POLAND: Poland's Catholic Church has demanded a full inquiry into allegations that a Polish priest in the Vatican had spied on Pope John Paul for the country's communist-era secret police.
The charge, made by the Polish state agency that is gradually opening the secret police files, was a grim shock to the church less than a month after the death of a pontiff who was lionised in his homeland for helping bring down Soviet-led communism.
The head of the National Remembrance Institute stunned Poles late on Wednesday when he announced that Fr Konrad Hejmo, a Dominican priest at the Vatican, "was a secret collaborator of the Polish secret services under the names 'Hejnal' and 'Dominik'."
At the same news conference, Father Hejmo's Dominican superior, Father Maciej Zieba, called the files "convincing and shocking".
Yesterday, as Polish media digested the possible betrayal of John Paul, Father Zieba said he would travel to Rome to speak to Father Hejmo, while senior clergy called for a full investigation into the case.
"We take this information in with great bewilderment and pain but there is no doubt the case requires a complete and honest clarification," the Polish Bishops' Conference said in a statement.
Fr Hejmo has for many years headed the Polish Pilgrimage House, a hostel for Poles visiting Rome, and was well known in his homeland for offering the media "insider knowledge" of John Paul's health. He arranged for certain Polish pilgrims to have an audience with the pontiff and was usually present at his public events, although Vatican experts say he was not part of the pope's closest "inner circle".
Father Hejmo immediately denied knowingly co-operating with the secret services, but did admit to having suspicions about one of his acquaintances. "I have never been a secret collaborator," he 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." Father Hejmo said he had only recently learned that the man - a Pole who was living in Germany and has since died - might have been a communist intelligence agent.
Father Hejmo said Polish intelligence had tried to co-opt the services of practically every Catholic priest, at a time when the combination of a Polish pope and the growing Solidarity trade union united opposition to the authorities. He said he had simply gathered press reports on the pope and the Polish church and sent them back home, as part of his work as deputy chief of the Polish episcopate's press office in Rome from 1979, a year after Karol Wojtyla became pontiff.