Responses of representatives of the Polish Bishops’ Conference to cases of sexual abuse of minors by clergy from 2001 to 2015

Abstract

The article focuses on exposing the beginnings of the difficult process of holding the Polish Catholic Church accountable for the problem of pedophilia, which continues to this day. The purpose of the article is to present the reactions of the Polish Bishops’ Conference related to cases of clergy sexual abuse disclosed in the media between 2001 and 2015. Of particular importance in this context was not only the critical analysis of the public statements of individual represent­atives of the KEP, but also the activities initiated by it related to the development of the first standards for the protection of minors in the Polish Catholic Church. In this context, the search for source materials devoted to the first cases of pedophil­ia in the Polish Catholic Church, such as the case of Archbishop Juliusz Paetz, Fa­ther Michael M. from Tylawa, or the two high-profile cases of sexual abuse by Polish clergy in the Dominican Republic, Father Wojciech Gil and Apostolic Nuncio Arch­bishop Józef Wesołowski, proved crucial. The first book on the problem of pedo­philia in the Polish Church, published in Poland in 2013 by Dutch journalist Ekke Overbeek, also played an important role. The application of the legal-institutional method made it possible to examine the process of shaping the Church’s standards for the protection of minors having its expression in the document Guidelines for Initial Canonical Investigation in the Case of Accusations of Clergy of Acts against the Sixth Commandment of the Decalogue with a minor under the age of eighteen. The formation of the aforementioned standards also had its expression in the es­tablishment of the office of the Coordinator for the Protection of Children and Adolescents at the KEP in 2013, as well as the Child Protection Center, established a year later and still operating today.