Warsaw, Poland, Jun 29, 2007 / 08:27 am
A special Church commission disclosed on Wednesday that about a dozen bishops, who are still living, had ties to Poland’s communist-era secret police.
The commission said that among Poland's 132 bishops, “about a dozen were registered by the security services of communist Poland as ‘secret collaborators’ or ‘operational contacts’ and one was registered as an “agent” of the intelligence service,” reported The Associated Press.
The secret police labeled other bishops as “candidates.” In such cases, security agents gathered material on a person in the hope of recruiting him as an informant.
This news comes at a time when Polish Catholics are still reeling from the shock of discovering that some of its clergy, previously known for their resistance to communism, had ties to the repressive government.