In Poland:

A second prominent Catholic clergyman quit his post Monday amid allegations he collaborated with Poland’s Communist-era secret police, a day after Warsaw’s new archbishop resigned after admitting he had cooperated with the despised agency.

The Rev. Janusz Bielanski resigned as rector, or head priest, of Krakow’s prestigious Wawel Cathedral, the burial site of Polish kings and queens.

Bielanski has submitted his resignation to Krakow’s archbishop, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, "in connection with repeated allegations about his cooperation with the secret services" of the Communist era, said Robert Necek, a spokesman for Dziwisz.

The TIME account of the events of the past couple of days is rather surprisingly, I thought,  titled, "An Archbishop Falls to a Witchhunt"

John Thavis with more, at CNS:

This failure was all the more surprising because the nuncio to Poland, the man who coordinated the search process, is a Pole himself — Archbishop Jozef Kowalczyk — who has been on the job since 1989 and presumably would have spotted a problem before it became a disaster.

And "disaster" is how it’s viewed inside the Vatican, for several reasons:

— Archbishop Wielgus became the highest-ranking church leader to admit that he agreed to spy for an East European communist regime, raising suspicions about the rest of the hierarchy in the eyes of the simple faithful. To many, the archbishop’s qualifier that he "never inflicted any harm on anyone" seemed disingenuous.

— The debacle was played out in public, crowned by the painfully embarrassing "installation" Mass Jan. 7 that turned into a resignation Mass. It was the first time anyone could remember that an archbishop was sent home on the day of his scheduled installation, an "emeritus" after only two days in office.

— Pope Benedict was drawn directly into the controversy. A Vatican statement Dec. 21 expressed the pope’s "full trust" in Archbishop Wielgus and "full awareness" of his past. But sources now say it appears the archbishop had not told the pope everything — that he had admitted contacts with the secret police, but not that he had agreed to collaborate in a spying effort.

By Vatican standards, the statement by its spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, was unusually direct: "The behavior of (Archbishop) Wielgus during the years of the communist regime in Poland seriously compromised his authority, even with the faithful."

That’s what the pope and his aides ultimately weighed, said one source. The discussion about accepting the resignation focused on the archbishop’s authority and was not regarded as "punishment" for not telling the truth, he said.