Archbishop resigns over secret police contacts

Warsaw’s new archbishop has resigned amid a scandal over his cooperation with the communist-era secret police, Poland’s Roman Catholic church said today.

Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus, who took office on Friday and was to have been installed in a ceremony today, ”has submitted his resignation from the office of archbishop of Warsaw,” Poland’s Episcopate said in a statement released only half an hour before the Mass was to begin.

Revelations that Wielgus had contacts with the hated secret police of the communist regime, which ended in 1989, have shaken the deeply Catholic homeland of the late Pope John Paul II over recent days.

The church said Pope Benedict XVI has asked the outgoing archbishop, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, to administer the archdiocese until a replacement is found.