This needs to change, and, as a Polish person, I wholeheartedly welcome this documentary. I am glad that it has been made - it would never be possible if it was not for independent filmmaking.
It's time for the Catholic church to stop being associated with child molestation - and in order for that to happen, the child molestation must be purged from that church with all appropriate means. Otherwise, that stigma will just keep on going on.
The Polish government should get rid of them. The Polish church shouldn't be able to keep people out of jail, right?
Why do you think so? I believe they can be excommunicated. There's a known process around it, even if rarely used.
I disagree. The Catholic Church SHOULD be associated with child molestation. Systematic child molestation.
If they are moving known pedophiles around and giving them access to new children, why should they not be called out?
The fact that this problem has spanned generations tells me that this isn’t something you can purge, it’s fundamental to the way the church operates. Ask a man to be celibate and then give him unquestioned, divine power over individuals? Of course you’re going to have a predator problem!
The John Jay report done on clerical sex abuse in the USA didn’t find the percentage of abusers in the priesthood to be significantly different from those in other professions.
The impulse to cover up is not limited to the institution of celibacy by any means.
Unfortunately as a catholic I fear this is a ticking time bomb for many non first world churches. The church here in the US only put into place decent zero-tolerance policies in the late 90s and early 2000s and many churches in other regions have failed to take matching action.
All-male moral authority is a real problem.
I find this repeated idea weird. We're not in a state which would politically protect them anymore. They could be easily removed/charged last week. Bringing up the implanting by the gov today sounds like "not only we hid child molesters, but also keep hiding old communist party spies now" - how does it make things better?
And what better way than to blackmail pedophile priests to force them to report on other priests and oppositionists?
And yeah, being not only pedophiles but also communist spies makes it it even worse that now 30 years later it's still not solved. It's mostly because all the governments compete to get favors of the church so that church tell people to vote for them.
There are English subtitles.
It's a long read but IMO was worth it.
It seems to be a long-running trend for Churches and similar religious organizations to do this sort of stuff.
Recently, I read a story about people who took down a statue of a priest who molested children. There was an outcry and some politician had the statue put back in its place. That is just so twisted. Many people I talked to in Poland don't want to even discuss church and systematic protection of pedophiles. It makes them very uneasy but they want to ignore it i guess?
The late president of Gdańsk said they will take it down, but it takes time for the procedure, and the activists took it down themselves before that. So they will probably put it back and then take it down legally. As funny as this sounds Gdańsk is very liberal for Poland.
But, generally I agree - Poland is crazy religious, and the problem with that particular priest was that he knew all the highest officials in Poland, including even presidents. He was the Solidarity priest, that participated in the protests against communism. At first it was almost a national betrayal to say anything bad about him (because he was a figure of anti-communism opposition), then after communism failed he knew presidents and prime ministers and who would act on these accusations.
So he died without being officially accused, and now it's hard to even get people to remove the statues...
The Keepers
On the institutional side its the well known and agreed upon siege mentality where the church tries to protect itself out of arrogance and a probably accurate assessment that its enemies want to use and manipulate this for political gain.
Also much less talked about is the church's former policies were partially due to a misguided sense of mercy. If the church really did come down as hard and preemptively as people now want it to from the very beginning the world would probably be whining about how intolerant and cruel they were to potential and defrocked priests.
Priests have sexual needs, that's understandable, but they could satisfy them without victimizing others. The line is harming someone, specially if they are defenseless. The beliefs of the perpetrators don't enter the equation.
It seems entirely predictable to me that this drives selecting folks for these positions that don't want wives, but want something else.
I'm not saying it's relligion's fault. It's just that things rarely have a single clearly defined reason. Some correlations exist.
EDIT: someone even flagged this.
