Anne Applebaum on the Bishop Wielgus

As usual, she has additional background:

Yet even in this city of new office buildings and 24-hour news, there is no escaping the past. Behind this scandal, there are layers upon layers of it, starting with the still-open and still-bitter debate about the compromises people made in the communist era. The archbishop's past collaboration was in some ways very typical. Intelligent and ambitious, he wanted to study abroad. The secret police told him that in exchange for a passport, he would have to report what he heard when he got there. He apparently agreed. Many others, offered the same deal, did not agree -- and as a result they did not study abroad, and possibly did not advance as far in their chosen professions as Wielgus did in his. Some of them are still angry about it.

It is true, of course, that the archbishop has said that he "never informed on anyone and never tried to hurt anyone." It is also true that nothing negative about him has been proven: This was trial by media, not a balanced judgment. The documents that would clarify the extent of his collaboration, one way or another, apparently no longer exist. But their absence is also a historical legacy, this time from 1989, when the last communist chief of the secret police -- who remained in charge rather longer than is generally remembered -- destroyed most of the files concerning church officials and possibly those of other public figures, too. Odd though it sounds, in some ways the memory of 1989 bothers Poles more than the memory of the 1970s. Certainly the deals done at that time -- political power for the former dissidents in exchange for amnesty for the former rulers -- laid the foundations for the country's perpetual bad mood.

Contrary to some Western reporting, the first Polish post-communist governments did not conduct significant investigations into the affairs of their predecessors. At the same time, laws that neatly allocated shares in privatized factories to their former managers -- thus allowing communist cadres to transform themselves into capitalist owners -- were allowed to remain in Poland, as they were in Russia, Hungary and elsewhere. Thanks to those shady privatizations, the former ruling class became rich in the 1990s, and their former opponents did not. Hence the generalized gloom, which has never been justified by the economic statistics, and the prevailing sense that justice was not done. Hence the lack of tolerance for archbishops who made mistakes as younger men.

And here Applebaum makes the same mistake as she did in her book "Gulag: A History": she engages in a curious bit of moral equivalence that the Left reserves for Communists but denies to Nazis. The only difference between the two is that the Communists were less discriminatory and less restrained in whom they murdered and tortured. And yet Applebaum can't quite muster any outrage over a clergymen who would comport with the secret police, a complete betrayal of his flock and his duty.

This was hardly a simple mistake, but rather a clear indication that Bishop Wielgus lacked something fundamental to serving Christ: the willingness to sacrifice oneself for the good of others.

And if a fine, fine journalist like Applebaum doesn't get this, we can forget the notion that the rest of the biased hacks at Pinch Sulzberger's little puppy tray liner production shop ever will.