Derek Scallyassesses the potential for lasting damage after the resignation of Bishop Stanislaw Wielgus
The Poles have a word for it: lustration. Derived from the ancient Greeks and Romans, lustration was once a ritual that involved making an offering to drive out impurities.
In modern Poland, lustration is the evaluation of the files of the communist regime's secret police, the SB. On Sunday, Bishop Stanislaw Wielgus became the most recent and most prominent case in Poland of lustration, in both senses of the word.
His inauguration-turned-resignation Mass was a painful, public humiliation as the 67-year-old bishop, eyes swollen from lack of sleep, told the congregation that he was standing down just two days after becoming Archbishop of Warsaw.
He was brought down by evidence of a 20-year collaboration with the SB, in particular a 68-page dossier by SB officers of the informant they called "Grey".
Bishop Wielgus protested that he had never spied on the church, the clergy or anyone else and that he had never carried out any activities demanded of him. But the complete file has apparently been destroyed, and with it any evidence to prove the case either way.
In the end, though, it was not the contents of the file that forced his resignation but his admission by degrees of SB involvement and his selective use of the truth - even, apparently, with Pope Benedict.
As the dust settles, the consequences of his departure are becoming clear - for Poland's relationship with the Vatican and how Poland evaluates its communist past.
Polish primate Cardinal Jozef Glemp was the first to spring to the defence of Bishop Wielgus after his resignation on Sunday, calling him the victim of a witch-hunt and comparing him to St Peter, who betrayed Christ but went on the lead the church.
But his spirited defence appeared to publicly question the wisdom of Peter's successor in Rome, Pope Benedict, who viewed the revelations as serious enough to warrant the bishop's resignation.
Ordinary Poles who defend the bishop, in particular listeners to the ultra-Catholic Radio Maryja, see Bishop Wielgus as a martyr of media injustice, lynched by a liberal conspiracy. That would suggest that the pope, by pushing for and accepting Bishop Wielgus's resignation, is also in on the plot.
It remains to be seen if a serious rift opens between Rome and Warsaw over the SB revelations. But for Polish politicians, the Vatican's statement on the matter warrants closer inspection. It said that Bishop Wielgus had "gravely compromised" his authority, before adding that the files were "produced by functionaries of an oppressive and blackmailing regime".
That must have been food for thought for Polish president Lech Kaczynski, who had a front-row seat on Sunday for the agonies of Bishop Wielgus. Since taking office, Mr Kaczynski and his prime minister twin brother, Jaroslaw, have restarted the lustration process that lost steam in the 1990s. Their aim is to root out the remaining communist officials and collaborators who slipped through the negotiated transition to democracy.
There are many valid arguments for pushing for a clean break with the past, but critics say that in the hands of the Kaczynskis, the process has become a hysterical, politicised witch-hunt, primarily directed at their political enemies.
These are the shadowy businessmen, former communists and journalists who have formed an all-powerful clique that perverted democracy in Poland from birth.
Yet the most powerful tool in the twins' moral crusade are the SB files, thrown open to general inspection with the flawed logic that the enemy of their enemy is their friend.
But the SB files are highly unreliable, as Jaroslaw Kaczynski himself knows: he was surprised to find in his file two signed letters agreeing to inform for the SB. Only after a court battle were they later agreed to be forgeries.
Critics of the twins take issue with the vindictive style of the lustration campaign led by brothers who live in a black and white world of anti-communist heroes and villainous communists and collaborators. It is the grey area in between - populated by people like Bishop Wielgus - that causes them difficulty.
After Sunday's drama, it seems that the church has two problems: collaboration allegations themselves and their unwillingness to confront the charges.
Later this month, a Krakow priest will publish a book naming church officials he found inside the file the SB kept on him.
In a classic case of shoot the messenger, the priest has been attacked by his archbishop as an "inquisitor" and a "merciless and ruthless prosecutor".
The book is likely to confirm the suspicions after Sunday's resignation that the Polish Catholic church is an institution riven with internal division and paralysed by fear of losing its moral authority, even as its authority seeps away through inaction.
Meanwhile the Kaczynskis, after opening a Pandora's Box, are unable to control the consequences of files that contain truths, half- truths and complete lies.