I, for one, find it refreshing when a scandal in the Catholic church doesn’t involve the rape of an underaged boy.
This story — about the newly appointed archbishop of Warsaw having to step down because he was informing for the secret police back in the ’60s — reminds me of Timothy Garton Ash’s book The File
I wonder where all the other collaborators of that period in Eastern Europe ended up job-wise?
I’d imagine they faced one of the standard problems of dismantling a police state: what to do with people whose job description involved brutal interrogation and racketeering. In Russia’s case, it looks like they established international crime syndicates, before the snake ate its own tail and they took over the government.
To get a perspective on normal people who informed on others, I really recommend that Ash book I mentioned in the post. I can’t quite figure out if it’s a more acceptable “deep dark secret” when so many members of the population have an equivalent “deep dark secret”, but it’s awfully disturbing when people were finding out that their closed friends and loved ones had helped the Stasi build a dossier on them.
(Here’s an article from Anne Applebaum about the unique resonances of the scandal in Poland)
Stephen Colbert had a nice bit on his show last night, acknowledging how great it was to have a Catholic Churhc scandal that was not a sex scandal and thanking the archbishop on behalf of all Catholics for it. You can probably find it on YouTube, or watch the replay tonight at 8:30 on Comedy Central.