Fri, Apr 29, 2005 page7

• Priest accused of being informer for Polish secret police

  • AP
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  A Polish priest at the Vatican was accused Wednesday of collaborating with the communist-era secret police during the 1980s even as Pope John Paul II inspired his countrymen to resist the Soviet-backed regime.

  The Reverend Konrad Stanislaw Hejmo, a member of the Dominican religious order, "was a secret collaborator of the Polish secret services under the names Hejnal and Dominik," Leon Kieres, head of the National Remembrance Institute, said at a news conference. The institute guards communist-era police files.

  Kieres did not provide details or documentary proof to reporters, saying they will be published in May.

  He said more documents about spying on church figures, including John Paul II, are to be published later this year in a book by a historian given special access to documents at the institute.

  Hejmo, 69, told reporters in Rome that he had been making written reports on church matters for Polish church officials and had been sharing the reports with an acquaintance introduced to him by other priests as someone interested in church affairs.

  "I have never been a secret collaborator," Hejmo said. "I can blame myself for being naive. This man came, we helped and on top of it I took his family around Rome ... I partly feel a victim of this situation now."

  He says he only now has learned the man, a Pole who was living in Germany but has since died, might have been an intelligence agent.

  Hejmo's Dominican superior, the Reverend Maciej Zieba, told reporters at the news conference he had seen the files, which he called "convincing and shocking."

  Andrzej Paczkowski, a historian at the institute, said the files contain some 700 pages and cover the 1980s and earlier years. He said Hejmo was not "some very important person."

  Hejmo was an ever-present figure at John Paul's public events in his white robes, leading Polish pilgrims around and taking selected groups up to see the pope. He was at the general audience with Pope Benedict XVI in the Vatican on Wednesday morning.

  He was close to the pope's entourage, but not a member of the inner circle. During the pope's recent hospitalization, for instance, he escorted the bishop of Zakopane, a town in southern Poland, to the Gemelli Polyclinic but did not go up to see the pope himself.

  He had extensive contacts with Poles who visited Rome, and had arranged housing and other assistance for Polish refugees who had fled the communist regime, according to Poland's Catholic Information Agency news service.

  Observers and church officials warned against passing a hasty judgment.

  "We are still not sure of the type of the cooperation, whether he was simply talking about the Holy Father with the secret services or was actually providing secret information on him," Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek told reporters. "If he was providing information, than this would be a very sad truth."

  Hejmo had been widely quoted about the pope's condition in the news media in the days leading up to John Paul's death April 2. He has served at the Vatican since 1979.

  Polish-born John Paul, elected pope in 1978, would have been of great interest to the secret police because of his role in inspiring the Solidarity trade union opposition to the communist regime, which collapsed in 1989.

  The release of communist-era information has created turmoil in Poland recently with the leak of an index to files in the custody of the remembrance institute.

  The so-called Wildstein list, named after the journalist who obtained it, caused controversy and confusion because it lists both people who informed and people who were spied on without distinguishing between them.

  Earlier this month, Kieres said he had recognized the taped voice of a clergyman who was secretly telling agents of Poland's communist secret services about Pope John Paul II. He said the news would have been "painful" to the pope.
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