The Vatican has sanctioned a retired Polish archbishop for covering up sexual assaults on minors, the Archdiocese of Wroclaw said on Saturday.
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The case of 83-year-old Marian Golebiewski is just the latest in a long string of sexual assault scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church in this predominantly Catholic EU member state. “
Following formal notifications, the Holy See has initiated proceedings regarding the reported negligence of Archbishop Marian Golebiewski in cases of sexual abuse of minors by certain priests,
” the archdiocese said in a statement.
These events took place while Marian Golebiewski was bishop of Koszalin-Kolobrzeg (northern Poland) from 1996 to 2004, as well as when he was archbishop of Wroclaw (west), from 2004 to 2013, the statement added. Following its investigation, the Vatican decided to ban Golebiewski from holding public office and to order him to make donations to a Catholic foundation for the protection of minors.
The Church, politically very influential in Poland, is confronted with a series of accusations, much publicized, of child criminality and cover-ups, a taboo subject not long ago in this country very attached to the Catholic faith.
Since last year, the Vatican has sanctioned eight Polish bishops for covering up acts of child crime committed by members of the clergy, as well as a cardinal.
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In July, the State Commission in charge of pedophilia indicated that priests were involved in almost a third of the pedophile acts recorded in Poland in the years 2017-2020, out of a total of 345 cases studied over this period. The commission, created in 2019, also indicated that it had not received, despite its requests, documentation concerning cases of child crime from the Church. In its own report presented in June, the Catholic Church revealed that it had received several hundred new complaints since 2018 for sexual assault on minors committed by members of the clergy. From July 2018 to the end of last year, 368 cases of sexual assault, committed between 1958 and last year, were reported to the Church.
