Opinion: Bishop checkmated

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The resignation of the new archbishop of Warsaw, who admitted to cooperating with the secret police during the Communist era, may be a very Polish scandal, as Anne Applebaum suggests. But the downfall of the Most Rev. Stanislaw Wielgus also will resonate -- in an exception-that-proves-the-rule way -- with any American educated in Catholic schools during the Cold War.

At Sacred Heart School in Pittsburgh in the 1950s and ‘60s, we were schooled in the heroism of anti-Communist bishops like Hungary’s Joseph Mindszenty and Croatia’s Aloysius Stepinac. (We didn’t hear as much about possibly the bravest episcopal victim of Soviet persection, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic leader Josyf Cardinal Slipyj, who spent 18 years in Soviet prison camps before being released to the Vatican.)

So iconic was the image of the anti-Communist Catholic prelate that it seeped into popular culture, from “The Shoes of the Fisherman” (whose papal protagonist was probably inspired by Slipyj) to “Mission:Impossible” (the TV series, not the Tom Cruise movie franchise). The other day I watched a DVD of one of the seminal M:I episodes, circa 1966, in which the American operatives must rescue freedom-loving “Anton Cardinal Vossek” from the “impregnable” Seravno Prison in one of the generic satellite states so popular with the series’ writers.

The irony, of course, is that the Roman Catholic Church’s policy toward the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe became considerably more nuanced, especially after the 1963 election of Pope Paul VI. Under Paul, the Vatican pursued its own policy of Ostpolitik, with the late Archbishop (later cardinal) Agostino Casaroli in the Willy Brandt role.

In the opinion of some Catholics in the “captive nations,” Casaroli was entirely too chummy and accommodating, believing, as The Guardian put it in its 1998 obituary, “that a church with some degree of independence was better than one with none.”

Casaroli, who ended his ecclesiastical career as John Paul II’s secretary of state, was one of the signers of the 1975 Helsinki agreement on human rights, which recently surfaced in some of the eulogies for former President Gerald Ford.

Like Ford and Henry Kissinger in the secular sphere, Casaroli was derided in Catholic circles as being soft on Communism. But his policy of engagement with what “Mission: Impossible” called the East People’s Republics arguably laid the groundwork for a post-Communist church that can now afford to look askance at those -- like Archbishop Wielgus – who preached the gospel in harder times.