KRAKóW (POLAND)
The Tablet [Market Harborough, England]
January 7, 2025
By Jonathan Luxmoore
New allegations emerged linking Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz to an abuse scandal when he was secretary to Cardinal Karol Wojtyła in the Archdiocese of Krakow in the 1970s.
Catholic commentators urged the Polish Church to set up an independent commission on historic sexual abuse by its clergy, after Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz, the retired former secretary to John Paul II, was accused of complicity in a paedophile scandal.
“Years of neglect and obfuscation by its hierarchy in these matters have made the Church completely unreliable as an institution capable of cleansing itself,” said Tomasz Terlikowski, a journal editor and TV director.
“This case reminds us that nothing has been concluded, and that real shocks still lie ahead for the Polish Church as more bishops and priests are named, including those once considered icons.”
Terlikowski’s was among the many reacting to allegations linking Cardinal Dziwisz, 85, to sexual misconduct while he served under the then-Cardinal Karol Wojtyła at his curia in the Archdiocese of Krakow in the 1970s.
He told the WP Opinia agency that the Polish Church should “show faithfulness to the Gospel” by suspending Dziwisz from all public functions pending examination of the claims of “paedophile excesses”, and should also avoid any implied “admission of guilt” by setting up an independent “historical commission” into clerical abuse.
However, the cardinal rejected the allegations as “baseless, untruthful and deeply offensive”. Dziwisz told KAI, the Church-run Catholic Information Agency, that he had never been in contact with any abusing priests.
The cardinal’s lawyer Michał Skwarzyński said the claims were based on long-discredited material from the former Communist secret police, the Służba Bezpieczeństwa, and aimed to incriminate John Paul II.
“This deliberate defamatory action is directed at the person of the cardinal, although the target is obviously Karol Wojtyła – such mechanisms have already been analysed in scientific and media studies,” said Skwarzyński in a statement. “I leave the credibility and reliability of these claims to public opinion, knowing how the method of ‘leaks’ is used to create a narrative that prejudges someone’s guilt without a trial.”
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Cardinal Dziwisz served as the Polish Pope’s secretary for 39 years. He was named 45 times in a Vatican report on the disgraced former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, published in November 2020, and previously faced accusations of ignoring abuse complaints after becoming Archbishop of Krakow in 2005.
The latest claims against Dziwisz follow attempts by the Polish bishops’ conference to defuse charges of inaction and indifference over sexual abuse across the country, where a dozen mostly retired bishops and archbishops have faced dismissal and sanctions for ignoring past complaints.
The Church appointed a child protection coordinator in 2013 and has since ensured all dioceses and religious orders have protection specialists, but has also vigorously rejected allegations that John Paul II turned a blind eye to abuse by local clergy while he was Archbishop of Krakow from 1963 to 1978.
On 30 December, the online portal Onet said it had seen a letter sent in 2021 to Poland’s state commission on sexual abuse by a man claiming to have suffered abuse while attending a party for Krakow diocesan clergy in the mid-1970s. It said Dziwisz had been named as one of the molesters but investigators had discontinued the case under Poland’s statute of limitations.
However, this was denied by the state commission’s chairman Karolina Bućko, who said all credible abuse claims were investigated and could lead to a perpetrator being entered into a national register of sex offenders.
“It doesn’t matter to us whether the person indicated as perpetrator of a given crime is Stanisław Dziwisz or anyone else,” he told reporters. “If a person decides not to appear before our commission, they receive notification that the case will be conducted without their participation.”