© 2005-2026 BISERICI.org
© 2005-2026 BISERICI.org
Timp stanga: 0.03s...
Letter #10: Zaleski's Choice[2012-05-14][Engleză]May 10, 2012 -- Zaleski's Choice"The Church (in Poland) didnt want to hurt the Pope (John Paul II), but actually, more harm was done by keeping silent." Father Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski, 55, a Polish Roman Catholic and Armenian Catholic priest, author and activist (photo below). Born in 1956, in Cracow, Poland, Isakowicz-Zaleski was an activist of the anti-communist student opposition in Cracow in the late 1970s, became a Solidarity chaplain in Cracow's Nowa Huta district in the 1980s and also the founder of a number of group homes for handicapped people. Following the end of communist rule, he became an avid supporter of the renewal of the Polish Church in the post-communist period based on truth-telling about what had happened under communism, including revealing who had collaborated with the regime. "I am only interested in the truth (Chodzi mi tylko o prawde)" title of Father Zaleski's latest book, published in Poland this spring, which alleges, without naming names, that there is powerful "homosexual mafia" within the Church hierarchy in Poland (and also in Rome) today The need for truth is more sacred than any other need.Simone Weil (1909-43), one of the most original, brilliant, intense, and enigmatic thinkers of the 20th century. Politically, Weil was left wing and and active in the trade union movement and the education of workers in France. After the outbreak of the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of France, Weil sought ways to be involved in the Resistance, but at risk because of her Jewish ancestry, in 1942, after a short detour in the US, she finally settled in London. Determined to share in the privations of the people she had left behind, and further weakened by overwork, and overcome by self-doubt and depression, Weil died in August 1943. She was just 34. It is, however, as a religous thinker and mystic that Weil left her most indelible legacy. Her relationship to Christianity was vexed and complex. She finally came to regard herself as a Christian, but, so far as is known, she was never baptised. George Herberts poem Love bade me welcome, introduced to her by a young English priest in the late 1930s, struck and moved her deeply. She learned it by heart, and would often recite it to herself during periods of what she called affliction. For Weil the essence of faith was not credal belief but prayer in the form of attente, a waiting on God. Gods wholly and holy otherness, Gods kenosis in creation and in Christ, Gods compassion and passionate and relentless honesty were at the heart of her theology Christ likes us to prefer truth to himself, because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go towards the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.Ibid. ====================== A Difficult Letter This is a complex, difficult letter to write. And I do not have enough time to do the various matters justice, so what I write here is merely a sketch. There are a number of important things happening right now in the Church. There is the battle for religious freedom between the Church in the United States and the administration of President Barack Obama. There is the investigation by the Holy See of the American women religious orders. (Many note that the average age of the nuns in many of these orders is now approaching, or surpassing, 70; there are simply very few new vocations for most of these orders.) There is the turmoil in the Church in Ireland, rocked by allegations of harsh treatement and abuse of children, where the cardinal primate just resigned. And there is Pope Benedict's imminent decision on whether to welcome the Society of St. Pius X, the traditional Catholic group founded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, back into full reunion with the Holy See. The decision is expected before month's end (and the Society's reaction to that decision will then soon follow). There is no doubt that the welcoming of a group of 500 traditional priests back into full communion with Rome -- and I intentionally do not go into the question of what that relationship has been up to now -- is a matter of considerable importance, as these priests, and their lay congregations, would inevitably be a powerful group on behalf of a traditional Catholic position in future theological debates over the Church's relationship to the secular world and over the interpretation of the Second Vatican Council, which is another way of saying that there will be voices in the secular media and on the "left" ready and willing to denounce the Pope harshly if he does move to "regularize" the situation of the Lefebvrists. Forewarned is forearmed. But there are also other issues, and three in particular: first, to simplify, is the issue of "gender," by which I mean the whole issue of human sexuality, sexual morality, the nature and role of the family, and even the demographic question -- and this does not exhaust the issue; second, again to simplify, the issue of the globalized economy, and the role of human work, and of private losses placed as debts on the backs of the tax-paying public, to the point of constructing an enormously unbalanced, and unjust economy, which may require our children and grandchildren to pay off debts incurred recklessly during recent decades; third, and once again, to greatly simplify, there is the revolution occurring in genetics and genetic research, which promises to provide great benefits to humanity, to human health and well-being, but which is also fraught with the potential to bring great problems, even great evils, some of them catastrophic. The second and third questions will have to be addressed in future reports. But the first question is worth bringing up here, if only in passing, because traditional Church teaching is being challenged in this matter in nearly every Western country. A Journey to Poland and Austria We at Inside the Vatican ended our annual Easter pilgrimage on April 9, the day after Easter. (On these pilgrimages, we bring a small group of friends, generally no more than 12, to meet with Vatican officials, including cardinals, here in Rome, and to visit places like Assisi, Norcia, Subiaco, Castel Gandolfo.) On April 9, we traveled to the village of Manoppello, Italy, where, on display in the local church is a mysterious image of the face of Christ on a small rectangle of ancient, precious, almost transparent, silk-like fabric. (Pope Benedict took the matter so seriously that he visited the shrine personally on September 1, 2006). Upon our return to Rome, we spent the evening with Paul Badde (photo, left, with Pope Benedict XVI), author of an important book on the image, The Face of God: The Rediscovery Of The True Face of Jesus (Ignatius, 2012, cover image below), and his wife, Ellen. Badde has made a significant contribution to the understanding of both the image in Manoppello, and the Shroud of Turin, and I think it is no exaggeration to say that the English edition of his book, just out, may mark the beginning of a new era and opportunity for scholars of the Shroud of Turin, as well as of the Holy Face of Manoppello. I mention this image because there is no doubt that Pope Benedict has been calling ever more frequently in reason years for all of us to look "toward Christ" and, in particular, to seek "the face of Christ." And I bring this up because it is this which must be at the heart of our search now, as we try to find a way forward for the Church, and the faith, in a secularized world, which is preaching a new anthropology, a new future for humanity, and, in a sense, a new "face" for the "messiah" of our age, a "face" without a transcendent dimension, a face which can be designed, and produced, by the new "gods" of our age, who are, as in the time of the Caesars, only men. After the Easter pilgrimage, and the interesting visit with Badde and his wife, I went to Poland, and then to Austria. In Cracow, I met with Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz (photo left), formerly, and throughout his entire pontificate (1978-2005), the personal secretary of Pope John Paul II, and also with Father Tadeusz-Isakowicz Zaleski, the priest who was silenced in 2006 by Cardinal Dziwisz because he discovered the names of 39 Polish clerics who collaborated with the Communist regime. (Here is a photo of Zaleski as a young priest in the days of Solidarnosc.) I also had the chance to visit the Shrine of Divine Mercy, where St. Faustina Kowalska lived, and the Shrine of the Black Madonna at Czestochowa, not far from Cracow. (The image below is of the Czestochowa shrine, but not from my visit.) I was deeply moved by the piety I saw at this latter shrine. A German priest was celebrating Mass directly in front of the venerated icon for a group of German Catholics. Throughout the Mass, quietly, reverently, people, Germans and Poles alike, moved with tiny sliding motions on their knees along a marble pathway made smooth by countless legs, and then, having left the chapel, wrote down their special petitions to Our Lady and dropped the writings into little slots at the back of the church. I asked that I might find some way to write more clearly and effectively, and to serve to build up, and not to tear down, to bring healing, not throw salt into wounds, to bring hope, not hopelessness, to bring understanding, and compassion, and peace, not confusion and condemnation and conflict. All writing springs from a desire to communicate, to share, and so does this writing. One seeks the right words in order to send thoughts, images, insights, to a reader, a hearer, a receiver. One seeks to send news, bare facts, but also to send a context for that news, a way of understanding it, even by telling a story (or a parable) so that the words can be digested, integrated into a complete, balanced, worldview. One seeks to do this so one tells oneself because one wishes to serve truth, to serve understanding, to serve reason (that is, the Logos, that is, Christ, "the anointed one"), to the exclusion of all ideologies and all false gods. And one can hesitate, before writing, or before finishing writing, and clicking on the "Send" button, because one senses, with unease, and with a certain sorrow, which cannot be easily set aside, that one has not given sufficient context, that what one sends will not serve to build up truth in charity, but only to burden souls with "news" that cannot be assimilated, that cannot nourish. "Truth-telling" Pros and Cons In 2006, Cardinal Dziwisz had just returned to Poland after a quarter century in Rome to become the archbishop of Cracow. One of the decisions he took was to forbid a priest -- Zaleski -- from revealing information on clerics who had cooperated with the Communist secret services during the years when the Soviet Union controlled Eastern Europe. Zaleski, a Solidarity priest, had been beaten up twice in 1985 by Polish secret police. These attacks came in the wake of the notorious murder of fellow Solidarity priest Jerzy Popieluszko in 1984. By the late 1980s, Zaleski had decided to devote his life to a work of Christian charity: to helping mentally handicapped people, who were virtually abandoned under the communist regime. Zelski launched a Foundation and began to raise funds to create centers for the care of mentally handicapped people throughout Poland. Today, he has 30 such centers around Poland, caring for hundreds of handicapped men and women. In about 2005, a friend of his came to him and said, "Father Tadeusz, there is a dossier also on you in the Secret Police files." "Really?" Father Radeusz replied. He had not known of it. "Yes," his friend told him. "Would you like to see it?" Zaleski said he would. He soon received permission to have access to his own secret file. He expected to find only a page or two. He found more than 500 pages, and a video of one of his two beatings. "I was shocked at the size of my file," he told me. He realized that some of his actions and movements had been followed by people close to him -- by collaborators of the regime who were inside the Church. But who were those collaborators? Zaleski decided to find out, with devastating consequences... The Warsaw Business Journal on June 5, 2006, wrote the following: "(Konrad Stanislaw) Hejmo, (Michal) Czajkowski, (Mieczyslaw) Malinski in the last year, three priests' names have already made it into the headlines, as they were all suspected of cooperating with communist secret services (SB, Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, the Security Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs). Fathers Hejmo and Maliński were close to the late Pope John Paul II, while Father Czajkowski was accused of informing on Father Jerzy Popieluszko a legend of the Solidarity movement who was murdered by the SB. "Last week, Father Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski, who was conducting research on SB agents in the church in Kraków, called a press conference to reveal information he came across while looking through the archives of the National Remembrance Institute (IPN). He claimed to know the names of 28 SB collaborators within the Kraków church, eight of whom are already dead. "A couple of hours before the meeting with journalists, Father Zaleski was summoned to the curia and handed a letter from Cardinal Dziwisz, which forbade him from talking to the press about his findings or continuing his research. 'As the illegal sullying of somebody's good name is a crime and by announcing that you are going to reveal the names of clerics suspected of collaboration with SB, you have come very close to committing one. I hereby give you a canonic reprimand pursuant to the relevant regulations,' Dziwisz wrote. "Father Zaleski, a famous priest within the Solidarity movement in Nowa Huta, told the journalists: 'I accept this decision in the spirit of obedience towards Kraków's archbishop,' but later added: 'I have a moral right to talk about my generation. It is the generation of people who in the 1980s stayed in Poland, survived the times of Solidarity and martial law.' This was a clear allusion to Cardinal Dziwisz, who lived in Vatican between 1978 and 2005." But within a few weeks, Zaleski published the results of his research. ================== Communist Collaboration in Poland Many historians argue that a significant segment of the clergy in Poland and other Eastern bloc countries collaborated to varying degrees with the Communist secret services. The Polish Church publicly apologized in 2006 for priests who collaborated with the SB, but has tried to keep their names secret. Most researchers who have delved into the archives of the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa (Security Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs) estimate that thousands of the countrys priests, monks and nuns at the time as many as 10% of the total collaborated with the secret police to some degree. The Archbishop of Warsaw, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, told an Italian news agency in 2006 that the overall percentage was 15%. The percentage was likely to have been much higher in major cities and university towns, some historians say, where surveillance was heavier. When Father Zaleski decided to begin publishing disclosures in May 2006, Cardinal Dziwisz forbade him to do so or to speak to the press because it would undermine love for the Church and Christ. The cardinal issued an order prohibiting any member of the clergy from delving into Krakows secret police archives without his authorization. Still, Father Zaleski published a book identifying 39 priests whose names he found in Krakows secret police files, three now bishops in the Polish Church. Sursa: www.InsideTheVatican.com Contor Accesări: 1137, Ultimul acces: 2026-09-21 09:24:10
|
Timp total: 0.04s...
[1]:1
