Polish pedophile priests exposed in new report

An activist and victim of sex abuse of clergy in Poland, Marek Lisinski, Don’t Be Afraid Foundation founder, holds up a a flag of Poland during the protest rally of  – members of Ending Clergy Abuse (ECA), a global organization of prominent survivors and activists who are in Rome for this week’s papal summit on the sex abuse crisis within the Catholic Church.  The group held a protest gathering on February 21, 2019 by the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome . Catholic Church’s Pope Francis has set aside three and a half days to convince Catholic bishops to tackle paedophilia in a bid to contain a scandal which hit an already beleaguered Church again in 2018, from Chile to Germany and the United States. The placards read “Zero Tolerance + Zero Cover Up = Truth and Justice”. (Photo by Alberto PIZZOLI / AFP)

 

WARSAW, Poland (AFP) — A foundation supporting victims of pedophile priests in Poland on Thursday released a report documenting nearly 400 cases of sex abuse by clergymen in the staunchly Catholic country.

The publication of the 27-page report, which activists presented to Catholic Church’s Pope Francis on Wednesday, coincided with the pontiff gathering the world’s top Catholic bishops at the Vatican at a summit on tackling clerical sex abuse.

Images broadcast on Polish television showed Pope Francis kissing the hand of Marek Lisinski, head of the “Be Not Afraid” foundation, as he handed over the report to the pontiff.

The document details the cases of 85 priests convicted of pedophilia, another 88 whose alleged abuse has been exposed by the media and 95 others accused by alleged victims.

The report also names 24 Polish archbishops and bishops accused of covering up abuse.

“We expect resignations among Poland’s church hierarchy, otherwise nothing will change,” Agata Diduszko-Zyglewska, one of the report’s authors, told AFP on Thursday.

She documented cases where paedophile priests were “protected” by bishops or other superiors.

(File photo) Protesters hold a banner reading “Bishop, Hiding Pedophilia is a Crime” and a map reading “Map of Church Pedophilia in Poland” with 255 documented cases of sexual abuse of minors by the country’s Catholic priests, during a protest against alleged child sex abuse in the Catholic church in Warsaw on October 7, 2018, demanding the church to stop protecting pedophile priests. (Photo by Janek SKARZYNSKI / AFP)

Father Pawel Rytel-Adrianik, the spokesman for the Polish episcopate, said on Thursday that he had not yet read the report.

The Polish episcopate insists it has “zero tolerance” for criminal acts such as pedophilia.

It has vowed to publish statistics on the number of child victims of priestly sex abuse, covering the period starting in 1989 when communism fell.

However, for Diduszko-Zyglewska the episcopate is “only pretending to take action” by adopting rules that are “fair, certainly, but not realized”.

The foundation insists that church authorities in Poland are “avoiding contact” with it and victims of abuse despite the steady trickle of criminal allegations.

“We are already struggling to record and verify” a growing number of historic and current cases of abuse, Diduszko-Zyglewska told AFP.

© Agence France-Presse

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