An investigation ensures that Karol Wojtyla did not act decisively in various cases of abuse in Krakow, a dynamic that was perpetuated during his time as Pope, with cases as scandalous as those of Marcial Maciel, Karadima or the Boston plot
“During his mission as Archbishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla knew of priests who abused children and helped them evade punishment, even transferring them to other parishes.” These harsh accusations belong to the Dutch journalist Ekke Overbeek, who for years has been investigating Polish Church documents that, he says, would show that the future Saint John Paul II covered up sexual assaults on minors, and that he continued to do so as Pope. Scandalous cases such as those of Marcial Maciel , the former cardinal McCarrick or the protection in Rome of the Boston cardinal, Bernard Law, after the publication of ‘Spotlight’ , preventing him from being tried in the United States, demonstrate this.
“It was never part of the solution, but of the problem,” notes the journalist, who has published a preview of his investigation in Nieuwsuur. The bulk of three years of analysis of documents from the secret services of the Polish dictatorship – the Church of the country has closed the archives of the time until 2042 – will come to light next year in a book entitled Maximum guilt and which shows how Wojtyla covered up the cases of at least four priests. The country’s Church has come out in a rush to defend the Polish Pope, elevated to the altars by Francis in 2014 in an express canonization.
“I found concrete cases of priests who abused children in the Archdiocese of Krakow, where the future Pope was Archbishop. The future Pope knew this, and yet he transferred those men. This gave rise to new victims”, stressed the researcher.
One of those predators was the priest Eugeniusz Surgent, who corresponded with the future John Paul II during his stay in prison and who, after his release, was able to continue working as a priest. This revelation overturns the arguments of Wojtyla’s defenders, who maintain that the Pole only began to hear about cases of abuse in 1985, when he received a report from an American priest, who alerted him to what, almost two decades later, exploded. in Boston. Overbeek’s revelations would show that, as far back as the 1960s, the future Pope knew firsthand of the existence of abuses and had the opportunity to root them out. And that he didn’t.
culture of cover up
And it is that, before the abuse complaints, Wojtyla chose to transfer the pedophile priests to other parishes, or with their families. In the most serious cases, he urged predators to spend time in a monastery. But they were not penalized with expulsion from the ministry, much less reported to the authorities. The persecution of the Polish Church during the dictatorship could have explained some of these actions, although not justify them. But Wojtyla’s subsequent decisions, already as John Paul II, confirm that the culture of cover-up was a constant of his pontificate.
The reaction, as almost always, came late. As Nieuwsuur confirms, while Overbeek was putting the finishing touches on his book, the Polish church contacted Surgent’s victims, announcing that it had decided to investigate the time. In Poland, there have been several thousand victims who have denounced child abuse. The State Commission created in 2020 has verified how 30% of the abuses perpetrated in the country were responsible for a member of the Catholic Church. Neither the diocese of Krakow nor the Holy See have wanted to participate in the reporting of the Dutch program.
“Almost all the documents that have been collected directly about Wojtyla have been destroyed, but he is mentioned very often in others that were not. And if you put them all together, they are pieces of a puzzle that form the picture of how child abuse by priests was handled,” says Overbeek, who maintains that “the reasoning of the Church, of the defenders of the Pope, is it boils down to the fact that he wouldn’t have known (of the abuses); that he understood the seriousness of the situation very late and that he first thought it was a problem for the United States. All those arguments can now be thrown out.”
The Polish Church, on a rampage in its defense
However, the Polish Catholic press has come out in force to defend their holy pontiff. Thus, as reported by Katholich.de, the Warsaw newspaper Rzeczpospolita recently gave a report favorable to Wojtyla, including a case of abuse dating back to 1970 in which the future John Paul II made “all the necessary decisions at that time ‘: rapid expulsion from the parish, suspension and order to live in a monastery until the matter is resolved.
These media add that the documents of the secret service of the communist regime of the time “must be evaluated with caution”. For his part, Slawomir Oder, who was a postulator for John Paul II’s canonization cause, sees the accusations of cover-up against Karol Wojtyła when he was Archbishop of Krakow as “completely absurd.” This was highlighted to the Polish Catholic news agency KAI in an interview in which he confirmed that all these issues were investigated by the postulation.
Oder, who is also working for the canonization of Wojtyla’s parents, rejects any accusation that the Polish pope favored or swept under the rug the sexual abuse of minors by priests. For him, these accusations are nothing more than an attempt to undermine the authority of John Paul II that is comparable to the “eternal struggle between good and evil.” The postulator sees the hand of the devil returning to fight against this Pope, who was a “powerful intercessor of the people before God.”
The truth is that, along with the drama of pedophilia in the Church, there is an underlying question that is much deeper, and that reveals the dynamics of cover-up that took place for decades in the institution worldwide, and that had John Paul II as his maximum exponent. A Wojtyla who, for years, did not pay attention to the allegations of abuse against some of the greatest exponents of the conservative restoration after the opening of the Second Vatican Council and who protected such famous pedophiles as the founder of the Legion of Christ, Marcial Maciel , whom he came to call “apostle of youth.”
And it is that, despite the fact that the accusations against him reached Rome as early as 1988 (previously, in 1954, when Pope Pius XII was, complaints had already appeared that were finally forgotten), John Paul II did not want to open any file against him. Maciel. Today both have passed away: the founder of the Legion, as the biggest predator of minors in the recent history of the Church; the Polish Pope, as a universal saint.
Maciel’s case was not the only one. The leader of the Sodalicio, Luis Figari, also roamed freely for years, as did Theodore McCarrick, one of the most powerful cardinals in the United States and from whom Francisco snatched the purple and today is being tried by North American courts.
The Legionaries of Christ took more than three decades to recognize the abuses of its founder, protected as in the case of McCarrick by John Paul II and his faithful secretary Estanislao Dzwisz, who a few months ago was acquitted in an investigation into abuses in Poland that threatened with implicating the Polish Pope himself.
The counterpart, in both cases, was evident: strong funding from Mexico and the United States, and new priestly vocations for the project of involution in the Catholic Church. Rome complied, none set foot in jail. The last example, that of the abuses of Nicola Corradi in the Próvolo Institute of La Plata, declared prescribed by Justice.
In other cases, such as that of Fernando Karadima, one of the educators of a large part of the Chilean episcopate, and an abuser who has gone unpunished for years, they ended up being tried. Others were not so lucky. When the scandal over the Boston Globe investigation broke out in 2002 , revealing thousands of cases of pedophilia and bankrupting half the Catholic Church in the United States, Boston Cardinal Bernard Law resigned but instead Before facing his responsibilities, he traveled to Rome… and never returned. The Holy See, first with John Paul II and later with Benedict XVI, denied the extradition requests of the American courts, and he ended up dying within the Vatican walls.
Ratzinger, to the bench
Wojtyla is not the only pope accused of a cover-up. Benedict XVI himself will have to testify in the coming weeks accused of having protected a pedophile priest when he was Archbishop of Munich, and would become the first pontiff to sit on the bench for his potential responsibility for the abuses of the Church.
The controversy broke out in 2016 as a result of the accusations of abuses against the priest Peter Hullermann, transferred to the diocese pastored by Ratzinger after being found guilty of abuses in Essen. Now it has reached the courts, which will try to determine whether the pope emeritus accepted the arrival of the priest knowing the reasons for his transfer, and will determine the possible civil and criminal consequences of his possible cover-up. Ratzinger, 95, could not go to prison under any circumstances.