Marek Lasota
Wojtyła Denounced
Donos na Wojtyłę. Karol Wojtyła w teczkach bezpieki
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Film rights sold in Poland
It is the first book presenting and analysing the material on the Pope-to-be preserved in the files of communist Poland’s secret services. The first document mentioning his name probably dates back as far as 1945 or 1946. From the 1940’s throughout the 1970’s Wojtyła and his friends were objects of regular surveillance. Marek Lasota shows what the main interests of the secret services were: Wojtyła’s career in the Polish church, his struggle for building a church in Nowa Huta – the communist-built, totally churchfree working class suburb of Krakow, or his involvement with the students and intelligentsia. The closing chapter describes the secret services’ actions during John Paul II’s first papal visit to Poland.
Drawing from materials from the Cracovian office of the Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (Institute for National Memory), he quotes extensively from original documents compiled by secret informers such as “Żagielowski”, “Marecki” or “Delta”, some of them recruiting from the Pope’s most trusted circle. The question whether their identity should be discovered is causing a heated debate in Polish church and society today.
The book also includes photos and scans of key documents. A fascinating read, it is an attempt to showcase the Polish social services’ patterns of thought and action, and the huge scale of their operations. It unearths many unknown facts and shows Karol Wojtyła’s life in a light very different from the numerous biographies of him as a pope.
About the author:
Marek Lasota works within the Institute of National Memory in Krakow, in its Commission for Tracking Down Crimes Agasint the Polish Nation. In 1984 he completed a degree in Polish philology at the Jagiellonian University. He also took up film studies while studying there. Between 1982 and 1984 he simultaneously studied at the Ecclesiastical History Department of the Papal Academy of Theology in Krakow—earning a doctorate for his efforts. Cultural critic, author and editor of books covering the history of Communist Poland and of the communist's repression of the Church. He has devoted much of his newspaper articles to these same topics. He is the co-author, consultant and participant of television and radio programs devoted to these themes.
