In Newsweek

That resignation ought to be seen, by the Polish church leadership, as an opportunity: an opportunity to end the internecine wrangling over the IPN files and initiate the kind of study the Kochanowski commission embodied in microcosm in the Wielgus affair—a study of the IPN materials by responsible clergy and laity in order to provide the Polish people with a reliable portrait of how churchmen behaved during the communist period. Scholars who have already worked in the IPN archives are convinced that any such comprehensive study will not change the basic story line of late-20th- century Polish history: that a heroic Catholic Church, led by Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski and Pope John Paul II, was the foundation and backbone of a successful national resistance to communism’s usurpation of Poland’s liberties. “No Church, no Solidarity, no Revolution of 1989” will remain the master truth of Poland’s history for the decades after 1945.

Such a study will also, inevitably, show that not every churchman was a hero (even as it will likely show that there were more heroes than scoundrels, and by orders of magnitude). At the same time, such a study, properly conducted, will help Poles, and others, avoid the black-and-white caricatures that misshaped media coverage of the Wielgus affair, as if every act of collaboration were of the same degree of wickedness. From what we already know, thanks to studies in the IPN archives, some churchmen had dealings with the SB for no other reason than that anyone in Poland who wanted a passport had to speak to the SB. Others, like Wieglus, signed agreements-to-cooperate; but there was a wide spectrum of cooperation, some of which did little or no harm. Still others constantly blabbed clerical gossip to the SB, which in the case of a former classmate of John Paul II, seems to have had more to do with ego than with any intent to harm the church. Others were venal, cooperating for money. And still others agreed to work with the SB because they were persuaded, somehow, that doing so would help liberalize the tight-ship church of Cardinal Wyszynski. When all is said and done, it may be that some 10 percent of Poland’s clergy were suborned by the SB, in varying degrees of complicity (and turpitude). But that is itself a compliment to the Polish church, when one considers that estimates of collaboration with the East German secret police, the Stasi, approach 50 percent of the entire population of the old German Democratic Republic.

The Catholic Church thus has everything to gain by turning the Wielgus affair into an opportunity to deal with the IPN archives in a serious way, making a clean breast of its modern history while helping shape a sophisticated public understanding of the nature of life under totalitarianism—which is already being forgotten among too many Poles (not to mention Westerners). By the same token, Polish Catholicism has a lot to lose, if it does not take the responsibility to tell the full truth about its recent history—and the potential damage reaches far beyond the court of public opinion. For, if every piece of paper in the IPN’s archive is duplicated in Moscow, then the Catholic Church in Poland will be open to blackmail for the foreseeable future, if it does not take the lead in clarifying the truth about its past, with both its glories and failures. For 50 difficult years, from Hitler’s invasion in 1939 until the communist crack-up in 1989, Polish Catholicism fought tenaciously and successfully for its independence, and Poland’s, by emphasizing the liberating power of the truth. That brilliant accomplishment must not be compromised now by a stubborn reluctance to face the full truth of those five decades, a reckoning which is essential to helping Poles of today and tomorrow—and the rest of the world—understand what those truths mean.