The brief tenure of Stanislaw Wielgus as archbishop of Warsaw ought to hold lessons for us. Archbishop Wielgus resigned last Sunday at the mass where he was supposed to be consecrated. Newspapers and websites had discovered old secret police documents showing that, on about 50 occasions during Poland’s period of communist rule, Archbishop Wielgus had met the notorious SB security services. He had promised to spy for them on trips abroad. The Catholic church’s involvement makes the lesson more complicated than the usual, necessary one about the brutality of communist regimes.

Archbishop Wielgus is responsible to a hierarchy other than that of the Polish state. He did not resign over a crime; there has been no talk of prosecuting him. He resigned over a moral taint that, as the Vatican put it, “gravely compromised his authority”. Authority is important to a religious denomination and the moral authority of the church in Poland is towering – precisely for its historic resistance to communism. A second priest resigned days later and a forthcoming book by a churchman in Kraków promises to name more clerical collaborators. But the church in general – led by cardinals Stefan Wyszynski of Warsaw and Karol Wojtyla (later Pope John Paul II) of Kraków – was a profile in courage.