Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski

Tadeusz Bohdan Isakowicz-Zaleski (; 7 September 1956 – 9 January 2024) was a Polish Roman Catholic and Armenian Catholic priest, author and activist. He was a leader of the anticommunist student opposition in Kraków in the late 1970s, became a Solidarity chaplain in Kraków's Nowa Huta district in the 1980s, and later an avid supporter of the lustration of the Polish Church. On 3 May 2006, he was awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, one of Poland's highest orders. Subsequently, in 2007, he was awarded the Order of the Smile and the Polish Ombudsman's Order of Paweł Włodkowic.

In 1985, he was twice tortured by Poland's communist-era Security Service, and some twenty years later in 2006, he started researching the secret police archives kept by Poland's Institute of National Remembrance to discover that 39 Archdiocese of Kraków priests had collaborated with the regime between 1944 and 1989. This resulted in the much-publicized 'Church Spy scandal' in Poland, where till then the Polish Church was only known for its role in battling communism and preserving traditional and national values both during the partitions of Poland and in the communist era. Subsequently in 2007 he published his controversial book }} (, but published in English under the title "Priests in the Face of the Security Services") on priests who cooperated with communist secret services. He is the subject of a documentary 'Poland's Turbulent Priest', shown on BBC World News in 2009, about his struggle with the communist regime and the Polish church. Provided by Wikipedia