There was a time, not so long ago, when Catholic bishops did not resign. Regardless of their sins, they were protected by church authorities determined to remain immune from alien concepts of public opinion and media pressure, writes Mary Raftery.
In this context, one of the more remarkable aspects of the spy scandal surrounding former archbishop of Warsaw Stanislaw Wielgus is the relative speed at which the Vatican moved to ensure his resignation.
Prior to the handful of removals of bishops associated with child abuse scandals, usually forced after years of controversy, one of the more notable exceptions to the non-resignation rule was of course our own Bishop Eamon Casey.
Superficially, Stanislaw Wielgus and Eamon Casey have little in common. The former resigned on Sunday in a furore over evidence that he had spied for the Polish secret police during the communist era. Eamon Casey's disgrace resulted from the revelation in 1992 that he had fathered a son following an affair some 17 years previously.
The similarity, however, lies in the impact of each of the scandals on the two most devout Catholic countries in Europe.
It is certainly true that long before the Bishop Casey scandal, Catholic power in Ireland was in decline, with steadily falling vocations and Mass attendance figures. The real significance of the Casey revelations was that they opened people's eyes to the reality of gross hypocrisy at the highest levels among those who preached morality to us.
This in turn laid the ground for the gradual removal of the culture of denial which surrounded clerical child sexual abuse in this country, and the creation of a public climate where victims could reveal the truth of their experiences and be believed.
The Stanislaw Wielgus affair may well have a similar impact in Poland, and be looked back on as the catalyst for waning Catholic Church authority in that country.
This is of the greatest significance for the Vatican. With Poland as the last major bastion of traditional Catholicism in Europe, there have been frequently repeated hopes that the devoutness of the Polish population would act as an evangelising force across the continent.
These hopes were undoubtedly boosted by the relatively insignificant impact on public opinion of another Polish Catholic scandal. In 2002, the archbishop of Poznan, Juliusz Paetz, resigned over allegations that he had sexually molested young seminarians, even using an underground tunnel to gain secret access to them. This did not convulse the Polish church to anything like the extent of events over the past week.
What makes the Wielgus scandal so serious for the Catholic Church in Poland is that its enormous strength in that country was due in great part to its opposition to communism, with the role of Pope John Paul II an important one in the eventual securing of democracy in 1989.
With up to 150,000 Poles now living, working and worshipping in Ireland, the dramatic events in Warsaw during the past week are of considerable relevance here.
Echoing the experience of many Irish people in Britain over the decades, Polish people here speak of the importance of the Catholic Church in providing support to Polish immigrants in this country, even if it is only a point of social contact with their fellow exiles. This, they feel, may now be damaged, with people beginning to wonder what further revelations of dysfunction may be on the way.
They themselves are beginning to draw the parallels between Ireland and Poland in the context of Catholic Church scandals. Even the language they use is similar, with people talking of betrayal, crisis in trust and hypocrisy.
There is also, however, considerable confusion over the motivation for revealing the information that the former archbishop was a secret police informer. It came originally last December through a right-wing, marginal newspaper, Gazeta Polska, which was promptly denounced by a number of senior clerics as engaging in "hateful attacks" against Bishop Wielgus. Two of the paper's journalists were reportedly beaten up last Sunday outside the cathedral after Wielgus announced his resignation. The culprits, apparently, were some of his outraged supporters - many of whom would be likely to be readers of the same publication.
The ultra-conservative Catholic station Radio Maryja has also supported the bishop, as have a number of like-minded commentators. Radio Maryja equally supports the current right-wing Polish government, headed up by identical twins Jaroslaw and Lech Kaczynski. They, however, favoured the outing of the bishop as a spy, and there is already speculation that they were instrumental in convincing the Vatican of the need for his resignation.
All of which provides an intriguing insight into the complex nature of modern Polish politics and religion. Polish Catholicism is no longer the traditional monolith it once was, and is experiencing just as much turmoil, grief and fundamental change as elsewhere in the western world.