Jind?ich Hole?ek, a lecturer at the Faculty of Theology in Olomouc, figures on a list of known secret police collaborators. He is accused of spying for the communist regime, reporting on Czech priests in exile in Vatican City during the early 1980s.

The charges surfaced late last month, when close to 30 academy members circulated a petition to have Hole?ek's name removed from the list of Jan Pato?ka Medal winners. He received the award in 2000 for work he did as part of the Czech Bishops Conference commission that traced the life and work of Jan Hus.

"I personally got the information of Hole?ek's alleged collaboration from the petition," academy President Václav Pa?es told The Prague Post. "I immediately asked [for an investigation], and we based our decision on that investigation."

Hole?ek, who could not be reached for comment, has agreed to return the medal. His name was removed from the Pato?ka Medal list Jan. 9.

The academy's decision came as Poland was still reeling from revelations that Stanislaw Wielgus, whom the Vatican had tapped to be Warsaw's next archbishop, had extensive collaboration with the Polish secret police during communism. Wielgus first denied the charge, but, as evidence mounted against him, he stepped down Jan. 7 during a Mass that was meant to mark his installation.

Since then, more Polish priests have resigned over similar charges. The Polish Catholic Church now says a tenth of its clergy probably worked as communist informers, and one priest, Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski, is threatening to publish a book naming names.

The cases of Wielgus and Hole?ek have some similarities. Communist regimes officially banned organized religion, yet unofficially tolerated it, using priests and clergy to inform on one another and lay people. Both Wielgus and Hole?ek spied on the activities of local clergy who had been exiled in Rome.

Using the code name "?e?ich," Hole?ek went to the Vatican in 1982. According to media reports, he received a yearly salary of 25,000 K? to report on such priests as Jaroslav Karvada and Karel Skalický. Reports do not detail how long Hole?ek's collaboration continued, but they do say that the regime was happy enough with his work to give him regular bonuses.

Since then, Hole?ek has called his secret police collaboration "the great mistake of my life."

Differing schools

With the Hole?ek and Wielgus cases, the issue of lustration — the act of vetting public officials to determine whether they collaborated with communist regimes — is once again a subject of discussion, if not outright debate.

The Czech Republic has had a lustration law on the books since 1991 and has set the pace for most former Eastern bloc countries in dealing with their pasts. Slovakia has a lustration law, but experts say it is rarely enforced. Hungary doesn't even have one, and only last summer did the Polish government announce a revamped vetting law and a renewed determination to cleanse the country's halls of power.

"Lustration has always been a source of political struggles in these countries," says Vojt?ch Cepl, a former Czech Constitutional Court judge and one of the authors of the lustration law. "The struggle is between two schools of thought: One says let's forget and forgive, and the other says that without properly dealing with the past, we will not have a good system of rules for human conduct."

Until recently, Cepl says, Poland's government belonged to the first school. It was only after the elections of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his twin brother, President Lech Kaczynski, that the government there pledged to go after past collaborators serving in public offices.

Judging the past

Throughout the 1990s, more than 300,000 Czechs were screened under the lustration law, with about 5 percent banned from public offices over their pasts.

Cepl says the Czech lustration law is remarkable for its strictness. The offices from which former regime hands are banned include the government, high-level civil service, security service, state-owned businesses, the central bank, the national railway, high academic positions and the judiciary.

The last time lustration surfaced significantly in the Czech Republic was in 2005, when two high-level judges were accused of prosecuting dissidents during the communist era.

While the names of those two judges — Jitka Horová and Vlasta Formánková — were eventually cleared, the Justice Ministry launched an investigation into the pasts of some 60 judges to verify that all had the certificate required under the lustration law that states they did not cooperate with the secret police.