Investigators in Poland yesterday launched an inquiry into allegations by a priest that Catholic bishops covered up for a cleric who abused boys at a children’s home for more than 13 years.Dominican priest Father Marcin Mogielski made the allegations in an article carried by the influential Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza. Mogielski said he had interviewed four former residents of the Holy Brother Albert boys home in the northwest town of Szczecin.
All four had accused the priest who ran the home of having sexually abused them during the 1990s, when they were adolescents.
The report in Gazeta Wyborcza carried extracts of the interviews he carried out with the alleged victims.
“Nobody wanted to listen to the victims, or help them,” Mogielski told the paper.
“Those who tried to bring this affair to light were told: don’t harm the Church!”
The court in Szczecin said it had opened a preliminary investigation into allegations of abuse against former residents of the home.
Bishop Stanislaw Stefanek, one of those accused by Mogielski of having covered up the affair, defended the priest in question in comments to the newspaper.
“We are dealing with a case of immense ingratitude towards an innocent man,” he told the paper.
But a Church spokesman in Szczecin acknowledged that the local episcopal court had opened its own internal inquiry into the affair five years ago.
This latest scandal, in a country that is 90 percent Roman Catholic, will renew the controversy provoked by previous cases.
In 2006, a 38-year-old priest was jailed for five years for sexually abusing a 10-year-old girl in the village of Lubin, in the east of the country.
In December 2004, another priest in the same region was jailed for two years for sexually abusing six girls aged between eight and 13 years old during catechism classes at the village – lessons in which the priest instructs the basic teachings of the faith.
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