POLAND
Emerging Europe
May 13, 2019
Father Franciszek Cybula, the former chaplain of president Lech Wałęsa, and Father Eugieniusz M, the custodian of the Shrine of our Lady of Sorrows and of the Basilica of Our Lady of Licheń, are among a number of priests who molested children, according to Just Don’t Tell Anyone, a documentary by Tomasz Sekielski.
“He told me to come to his room, and when I got there, he was standing there with his trousers down and with an erected penis. He said ‘what should I do? It won’t go down,” says a young man who was 12 at the time and now, as an adult pays, a visit to the old priest.
“This didn’t exceed any boundaries… there was no ejaculation. There was a moment of petting,” Father Cybula admits. He later suggests financial compensation. The 79-year-old priest, who was Wałęsa’s confessor back in the 1980s, dies while the documentary is being produced. During his funeral the Metropolitan Archbishop of Gdańsk Sławoj Leszek Głódź delivers a sermon remembering Father’s Cybula’s good deeds.
“I reported the case to the Curia, so Głódź must have known about it and yet he didn’t even mention it,” the victim says.
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