The Polish edition of Newsweek [Newsweek Polska] under the command of Tomasz Sekielski is striving to meet the Cathophobic standards which were set at the time when Tomasz Lis was the editor-in-chief. It is reflected by an article by Stanisław Obirek and Artur Nowak “Saint hypocrisy”, published in the latest issue.

At the same time its title contains accusation against St Mother Theresa from Calcutta. The authors are driven by an idea that because the Church mythologized this nun the brutal truth against her must be revealed.

The columnists accuse Mother Theresa of ties with organized crime. The texts reads that the founder of the Missionaries of Charity congregation “consciously received donations from drug dealers and fraudsters. She would intercede for them writing letters to prosecutors and judges in the US so that they aren’t punished”. Further on the authors negate Mother Theresa’s ascetic conduct: “While having affirmed suffering she didn’t economize on her treatment. She lived a good life, being received by political leaders with honors, travelling throughout the world by a private plane. Till the end she collected prizes and splendors”.

SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE There is more. Under the eyes of Obirek and Nowak the nun’s faithfulness to the Catholic instruction… a crime. Mother Theresa would express her conviction that human life should be safeguarded from conception. When Western feminists demanded from the Church to consent abortion and apply measures preventing it, she refused to endorse this lobby. Meanwhile, according to the columnists, the source of poverty in Africa lies within overpopulation (let’s put it straightforward: it’s about “unwanted” or “unnecessary” children), so the abortion and contraception would solve the problem.

Mother Theresa didn’t not question the authority of subsequent popes. Among them there was saint John Paul II. Meanwhile Obirek and Nowak reproach him for having written the “Evangelium vitae” encyclical letter. It’s there that the term “culture of death” was used, referring to such phenomena as abortion, contraception, euthanasia, in vitro.

First of all it is worth asking about the credibility of the authors. Obirek is an ex-Jesuit. After having left the priesthood (he did it for he met a woman) he got down to journalism, whose black character is the Church. Nowak, in turn, is a lawyer. He is a plenipotentiary of Church sexual abuse victims, to whom he too belongs (he played in a famous documentary by Tomasz and Marek Sekielski “But don’t tell anyone”). It is hard to resist the conviction that having such biographies both columnists are driven by an anti-Church resentment more than epistemological passion.

But the article in “Newsweek” should be regarded as part of a certain entirety. It is constituted by repudiating the Catholic Church as a still influential institution which, over the past few decades, has criticized social, cultural and moral changes in the West. Reviling abortion as murder or defining marriage as a union of man and woman, the Church incurs the anger of Left-wing and liberal opinion-forming milieus. That’s because they call for radical emancipation of man which is bound by no social norms, human nature and traditional morality.

Suspecting the Church of collusion with criminals and blaming it for the fact that people starve to death in large numbers is one of the methods to destroy its image. Such defamatory actions are nothing new anyway. Let us recall that the Vatican – also in the Polish public debate – was blackened that it collaborated with III Reich. Pope Pius XII was denounced as a “Hitler’s pope” although he was engaged in helping Jews, which was asserted by Eugenio Zolli, the chief rabbi of Rome (after WWII he converted to Catholicism).

The only problem is that labeling somebody a fascist or Nazi makes increasingly small impression. When, in 1990s “Gazeta Wyborcza” used this means against the right it was an effective sociotechnical trick. But when it turns out one who’s pronounced a “fascist” or “Nazi”… has nothing to do with it, every further action of this kind, doubts began to surface.

Nowadays there is another classification – relevant to the current international situation. It’s about “putinism”. For unlike Adolf Hitler, Vladimir is no past and threatens the world indeed, pronouncing somebody his adherent has a striking power. And that’s why when, in progressive Polish media voices affronting the right arise, attempts are made to associate it with the Kremlin.

The Church is hammered in a similar way. Equaling patriarch Kirill of Moscow who is openly fraternized with Putin with archbishop of Kraków Marek Jędraszewski may serve as an example. His antagonists’ main argument is that the hierarch when opposing aggressive pressure of LGBT movements putting pressure on the Polish state, speaks a language of the primate of the Russian Orthodox Church – who depicts the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a crusade against gay parades in Ukrainian cities. And it doesn’t matter that it has little to do with reality.

By contrast with Kirill archbishop Jędraszewski doesn’t call for violence. He condemns ideas, not people. By organizing help for the refugees from Ukraine he unambiguously places himself poles apart from the Russian chauvinist dressed as an Orthodox monk.

It should be expected that Poles will read or hear about “putinism” of the Church more than once. Such conclusion may be supported, for instance, by this Polish MEP’s tweet: “sadly, many of our compatriots get fooled by Russian (un)intellectual clichés: “the rotten West”, “rainbow disease” etc. It all comes to us from the East, doesn’t it?”.

There is nothing left but to expect revelation that John Paul II already in1990s (or maybe even earlier) was a “putinist” and the writings in which he warned the West against falling into the “culture of death” abyss were written in the Lubyanka Building. For if it is possible to depict Mother Theresa as a complicit in narcobusiness, why then one couldn’t make a “Russian foot wrapping” [i.e. an agent] out of John Paul II. –Filip Memches
–Translated by Dominik Szczęsny-Kostanecki

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists