An historian from the Cracow branch of the Institute of National Remembrance sparked a storm of controversy yesterday when he declared that he had studied documents that revealed the names of clergymen who had acted as informers during the Communist era. The revelation that a figure close to the Pope was on the lists added further fuel to the fire as journalists scrambled to guess the guilty party.
Rumours quickly spread that Mieczyslaw Malinski (one of the Pope's closest confidantes during his years as Archbishop of Cracow) was amongst the names. However, the seriousness of the allegation prompted Leon Kieres, the President of the Institute, to quash this suggestion, and he categorically denied that Malinski was the man in question. Malinski himself leapt to defend his honour in a television interview last night.
This is the second such scandal to have emerged in Poland in recent months. In February, the outspoken journalist Bronislaw Wildstein discovered tens of thousands of names of communist era informers alongside those of their victims. The entire list was activated on the internet, which caused half the country to log on to see if family members were included in the catalogue. Matters were confused due to the fact that both the victims and the perpetrators were lined up side by side and there was no means of confirming which was which.
Historically, the post 1939 reputation of the Polish Church is an heroic one, both during the war and the ensuing communist era. It is widely accepted that the Church successfully acted as the shepherd of the nation through those difficult epochs, particularly during the Cold War. In several cases members of the clergy had to pay dearly for their stance, as is evidenced by the state initiated murder of Father Jerzy Popieluszko in 1984.
No names have been published by the Institute of National Remembrance as of yet. The subject of collaboration and infiltration remains a deeply emotive one - no satisfactory study of the matter has been made to date. It represents a prickly theme for young historians to investigate, but one which will surely begin to open up over the following years.
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