WARSAW (Reuters) — Poland’s Roman Catholic bishops held a crisis meeting yesterday to decide how to deal with the Church’s communist-era past after Warsaw’s archbishop resigned, admitting he had spied for the secret police.The powerful Polish Church and the Vatican were deeply embarrassed by revelations that Stanislaw Wielgus collaborated with the communist regime. He was forced to resign only days after his official appointment by Pope Benedict.

“Our meeting is a response to the extraordinary situation the Church is facing,” said Father Jozef Kloch, spokesman of the bishops’ conference.

“The situation is so difficult, it would be impossible for the bishops to stay silent,” he told a news conference.

He said the bishops would try to come up with a “systematic solution about how to deal with secret service files”, currently held and supervised by the National Remembrance Institute.

Like many former communist countries, Poland did not open its secret files after the collapse of communism in 1989. It chose to seek reconciliation between supporters and opponents of the communist regime which ruled from the end of the Second World War.

Last year, journalists and academics were given access to the communist files. Since then, prominent former pro-democracy activists and Church officials are accused almost every week of spying for the communist secret service.

The Church also has access to the files at the institute.

The Wielgus scandal, called by the Vatican a “moment of great suffering for the Church”, has forced Polish bishops to consider whether to make public the names of priests who cooperated with the secret services.

The Polish Church supported the pro-democracy Solidarity movement during the 1980s. Its priests became a major target of the secret police recruiters and historians say up to ten percent may have cooperated.