POLAND
Balkan Insight
August 26, 2020
By Claudia Ciobanu
While the Polish authorities focus on fighting an imagined threat to children from what they call the “LGBT lobby”, progress on combating pedophilia inside the Catholic Church, a well-documented phenomenon, remains slow.
Afew days after receiving her first communion in May last year, nine-year-old Julia told her mother she was sick and refused to go to church for further ceremonies planned in relation to this key moment in a Catholic family’s life.
“When I asked her why she didn’t want to go, she said she didn’t like the priest. When I asked her why, she said the priest was touching her,” Magda, Julia’s mother, told BIRN, speaking on the phone from Ruszow, a village of about 2,000 people in south-west Poland where the family lives.
According to the girl’s testimony, which experts verified as authentic as part of subsequent court proceedings, the local priest, Piotr M., had put his hands under her clothes and touched her in intimate areas.
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