POLISH CHURCH IS URGED TO TAKE ACTION AGAINST SEX ABUSE

A Polish theologian has called on his Church to follow the Irish Bishops Conference in taking steps to tackle sex abuse by Catholic clergy in his country.

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“My own talks with victims suggest there are many similar cases here”, said Tadeusz Bartos, a former Dominican who left the priesthood in 2007 after criticising Church leaders. “The Church has such a strong social position today that the victims are too afraid to begin a struggle. It isn’t responding adequately, since it isn’t threatened with shame or the prospect of huge damages. It behaves as the Irish Church did 30 years ago”.

The 42-year-old, who teaches at Warsaw’s Academy of Humanities and runs a study centre on theology and philosophy, was speaking after the resignation of four Irish bishops in response to an independent commission report, which accused Church leaders of failing to protect children against multiple abuses by Catholic priests in the Dublin archdiocese.

In an interview, he said parallel claims of sexual molestation had surfaced since the Polish Church recovered schools and orphanages confiscated under communist rule. However, he added that incriminated clergy were routinely moved to different parishes, rather than suspended, while local opinion often took the side of priests against their accusers.

Leading Catholics, including the country’s Children’s Rights Spokesman, have urged the Polish Church to establish procedures for handling sex abuse accusations, which were the subject of 2001 Vatican guidelines.

In 2008, a Dominican monk, Fr Marcin Mogielski, was sent on leave after exposing abuse by the priest in charge of Catholic schools in Poland’s northern Szczecin-Kamien archdiocese. The Bishop of Plock, Mgr Piotr Libera, has asked the Vatican to rule on the future of three priests accused of molesting children in his central diocese, although local clergy told Poland’s Rzeczpospolita daily other priests were implicated in the scandal.

A third of practising Polish Catholics said their bishops had failed to “draw the necessary consequences” when clergy faced accusations of child abuse in a 2009 survey by ISKK, the Church’s Warsaw-based official statistics institute. In September, Poland’s Sejm lower house voted overwhelmingly for Penal Code amendments to make the country’s Europe’s first to permit the chemical castration of convicted paedophiles.

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