"Conversion of Russia" Update

Close Confidant of John Paul II
Suspected Communist Spy

by Christopher A. Ferrara

        On April 28, 2005, John Hooper of the English newspaper The Guardian broke a bombshell story: "A Polish monk close to the late Pope John Paul II was ordered back to Poland from the Vatican yesterday to face allegations he spied on the pontiff for his country’s communist regime in the closing stages of the cold war."

        This is no rumor, but a real disclosure backed by real evidence. As Hooper reports, "An official in Warsaw said Father Konrad Hejmo had collaborated with the secret police in the 1980s when the communist government was struggling to cling to power in the face of a swelling opposition inspired by the then recently elected pope. The priest's job at the Vatican gave him privileged access to some of the Roman Catholic Church's most sensitive information at a time when its leader was playing a crucial role in world affairs."

        Father Hejmo himself admitted to reporters in Rome that he had shared confidential Vatican information with what he called "an acquaintance," but claimed that he "did not know the man was an agent." Conveniently enough, the "acquaintance" is dead. But not even Hemjo’s own superior is buying his story about an innocent acquaintance. Hooper reports that "Father Hejmo's Dominican superior, Maciej Zieba, told reporters he had seen the files and that they were ‘convincing and shocking.’"

        In fact, Andrzej Paczkowski, "a historian at the institute which investigates Nazi and communist era crime, said the dossier ran to some 700 pages and also covered ‘earlier periods’" before Hemjo ended up at the Vatican. The head of the same institute, Leon Kieres, said that the evidence showed that Hemjo was a "secret collaborator of the Polish secret services under the names of Hejnal and Dominik."

        According to Hooper’s report, "Father Hejmo arrived in Rome in October 1979, a year after Karol Wojtyla was chosen to be the first non-Italian pontiff in more than four centuries. He had been recommended by the late Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski and was put in charge of looking after Polish pilgrims."

        Thus, the errors of Russia literally spread into the Vatican itself during the reign of Pope John Paul II. And is it likely that Hemjo was the only communist infiltrator in the Vatican apparatus during his reign? If someone so close to the Pope was spying for the communists, who knows how many other Vatican bureaucrats were involved in the same activity? That would help to explain some of the bizarre decisions the Vatican apparatus has taken since the Second Vatican Council — decisions that are part of the "apostasy in the Church" that Cardinal Ciappi, having read the Third Secret of Fatima, warned would "begin at the top."