The attacks on Saint John Paul II which we have recently seen in Poland are nothing new. The slander on Karol Wojtyła, as during other stages of his priesthood, that he covered for paedophiles in the Catholic clergy, have been circulating for a long while.

Joining the fray against the Polish pope was a charge made against Cardinal Adam Sapieha by the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper, that accused him of the homosexual exploitation of members of the clergy. It spouted the charge as sensationalist in that the much long- served Kraków archbishop has the reputation of being a trusted servant of Poland.

  The quality of the argument advanced against both clerics reveals the profound reserve of historians as to the credibility of the sources used by the media accusers. It is enough to avoid the voices of the academics within Catholic circles themselves. After all they could well be accused of impartiality. But it is worthwhile noting the piece by Mirosław Czech in Gazeta Wyborcza.

This journalist is a history graduate who studied at Kraków’s Jagiellonian University (so he has a research skill set). He is a former member of parliament from the Democratic Union as well as the Union of Freedom Parties. He is not associated, and this should be kept in mind, with right wing defenders of the Catholic church. But he maintains that the source material originating in the files of the communist security services contains a number of pitfalls. He stated that the very individuals who sought to accuse John Paul II and Cardinal Sapieha fell in to this trap themselves

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  We read in his article that during the Stalinist era, the security services were particularly brutal in extracting confessions that could be used to blacken the Kraków bishop. They were an instrument used by the communists against the church in Poland. The wording of the lead is significant.. Even if Karol Wojtyła- so it goes- had not been seduced by Cardinal Sapieha, the knowledge of his behaviour may have played a part in the cover up of paedophilia in the Church by the future pope John Paul II. Its thesis is out and out absurd and morally dubious, it ends.

But this could be interpreted by Czech and Gazeta Wyborcza simply playing the good cop, bad cop routine. The leading means by which anti-clerical communist propaganda was promulgated was to issue a communiqué: we acknowledge a number of different positions, we are open, among us are also people who are against coming to a hasty verdict. Czech appeared after John Paul II and Cardinal Sapieha to use the occasion to stab an anti-investigative, vetting element into the heart of the Polish right. This is a typical way of behaviour that has been used by the Gazeta Wyborcza for over thirty years.

Contrast this for example with the email received by Stanisław Obirek, a former Jesuit, from Dariusz Libion, a historian and former employee in the education bureau of the Lublin Institute of National Remembrance.

Obirek is making his reputation as a staunch inquisitor of the church. But as a former member of the cloth, is this not just a case of sour grapes? There’s nothing surprising in the text in OKO.press internet service that cites Libion in support of its arguments. “The Sapieha affair will bury the church in the end. The whole of Kaków knew but said nothing. Nothing ever came to light. The spooks had other priorities …they were looking for compromising material and the possibility of recruiting.”

    Furthermore, as a reading of Obirek’s piece would show, the historian does not even present any factual information that would be detrimental to the case of John Paul II or Cardinal Sapieha. There are only insinuations and suspicions. We have to accept simple gossip as credible ( for example,“The whole of Kraków knew but said nothing”). The gossip could not have been spread without the knowledge of the security services. This compromises the reputation of the academic who has a doctorate to boot.

Should we pause to consider the case of Cardinal George Pell in these circumstances? The Australian cleric died this January. He spent several months in a maximum security prison. In 2019 he was sentenced to six years imprisonment. The court declared that he carried out homosexual offences against two teenagers. But later it transpired that the prosecution case collapsed as a result of the statement given by one of the alleged victims and whose facts contradicted a whole range of circumstances. Cardinal Pell was acquitted in 2020.

  When Pell landed behind bars, many enemies of the Church felt a profound satisfaction. But he persisted in his watchfulness of the Church's teachings such as the right to life from conception to natural death, or regarding marriage as sacrament between a man and a woman. He was an opponent of compromise with the “wisdom of this world” that various liberal and progressive advocates tried to foist onto Catholics.

Such clerics like Pell are in the way of these people. In contemporary elites, cultural, academic, media, or big business, the lead is taken by those individuals who see Catholics as cruel relics of a patriarchal traditional society.

  It is obvious that the church is a community of sinners. Given this, various pathological traits can also be present. They should not become a taboo subject. Those who wish to eliminate this are waking up and should call to accoount. Take for example Father Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski, who has raised the question of paedophiles in the Church. But his intention is not to destroy the Church but to cleanse it.

  It is different with those who do not conceal their antipathy towards the Church. Only last week on a Facebook post, a noted and respected historian and a left- wing commentator wrote “I have to tell you something. All forms of organised religion, Catholicism at the head, I regard as oppressive and inimical to human nature”

He went on to write “I am not surprised at the scandal surrounding John Paul II, nor am I surprised that he helped to sweep the guilt of a paedophile priest under the carpet”.

He concludes by climbing the dizzy heights of prejudice: “I do not understand your, my dear Catholics, surprise. JP2 was the servant of an authoritarian institution and behaved according to its practices and laws. This is no surprise. What would be a surprise would be if he behaved differently”.

  A rhetorical question therefore. Can we expect an honest accounting with the Church from someone who puts the matter like this?

In Poland there’s no lack of nationalistically charged emotions and the cult of the individual of John Paul II- a national papal worship. There is no lack of reminders that Catholicisn is not a national religion either. It means believing in God and not the exaltation of this or that particular pope. And the heart of the culture war in Poland does not revolve around papal worship.

So what does it revolve around? Maybe with respect to the sermon delivered by the Polish pope in Kielce in 1991. It is worth reading or listening to it in its entirety. A particular resonant fragment is that where John Paul II touches on the matter of forcing onto Poland, after the fall of real socialism a liberal revolutionary tradition that ushers in such things like divorce as a remedy for marital crises.

“We cannot speak here of the freedom for the individual,” the pope declared “because it is a freedom that enslaves. Yes, we need to educate in order to be free, and we need a mature freedom. Only on this can we base society, the nation and all other aspects of our lives. And we cannot create the fiction of a freedom that pretends to liberate man, but which not only enslaves him but corrupts. We have to examine our consciences standing as we do ,on the threshold of the Third Republic!”.

  John Paul II is an uncomfortable prophet for the Poles. If we reject him as a supporter of paedophiles on this point, then his words will cease to have any meaning at all. The aim of this operation against the pope seems to be banal.

It’s that the “liberation” of the Poles from catholic “subjugation” will be at once changing them into a herd of amoral cattle.

–Filip Memches

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and journalists

–Translated by Jan Darasz