Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Polish president wants church action over priest

Polish President Lech Kaczynski urged the Roman Catholic Church to take action against an influential priest who called him a liar and his wife a witch.

Audio tapes released by the weekly Wprost appear to capture Father Tadeusz Rydzyk telling students at his Catholic college of his outrage that the president and his brother, the prime minister, were refusing to endorse a parliamentary plan to tighten Poland's abortion laws.

"I spoke to him (the president) before the elections and he lied to me," Rydzyk is heard saying.

Kaczynski said insults aimed at Poland's leaders were a matter of government-church relations and must have consequences.

"If Father Rydzyk's remarks are authentic, this would be the third time he has insulted the head of the nation," a visibly angry Kaczynski told a press conference.

Rydzyk is heard on the tapes lashing out at the prime minister's wife Maria, saying her support for limited abortion rights amounts to backing euthanasia: "The first lady with this euthanasia. . . You witch, I'll let you have it. If you want to kill people, do it to yourself first."

Wprost said the authenticity of the tapes was beyond doubt. Officials of the ruling Law and Justice party said they would wait for the results of an investigation by prosecutors, while the order to which Rydzyk belongs launched its own inquiry.

"It's a serious problem which the Redemptorist order needs to address," said the president, the twin brother of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

Rydzyk did not deny having made the remarks, but said on his influential radio station, Radio Maryja, that they had been blown out of proportion.

Rydzyk has courted controversy before with nationalistic broadcasts, earning criticism from the Vatican that he was meddling in politics and straying from Christian values.

The row is a major embarrassment to the Kaczynskis' Law and Justice party since Rydzyk's listeners, mostly poor, uneducated Poles in villages and small towns, are the party's most loyal electorate.

In March he criticised Maria Kaczynska in public after she signed a declaration in support of the existing abortion law – already strict by European standards – which allows terminations only when the pregnancy poses a threat to a woman's life, or results from rape, or when the foetus is damaged.

Rydzyk said Kaczynska has turned the presidential palace from a "perfumery into a sewage tank".

He also attacked Lech Kaczynski when he backed the Catholic Church in its decision not to appoint a cleric close to Radio Maryja as archbishop of Warsaw after revelations that he had been a collaborator with Poland's communist rulers.

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