Warsaw, Poland ? A Polish priest at the Vatican was accused Wednesday of collaborating with the communist-era secret police during the 1980s when Pope John Paul II was inspiring his countrymen to resist the Soviet-backed regime.

The Rev. Konrad Stanislaw Hejmo, a Dominican, acknowledged late Wednesday he had shared reports that he wrote for Polish church officials with an acquaintance, a Pole who lived in Germany, but said he did not suspect the man might have been a spy.

The accusations originated with Leon Kieres, head of the National Remembrance Institute that guards communist-era police files. At a news conference Wednesday he said Hejmo “was a secret collaborator of the Polish secret services under the names Hejnal and Dominik.

Kieres did not provide details or documentary evidence, saying they would be published in May. He said more documents about spying on church figures would be published later this year in a book by a historian given special access to documents at the state-run institute.

Hejmo, 69, was close to the pope’s entourage, but not a member of the pontiff’s inner circle. He was an ever-present figure at John Paul’s public events, leading Polish pilgrims around and taking selected groups up to see the pope.

He had extensive contacts with Poles who visited Rome, and had arranged housing and other assistance for Polish refugees who had fled the communist regime, according to Poland’s Catholic Information Agency news service.

Hejmo told reporters outside his villa in an upscale section of Rome late Wednesday that he had been making written reports on church matters for Polish church officials and shared the reports with an acquaintance introduced to him by other priests as someone interested in church affairs.

“I have never been a secret collaborator,” Hejmo said. “I can blame myself for being naive. This man came, we helped and on top of it I took his family around Rome…I partly feel a victim of this situation now.”

Hejmo said he had only just learned that the man, whom he did not name, might have been an intelligence agent. Hejmo said the acquaintance has since died.

Hejmo’s Dominican superior, the Rev. Maciej Zieba, told reporters at the news conference he had seen the files, which he called “convincing and shocking.”

The Vatican said it had no comment.

Andrzej Paczkowski, a historian at the institute, said the files contain some 700 pages and cover the 1980s and earlier years. But he said that Hejmo was not a “very important person.”

Observers and church officials warned against passing a hasty judgment.

“We are still not sure of the type of the cooperation, whether he was simply talking about the Holy Father with the secret services or was actually providing secret information on him,” Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek told The Associated Press. “If he was providing information, then this would be a very sad truth.”

Polish-born John Paul, elected pope in 1978, would have been of great interest to the communist secret police because of his role in inspiring the Solidarity trade union opposition to the communist regime, which collapsed in 1989.