Both the Vatican and the head of the Church in Poland this week blamed the Church's "adversaries", the media and even some lay Catholics for the deeply embarrassing resignation last Sunday of Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus of Warsaw. The prelate, 67, dramatically stepped down minutes before what was supposed to be his installation Mass after he admitted, under a barrage of accusations in the Polish press, that he had been an informant for the Communist secret police (the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa or SB) from the 1960s until the end of the totalitarian regime in 1989. And on Monday, Janusz Bielanski, a priest at Krakow Cathedral, resigned.

"There is an organised media programme against the Church, which is worrying a lot of people," Cardinal Jozef Glemp said in a Polish TV interview on Tuesday. "I'm not saying the lay Catholics had bad intentions. But they did surrender to the atmosphere of pressure, which gave Archbishop Wielgus no right to defend himself according to civilised standards."

The director of the Holy See press office, Fr Federico Lombardi, said on 7 January that the "behaviour" of Archbishop Wielgus during the Communist years had "gravely compromised his authority" and said his resignation was "an adequate solution" to the confusion the incident had caused Polish Catholics. But the spokesman went on to say that the archbishop had been a victim of "attacks on a Church personality based on documentation ... produced by functionaries of an oppressive and blackmailing regime". Fr Lombardi warned that other churchmen would probably be targeted in the future. 

However, another Polish Church leader defended researchers who had published evidence against the archbishop and urged Poles not to "build a climate of suspicion". "The fewer hurtful words, suspicions and epithets, the greater will be our chance of escaping from this situation," Archbishop Jozef Zycinski of Lublin told journalists. "We can't specify the best methods for overcoming such a crisis. But we can at least say what we shouldn't do - and the first is to look for scapegoats on whom to throw responsibility."

The head of the Congregation of Bishops, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, told an Italian newspaper this week that the Vatican was unaware of the archbishop's past when Pope Benedict appointed him to Warsaw on 6 December. But that seemed to contradict an official Vatican statement released by Fr Lombardi on 21 December saying that the Holy See had reviewed all the "circumstances of [the archbishop's] life", including "those things concerning his past", before appointing him. The statement said the Pope had "complete trust" in Wielgus and had named him archbishop with "full awareness" of these circumstances. 

Privately two mid-level Vatican officials who did not wish to be named separately told The Tablet they were "pretty sure" that Pope Benedict knew of Archbishop Wielgus' past involvement with the secret police. One pointed to a speech the Pope made last May while in Poland where he warned "against the arrogant claim of setting ourselves up to judge earlier generations, who lived in different times and different circumstances". During that homily, given on 25 May in the same Warsaw Cathedral where Archbishop Wielgus was to have been installed last week, the Pope had said: "Humble sincerity is needed in order not to deny the sins of the past, and at the same time not to indulge in facile accusations in the absence of real evidence or without regard for the different preconceptions of the time."

Polish newspapers said Church leaders were bracing themselves for further accusations after the departure of Archbishop Wielgus.

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