Yesterday, Poland’s bishops met:

The Roman Catholic Church leadership of Poland called Friday for all of the country’s bishops to be investigated for past ties to the secret police.

“We will ask a special commission to check the past of all our bishops,” the Council of Bishops’ chief, Jozef Michalski, told reporters in Warsaw after the episcopate’s 45 bishops held an emergency meeting to deal with the worst crisis to hit the Polish church in years.

And:

The Vatican is to receive reports on the activities of all Communist-era Roman Catholic bishops in Poland, their spokesman Jozef Kloch said Saturday.

He said the decision was taken by Friday’s extraordinary meeting of the Permanent Council of the Polish Bishops’ Conference to discuss the church’s involvement with the Communist-era secret service.

Teresa at Papa Ratzinger reports (post 5692, bottom of page) Her comments in italics:

At least two Italian news reports today are citing statements made yesterday by the secretary-general of the Polish bishops conference that it did inform the Vatican of ‘signs of unease’ about Mons. Wielgus. Here is how korazym.org reports it:

The secretary-general of the Polish bishops conference, Mons. Piotr Libera, said the Holy See knew about Wielgus’s situation [presumably, his collaboration], in effect giving the lie to Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, Prefect of the Cognregation for Bishops, who told the Corriere della Sera on January 6 that "we knew nothing at all about this."

Linera said ‘the signals of unease’ were sent to the Vatican about Wielgus. [I am translating from the Italian ‘i segnali d’inquietudine’, so I do not know if that was how it was expressed in Polish as well. I truly would welcome a fuller account of his statement from the Polish press, because if he had said this to newsmen, the obvious follow-up question to him would be: "What signals, and why only signals, not a direct statement?" ]

He added, however, that the Vatican was able to see the 68-page documentation by the Institute of National Memory about Wielgus’s involvement with the secret police only after it had been published in the Polish press.

And, today the Pope, in addition to some Italian and South American bishops, met with:

Em.mo Card. Giovanni Battista Re, Prefetto della Congregazione per i Vescovi

I guess he would…

Update: More from La Repubblica, translated by Teresa at PRF:

It’s the time for reckoning. Poland is girding for months or even years of looking back to the past and perhaps of admissions of guilt.

The Polish bishops decided at their dramatic meeting yesterday that the Church will place its bishops under scrutiny. Two commissions will examine their dossiers from the Communist era, and where necessary, submit findings to the Holy See for the Pope’s judgment.

Meanwhile, the Polish government announced a new law to punish the ex-officers and members of the hated Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, (SB), the disbanded Communist political police.

After 17 years, a pact of silence has been broken in Warsaw. This was the compromise, patterned after post-Franco Spain, with which democratic elements persuaded General Jaruzelski and his regime to launch the first democratic initiative in what was then the Soviet empire in 1989. [Presumably, the compromise was not to bring up the crimes of the Communist regime.]

Against this background, the conservative newspaper Dziennik revealed today the name of another Catholic prelate who informed for the Communists: the code name Teolog, it says, refers to 86-year-old Bishop Boleslaw Pylak, who reportedly had contacts with the two SB men who were responsible for the assassination of Solidarity priest Jerzy Popieluszko.

A pastoral letter from the Polish bishops, to be read in all Polish churches tomorrow, is entitled "Ecclesia semper reformanda" [Church always in need of reform]. It tells Polish Catholics what the bishops decided yesterday.

"The events these days have created a disorientation among the faithful," it begins. "It is necessary to intensify the efforts for reconciliation in order to close the wounds of the past."

To arrive at their decisions, the bishops spent hours of tense confrontations behind closed doors in the tiny but modern seat of the Polish bishops conference on Cardinal Wyszynski street, dwarfed by the skyscrapers of modern Warsaw.

Update:

We’re going to start all over again on the comments. There weren’t that many, but those that were there had a strong, snippy tone of anti-Catholicism, weren’t well-informed, and…most importantly…were posted by folks who left clearly fake emails.

And, as I’ve said before, fake emails are okay as long as your commenting is responsible. If you drift over into stupidity and pretty much mindless rabble-rousing which have little to do with substantive issues at hand, you are first to go.