ninme

Good heavens.

Newsweek International – The Vatican: Peeking Into the Past: Newly-discovered documents reveal a jealous cleric’s attempts to sell out the pope, By Piotr Zaremba and Andrew Nagorski

In the communist era, Poland’s secret police had a special unit that spied on the Roman Catholic Church. And in the 1960s, operatives in Cracow took a special interest in Karol Wojtyla, now Pope John Paul II. As NEWSWEEK’s Polish edition has learned, the secret police were helped in their efforts by one of Wojtyla’s fellow clerics, Wladyslaw Kulczycki—an informer who, until his death in 1968, sent in regular reports on the rising star of the Polish church.

An adviser to Cracow’s top church officials, Kulczycki was incensed that the younger Wojtyla was elevated to the rank of bishop and then archbishop while he was passed over. His reports denounced Wojtyla as a lightweight and dismissed his growing popularity.

Eventually, the secret police caught on that their informer’s envy of Wojtyla was skewing his judgment. But his reports on Wojtyla’s meetings with Cracow intellectuals and activists jeopardized many of the people who developed close ties to the future pope.

Kulczycki was far from alone in betraying his church and his colleagues. Documents unearthed by the Institute of National Remembrance indicate that about 15 percent of the Catholic clergy were listed as informers in the 1970s and 1980s. Some may have played a double game, talking to the secret police but not revealing any compromising information. But many, like Kulczycki, had unambiguously sold out.

Wow.