SB Priests

[sobieski010]

It seems as if we will never know which priests spied for the SB
In Kraków they are keeping firmly the lid on the file... and Maliński is of
course innocent as white snow.
...and strangely enough the president thinks that's a good thing.
Probably there are names on the list which could be quite shocking.
I wonder if they will show so much clemency with journalists etc.. who were
informers or SB agents..
Ian was right - the pope has gone and the scandals start to appear.

[ianek70]

Priests are paid to listen to confessions, not to make them.

This should all have been done a long time ago, although I understand the
temptation to put things off until later when you know they're going to hurt.
In South Africa they had something like a Truth and Conciliation Commission,
where people on both sides admitted what they'd done and explained why, in
exchange for immunity (except in extreme cases). Everything was out in the
open, there was a lot of anger and lots of people felt betrayed, but this was
immediately after the end of apartheid and they were still angry anyway.

If Poles had done the same, the wounds would have healed by now, although
that's easy to say as an outsider, and for a lot of powerful people it was
better to wait and maybe confess tomorrow...

There's an excellent book called "Pajęczyna - Syndrom Bezpieki" (a little
paperback by B. Stanisławczyk & D. Wilczak), based on candid interviews with ex-
SB men.
Some of them joined up because they believed in the system (at first, anyway),
some were from small villages where commies came in bringing electricity and
the offer of a well-paid job, some were just careerists, some claimed not to be
interested in politics, they just enjoyed the challenging, exciting life of a
spy, intelligent but cynical people who had to identify which of the other side
could be blackmailed and how.
The syndrom of the title is the paranoia still felt by former SB - the instinct
to walk away from the pavement when a car slows down behind you, or to throw
papers and documents about the room before you go to the shops, remembering
what's where so that you know if someone's searched the house while you were
out.