The new report claims that the late Polish pope John Paul II was aware of child abuse in Poland’s Catholic Church years before becoming pontiff and assisted in covering it up.
Michal Gutowski, the investigator behind the report for private broadcaster TVN, revealed that the late Pope had knowledge of cases of paedophile priests within the church while still a cardinal in Krakow.
He reportedly transferred the priests to other dioceses, one as far away as Austria, in order to prevent any scandal from erupting.
Gutowski also mentioned that Wojtyla, who was pope for 27 years from 1978 until his death in 2005, wrote a letter of recommendation for a priest accused of abuse to Vienna cardinal Franz Koenig without disclosing the accusations.
During his investigation, Gutowski spoke to victims of paedophile priests, their families, and former church diocese employees. He referenced documents from the former Communist-era SB secret police and rare church documents that he managed to access. However, Gutowski stated that the Krakow diocese had denied him access to its documentary archives for his investigation.
The Polish church has previously refused to provide documents to the judiciary or a public commission of enquiry investigating cases of church abuse of minors.
One of Gutowski’s sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, claimed to have personally informed Wojtyla about acts of paedophilia concerning one priest in 1973. The source mentioned that Wojtyla initially wanted to verify the information before requesting that it not be reported anywhere, as he would handle it.
The then cardinal explicitly requested that the alleged affair be kept strictly confidential, according to the source who spoke to Gutowski.
Thomas Doyle, an American former Catholic priest, canon law scholar, and the author of one of the first reports of Catholic clergy abuse in the United States, commended Gutowski’s investigation as groundbreaking and asserted that it showed John Paul II was aware of this issue before he became pope.
The broadcast of the investigation in traditionally Catholic Poland follows similar accusations made by a Polish-based Dutch journalist, Ekke Overbeek. This comes amidst several reports of abuse of minors in the Polish church, with the Vatican sanctioning several high-ranking church officials for covering up paedophilia by members of the clergy.
At the time of his election, John Paul II was the first non-Italian pope since the 16th century and the longest-serving pope in modern history after Pius IX in the 1800s. He publicly apologized to many groups that had suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church over the centuries, including apologizing for the church hierarchy’s role in burnings at the stake, injustices committed against women, and the inactivity and silence of many Catholics during the Nazi Holocaust in the Second World War.
