Pressure on the Catholic Church is no longer just external, and is being brought to bear not only on the individual perpetrators, but also now on those who protected them.
Commission of Clarification and Repair
Over a year later, the commission, named “Wyjasnienie i Naprawa” (Clarification and Repair), prepared a report that was presented by Wazny at the February press conference in Dabrowa Gornicza.
It was the first effort of its kind in Poland: a broad, independent attempt to examine abuse within a single diocese. It was also one of the first initiatives to come not only in response to external pressure, but from within the Catholic Church itself.
“We had to work everything out ourselves,” Professor Monika Przybysz, a crisis communications specialist and member of the commission, tells BIRN. “The rules, the procedures, how the commission would function – because there was no model to rely on.”
The commission reviewed thousands of pages of diocesan files and cross-checked them against witness testimonies and state archives.
What they found was often fragmentary: records were missing, files unpaginated and, in some cases, entire correspondence logs had disappeared.
The chaos, Przybysz notes, was not incidental but structural – a reflection of how these cases had been handled for years, without consistent procedures or proper documentation.
The first part of the report identified at least 50 minors abused by individuals linked to Catholic institutions, in cases stretching back decades, and listed 29 alleged perpetrators, including 23 diocesan priests.
In 19 cases involving clergy, the allegations were considered credible enough to warrant further examination, and six priests were ultimately punished.
The commission stressed that these figures represent only what can be documented. Many cases surfaced decades after the abuse; others may never have been reported at all. In one instance, a victim came forward nearly half a century after the event.
The first part of the report focused above all on victims whose cases were nearing the statute of limitations in the hope, as Przybysz put it, that it would “prompt them, or those who knew, to come forward”.
The harder questions – including episcopal responsibility – were left for the second part of the report.
One case in particular illustrates what that delay could mean. In 2001, a mother wrote to Bishop Adam Smigielski (who oversaw the Sosnowiec diocese from 1992 to 2008) to report that her 16-year-old disabled son had been sexually abused by a priest known as D.
She was not alone: a hospital chaplain – a doctor by training – forwarded her account, enclosing drawings made by the boy that he considered credible evidence of abuse.
The bishop did not contact the chaplain. Instead, he ordered another priest to look into the case; following a brief investigation, the woman was found to be unreliable.
Her letter was later discovered in the bishop’s personal archive with a single word written on it: “slander”.
The parish closed ranks: letters arrived defending the priest, urging that he remain. The case did not move forward.
When it resurfaced in 2016, the boy was already dead.
The woman testified that the priest had raped him three times. Church investigators met her, but gave her only days to produce decades-old records, again failed to contact the chaplain, and closed the case within weeks, citing a lack of evidence.
It was only much later that the Sosnowiec commission reconstructed the sequence from scattered documents and overlooked testimony, finally interviewing the hospital chaplain, and reaching a conclusion that from the moment the first letters arrived, the Church should have acted.
By then, those who had decided otherwise were no longer alive to answer for it.
Priest D., meanwhile, had been convicted of abusing another minor, who was only eight when the crimes began.
Responsibility moves upward
“Paradoxically, the Sosnowiec report is more damaging for bishops than for priests,” Tomasz Terlikowski, a journalist and author of over 50 books on the Catholic Church and religion, tells BIRN. “It suggests that a little over 3 per cent of clergy committed sexual abuse against minors – but that a hundred per cent of bishops protected them.”
Terlikowski is careful to place the Church’s record in context. The scale of abuse, he argues, is “probably comparable, or only slightly higher” than in other institutions with broad access to young people – schools, sports clubs, choral societies. What sets the Church apart is not the prevalence of crimes but the structure of responsibility above them.
“The level of control a bishop has over a priest is simply not comparable to that of a school principal over a teacher,” he says. “A bishop can appoint and remove a priest at any moment – no secular institution grants that kind of authority. In secular life, taking up a position does not involve a feudal gesture of submission or an oath of obedience and reverence.”
Commission members, too, have noted that the proportion of clergy implicated falls within ranges observed in international studies. The difference, they suggested, lies less in how often abuse occurred than in how institutions responded to it.
That question of responsibility is now being tested in court.
On February 18, Bishop Andrzej Jez of the Tarnow diocese became the first Catholic bishop in Poland to stand trial over the handling of abuse cases.
Bishop in the dock
Less than a week after the Sosnowiec report was published, Poland entered further uncharted territory.
On February 18, Bishop Andrzej Jez of the Tarnow diocese became the first Catholic bishop in Poland to stand trial over the handling of abuse cases – not for committing abuse himself, but for failing to report it promptly.
The charges relate to two priests under his supervision – Stanislaw P. and Tomasz K. The case of Stanislaw P. alone had shaken Polish public opinion.
Prosecutors accuse the now-retired 67-year-old of abusing 95 people – 77 of them minors – in cases stretching back to the 1980s.
Although the first complaints emerged in the 2000s, the Church’s response was to grant the priest leave, move him between parishes and eventually send him to Ukraine, where he is also accused of abusing minors.
The complaints kept coming.
In 2010, a man known only as Andrzej wrote to the head of the Catholic Church in Poland, Archbishop Wojciech Polak, to report abuse by Stanislaw P.
“For as long as I can remember, I have thought about this man constantly,” he said. “The memories bound up with him are so deeply etched that I cannot forget them.”
His letter had no effect.
Bishop Jez, who has led the Tarnow diocese since 2012, did not report Stanislaw P. to prosecutors until 2020 – shortly after another priest made the case public on his blog.
According to prosecutors, had the report been filed even a year earlier, as many as 23 more survivors might still have been able to seek justice.
Instead, the case against Stanislaw P. was discontinued in 2022, with most of the alleged offences deemed time-barred.
On April 15, testifying as a witness in the trial of Bishop Jez, Stanislaw P. dismissed the allegations against him as “some kind of denunciations”.
Prosecutors argue that the diocese had credible information about both priests and was obligated under Article 240 of the criminal code – which, since 2017, requires the immediate reporting of such crimes – to notify law enforcement without delay. It did not, or not quickly enough.
“For the first time, a case may end not with a Church ruling but with a secular court verdict,” Terlikowski says. “That is a shift – not within the institution, but in the state: a recognition that being a bishop does not shield you from criminal liability.”
In court, Bishop Jez did not contest the underlying facts of the abuse. Instead, he and his defence lawyer, former justice minister Zbigniew Cwiakalski, shifted the focus from timing to intent: he had not ignored the allegations, they argued, but followed canonical procedure, verified them internally and ultimately reported the case to state authorities – acting, in their telling, responsibly.
The legal framework, Cwiakalski stressed, was genuinely unclear at the time: bishops operated under both canon and civil law simultaneously, with a pontifical secret in force until 2019 that restricted sharing information with external authorities.
“In a way, Bishop Jez is paying the price for the fact that he decided to report the crime,” Cwiakalski tells BIRN. “He believed that if he reported the abuse, the law enforcement authorities would focus on prosecuting the perpetrator.”
He fears the trial risks becoming something broader than its own evidence – a verdict on the institution rather than the man.
“I would not want him to be punished as an example, as a warning to others, rather than on the basis of the evidence in the case,” he tells BIRN.
Terlikowski rejects that logic. “Under canon law, responsibility ultimately rests with the bishop,” he says. “He holds full authority in the diocese – he benefits from it, so he also bears the consequences.”
But he acknowledges the other side of the coin – that the Church in Poland has become, in public debate, something of a byword for sexual crime.
“Politicians and commentators are far more willing to talk about abuse in the Church than elsewhere,” he says. “In part, that is because the Church has positioned itself as a moral authority, while not always living up to those standards.”
A church divided
If there is movement, it is uneven – and sometimes the distance between progress and impunity is a single diocese.
In September 2025, Jan Szkodon, the former auxiliary bishop of Krakow, was buried with full honours, despite years of abuse allegations in which several women independently accused him of sexual harassment, as reported by Gazeta Wyborcza. His case was never formally investigated.
Among those who have spoken out is Zofia Schacht-Petersen, a trauma therapist and a former nun, who says Szkodon had been her confessor while she was preparing for religious life.
When she returned to him in 1991 for guidance about a potential posting to Ukraine, she says he moved to sit beside her and put her on his lap.
“He hugged me and ran his hands over my body, especially my breasts,” she recalled.
Her account is one of several; none led to a formal reckoning.
“The Church in Poland is facing a serious crisis,” says Przybysz. “Unless real action is taken now, it will only deepen. The bishops are aware of this, but some still lack the courage to act.”
Terlikowski divides the episcopate into three camps: those opposed to any real reckoning; a smaller group pushing for accountability; and a large, undecided middle.
The thinking of the first group is captured in an internal legal opinion drafted by advisory body to the Polish Bishops’ Conference, which Terlikowski publicly disclosed in 2025, stirring a nationwide debate.
The document cautioned against establishing an independent commission to investigate abuse – despite an earlier commitment by the episcopate to set one up – warning that it could expose bishops to scrutiny and the Church to legal and financial consequences.
“In essence, it said: do nothing – the public will soon forget, and it will cost too much,” Terlikowski recalls.
At the other end are bishops calling for real accountability – acknowledgment of wrongdoing, admissions of guilt – among them Bishop Wazny and Cardinal Grzegorz Rys. But the decisive group, Terlikowski argues, lies in between: those who will follow whoever persuades them. That is where the real struggle is now.
For Przybysz, the hesitation to reckon with the history of abuse in the Church reflects something more fundamental than politics.
“I have worked in crisis communication for 25 years, including within the Church, and this process is being stretched out,” she says. “The repeated debates among bishops show the scale of fear. But we know from experience that confronting a crisis quickly can actually strengthen an institution – you simply have to act.”
Whether that happens depends on what comes next. A single diocese, Terlikowski argues, is not enough.
“A real breakthrough will not come from commissions or trials alone,” he says. “It will come when the Church moves from reacting to pressure to a genuine internal conversion – once it understands that serving Christ means serving the person who was harmed, not protecting the institution.”
There is still a long way to go, he adds, “but the first step will be when a diocese decides, on its own, to compensate victims – without waiting for a court judgment.”
