop at the time who was to become Pope John Paul II, one of the main activists against the Communists' attempts to dominate the Church.

Even party members went to Sunday mass as a matter of course. During the years of martial law in the 1980s, priests tended to the families of those detained by the authorities.

The Church also provided space for political discussions without censorship.

As a result the authorities treated the Church with suspicion and monitored its activities closely. A whole department of the state secret services was devoted exclusively to spying on clerics.

One of those spied on was Wojtyla, whose name crops up in the secret service files as early as 1946, according to investigations conducted by the IPN, an institute set up to probe the country's communist past.

When Wojtyla became bishop of Krakow in 1958, he was subject to systematic monitoring.

"The security authorities bugged Karol Wojtyla continuously," IPN director Leon Kieres says.

When he visited Poland as Pope, this close observation was intensified, with the security services in Krakow alone devoting 480 agents to watching John Paul II, the IPN investigators have found.

Just a few days after the Pope's death, Kieres revealed that the IPN had uncovered information that would have been "very painful" for Wojtyla. One of his friends among the Catholic clergy had been one of the spies, he said.

Last week the IPN director put an end to the speculation, naming the agent concerned as the Dominican Konrad Hejmo.

Hejmo, who used to head the Polish pilgrims' center in the Vatican, initially denied the allegation, but later ac-knowledged that it was true. He had accepted money from a man whom he had taken for a German priest, Hejmo said.

The man had, however, been an agent for the notorious Stasi -- the East German secret service.

The news magazine Wprost, which has come out in favor of naming all the former agents publicly, has also identified one of the friends of Wojtyla in his youth as a secret service spy.

The priest concerned has denied the allegations vehemently, and there has been no confirmation from the IPN as yet.

Now concern is rising in the Church that new and more painful surprise revelations are in the offing. The Catholic bishops have called for cautious and responsible handling of information regarding alleged agents during the communist past.

They have also spoken out against prejudging people who may have come under extreme psychological pressure from the former regime.