By all accounts the Polish Church handled well the disclosure that Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus had once collaborated with the security police. The Archbishop resigned before his installation, and the nation’s Bishops have submitted their own records to scrutiny.
Such openness must have been difficult in a church with such a proud record of resistance to Communism. Persecuted churches often suffer from the expectation that they will be exceptional and from the view that persecution is a place in which the Church is necessarily purified.
This is a romantic trivialisation of the early Christian axiom that that the blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians. It makes it easy to idealise times of persecution as times when Christianity flourishes. Frederick Faber catches the mood in his hymn Faith of our Fathers: ‘Faith of our Fathers, living still/ In spite of dungeon fire and sword’. To to die like these Fathers would be a sweet fate.
Certainly, in the face of a relatively low-level persecution, as in Ireland or in Poland, a national church may be strengthened. Under intense persecution, too, some people show extraordinary heroism. But there may also be a heavy cost.
The cost is evident in the early Church. Under the Pagan emperors persecution was generally sporadic. But in the middle of the third century and particularly at the beginning of the following century, Emperors saw the security of the Empire as dependent on universal worship of the state Gods. They therefore set out to destroy the Christian Church.
They targeted initially the lives of Church leaders and the property of lay Christians. Ultimately, all citizens were required to have certificates declaring that they had sacrificed to the Roman Gods. Clergy were also required to hand over the sacred books and vessels used for worship. Those who refused were subject to torture and death. These laws paid both ways. If Bishops resisted, the Church would be made leaderless. If they sacrificed, it would be demoralised.
Eusebius, a contemporary witness, describes the result: "many church leaders bore up heroically under horrible torture, an object lesson in enduring terrible ordeals; while countless others, their spirits already cowed by terror, immediately yielded at the first threat."
At the end of the persecution many churches were chaotic and divided. Clergy who had fled from their towns were confronted by members of their congregations who had been blinded or maimed for their confession of