LASTSunday, the new Catholic archbishop of Warsaw resigned his post minutesbefore the ceremony of his installation was scheduled to begin. He satinstead on a lower chair, beside the throne he would never occupy,during a mass intended as a liturgical welcome which had suddenlybecome a celebration of his predecessor's return.

Helooked like an ambitious man who'd only just realised the depth of thedisgrace that he'd brought down on himself, the Polish Church and theHoly See.

Church hierarchies within the Soviet Union and the Eastern Blocgenerally were often penetrated by the spy services of the old regimes.The churches were long recognised as information networks and potentialinstruments of social control. Even in Poland, where the cardinalssuccessfully resisted the blandishments of the secret police, juniorclergy were often frightened or beguiled into various degrees ofcomplicity or active co-operation. There are mountainous files, many ofquestionable accuracy, preserved in the Institute of National Memory.

Some priests colluded to save their own lives or to save theirflocks. Some were merely self-interested. The Pope, on a visit toWarsaw last May, made a point of saying: "We must guard against thearrogance of setting ourselves up to judge earlier generations wholived in different times and different circumstances." In Poland it'sestimated that about 10 per cent of the clergy were to some extentcompromised by the regime. Unfortunately, in the case of the incomingarchbishop of Warsaw, Stanislaw Wielgus, the lure the secret policeused was permission to travel overseas and the collaboration involved aperiod of special training and a signed undertaking to act as aninformant.

Wielgus had been a member of the Polish hierarchy since 1999, whenhe became the bishop of Plock. While several Vatican departments made apublic relations disaster out of defending his selection for the see ofWarsaw, which I'll come to presently, the responsibility for the majorscandal played out last Sunday needs to be broadly distributed amongthe main players and also encompasses some deep-seated historicalproblems.

Church historians put much of the blame on the selection process bywhich clerical in-crowds have rewarded their junior members. Ambitiousyoung men on the make quickly learn how to become indispensable.

Clerical celibates are at least as prone to playing favourites asany other power clique. In earlier times it was common to guard againstthese problems by having the clergy or the cathedral chapter andsometimes the laity involved in electing their bishop. It at leastguarantees that the local church is obliged to "own" the head they'vechosen and, while it can encourage the promotion of crowd-pleasers,minimises the likelihood of scandalous appointments.

Many historians also point to Pope John Paul II's principal focusduring the course of a long reign on the church's external relationsand geopolitics, at the expense of internal management. Without castingdoubt on his role in the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, they note histendency to rely excessively on papal diplomats, the nuncios who conferwith local churches about appointments, and the Congregation of Bishopsto whom much of the screening work was delegated.

Much that is amiss in the contemporary Catholic Church, from theclerical sex abuse scandals down, is attributable to the decliningstandards of episcopal appointments. They're often men who arefollowers rather than leaders, lacking in broad intellectual ortheological distinction, let alone conspicuous piety or gravitas. JohnPaul II never seemed to realise the depth of the problem, particularlyin Britain and North America.

The previous pope was the first to be elected from Poland and hetook special interest in the church of his homeland. Scrupulous in hisown dealings with the communist regime and aware of its attempts atinfiltration, it's surprising that John Paul II didn't ensure Wielguswas diligently screened before his first promotion in 1999. The Polishbishops had also set up an ecclesiastical historical commission toinvestigate clergy suspected of past collaboration. Neither it nor thepapal nuncio did their jobs properly, then or later.

It was left to a rather conservative weekly magazine Gazeta Polska,which broke the news, with chapter and verse revelations which PrimeMinister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has described as provoking "a nationalcrisis". Wielgus went on the record in late December, flatly denyingthat he had collaborated with the secret police from the 1960s up tothe early '90s. It must have been gradually dawning on both his brotherbishops in Poland and perhaps on officials in the Holy See that he waslying, but they backed him nonetheless, apparently judging that theycould force the appointment on the laity willy-nilly.

The Vatican Press Office said: "The Holy See, in choosing to appointthe new metropolitan archbishop of Warsaw, took into consideration allthe circumstances of his life, including those regarding his past. Thismeans that the Holy See nourishes complete trust in ArchbishopStanislaw Wielgus and, in full awareness, has entrusted him with themission of pastor of Warsaw." It also noted, as though Wielgus were aninjured innocent, "that harm that has been inflicted against a specificperson's right to a good reputation".

By January 5, CNN carried the news that a special church commissionhad discovered Wielgus's involvement as an informer: "There are plentyof documents which confirm Wielgus's willing co-operation." Thearchbishop-elect said in reply that he had talked to the secret policeto be allowed to travel outside Poland but had never done anyone anyharm.

"I know I should not have had any contact with the communistservices. I regret taking those foreign trips which were the reason forthese contacts." He later claimed that, before accepting the position,"I also presented my life history to the Holy Father and thenappropriate departments of the Holy See, including this part of my pastwhich comprised being entangled in the contacts with the secretservices ..."

It was a last act of self-justification before his resignation, onewhich dovetailed neatly with the Vatican press office's line abouttaking all the circumstances of his life into account in making hisappointment.

On Monday the head of the Congregation of Bishops, Cardinal Re, wasout and about doing what he could to dispel the suggestion that thePope and his congregation were complicit in a cover-up. He told theCorriere della Sera that "when Monsignor Wielgus was nominated, we didnot know anything about his collaboration with the secret services".Without naming sources La Republica reported that the Pope received an80-page fax from the Polish government only on Saturday eveningdocumenting Wielgus's activities as a spy.

The repercussions of this debacle for the Polish Church are many,complex and beyond the scope of this column. Suffice it to say thathaving so narrowly escaped the ministrations of a prelate prepared toengage in brazen lies to save his career may well have a long-termimpact on church attendance in Europe's most pious province. Thenagain, a positive consequence is that it will surely prompt a far morediligent vetting process with senior appointments and either thevirtual passing-over of a generation of compromised candidates or aconsensus on what level of co-operation with the previous regimeamounts to an absolute impediment to preferment.

The more general question is who inside the Vatican knew what, andwhen did they know it. Re almost certainly overstates the case with theassertion: "We did not know anything." Did they suspect anything, orhad they perhaps made it their business not to know? Plainly he and hiscongregation, who choose and vet episcopal candidates, should haveknown about damning evidence the Polish secular press were able toproduce in a matter of days.

Again, Wielgus's claim that he'd told the relevant authorities abouthis past and the Vatican press allusion to his history having beentaken into account suggest some had at least partial knowledge of thecircumstances.

On the other hand, Wielgus is a serial offender when it comes tolying on the public record and a great bender of the truth to boot.It's quite possible he made vague mention to the Pope and Re of adistant involvement in a situation where he believed no one hadsuffered as a result. He may have suggested these were commonplacepeccadilloes that only people living in stable democracies had theluxury of condemning. He may also have told various curial cardinalsand the Pope that his lapse was regarded as trivial in Poland and wassomething already long-known within sections of the Curia.

No one expects the Pope to micro-manage the church: he's at oneremove from the bureaucracy he mostly inherited from the previousreign. It's also hard to imagine the Pope deciding to stand by Wielguswhile he was lying to his flock in so transparent a fashion, denyingthe allegations, though the same can scarcely be said with muchconfidence of Re and the spin-doctors in the Vatican press office. Aclarification of what Wielgus told Benedict would settle the matter,preferably followed after a decent interval by the news that Re's beensent off to a provincial see and his career as promoter of lacklustrebishops has at last come to an end.