JERSEY (JERSEY)
Jersey Evening Post [St. Helier, Jersey, England]
April 5, 2025
By Megan Davies
A CATHOLIC priest on trial in the Royal Court has claimed he “never ever” sexually abused his alleged child victim.
Piotr Antoni Glas (61) admitted he had a “foot fetish” – and had downloaded images of feet to his computer which the child later discovered – but said he never acted on that fetish.
Mr Glas said he abused the child’s faith and trust but denied this was sexual abuse.
The priest faces seven counts of committing indecent acts against a child which he denies.
Mr Glas, who has been on trial since the beginning of last week, also said that the family of the child never raised concerns with him.
“If something did happen sexually, I think [their] mother would be with me in five minutes,” he said.
Mr Glas, who was a Catholic priest in Jersey at the time of the alleged offending, is accused of placing the child’s feet against his face while he masturbated and on one occasion, play-fighting with the child until they were positioned with their head against the priest’s “semi-erect” penis.
Appearing in court on Monday, Mr Glas denied ever engaging in any sexual acts with the child or anyone else.
He said: “I never ever put his feet to my face and I never ever masturbated at his feet.”
Mr Glas claimed that there had been two physical altercations between him and the alleged victim – on one occasion, he said the child had found him lying on the floor and had jumped on him.
The second time, the priest said, he had been lying on the floor in the same room as the child and had turned in order to hear the child better, with the child becoming angry and confronting him about pictures of feet they found on the priest’s computer.
Mr Glas admitted that he invited the child – without parental approval – to walk on his back to help with back pain, but said that the complainant’s descriptions of walking on the priest’s front were not true.
Mr Glas’s advocate, Simon Thomas, asked him about two phone calls in which the prosecution said he admitted to the abuse and apologised for it.
Mr Glas, who is from Poland, blamed a language barrier and cultural differences for some of his answers on the calls, claiming that when he said “yes” to an allegation of abuse, he was indicating that he was listening.
He also said that when he apologised to the complainant in a call years after the alleged abuse, he was in fact apologising for an incident where the child had found images of feet on his computer.
He previously told jurors that he found the images by accident in the early days of the internet, that he downloaded them and then forgot that they were on his computer.
Commenting on his “issue” with feet, Mr Glas said: “Sometimes thoughts come into my mind. “But I didn’t put it into action.”
He also argued there was a difference between having a foot fetish and a sexual fetish.
Mr Glas said: “There was nothing sexual about it. I didn’t act on it at all.
“If I said sexual abuse, that would be a different story. The abuse was [of] trust. Abuse of trust.
“I abused [their] faith, [their] trust, [their] love, whatever it was.
“It wasn’t: ‘I hurt you sexually or I damaged you sexually’, because I didn’t do that.”
He said that while he apologised for “harming” the child, there was no sexual harm.
He also denied the grooming alleged by the prosecution.
Crown Advocate Carla Carvalho, prosecuting, asked Mr Glas if he was a sinner.
He replied that everyone was a sinner.
“I am a sinner, but it’s not in relation to sexual abuse of [the complainant] or any other child I know, not in my life as a priest,” he said.
The trial is expected to conclude this week.