Huge crowds waving Polish and papal flags marched through Warsaw, Kraków and other cities on Sunday to defend the memory of St John Paul II, 18 years after his death, amid reports he was aware of clerical sexual abuse cases before he became pope in 1978.
Early on Sunday morning in the central city of Lodz, a statue of the Polish pope was smeared with yellow paint on its face and red paint on its hands.
Sprayed on the plinth: “Maxima Culpa”, the title of a controversial book by journalist Ekke Overbeek.
Similar to a separate television documentary, the book argues that Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, as archbishop of Krákow until he became pope in 1978, was aware of at least four cases of abusing priests and reinstated them to parishes where they abused again.
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Tens of thousands of people in Warsaw and elsewhere begged to differ on Sunday, at special masses and reciting the rosary before marching through city streets.
Holding pictures of the late pope, canonised in 2014, and palm branches after Palm Sunday services, the crowd – from older people to young children – many chanted the slogan: “You have awakened us! We will protect you.”
Leading the Warsaw march was the empty papamobile, which the Polish pontiff used on return journeys to his homeland, flanked by members of the Order of the Knights of St John Paul. Ahead of Sunday’s march, order general Krzysztof Wąsowski described the late pope as “the greatest prophet since St John the Baptist”.
“He is a prophet who, above all, saved the world from total annihilation,” Dr Wasowski said. “Our future as a nation ... will depend on whether we manage to defend the good name of St John Paul II and the church.”
Ahead of a march of about 4,000 people in the eastern city of Bialystok, Archbishop Józef Guzdek said Poles must not forget how what the pope did for his homeland during “communist slavery”.
“We are a generation of debtors, we have a huge debt to pay for what Cardinal Karol Wojtyla and later John Paul II did, pulling us out of a great depression,” he said.
Many Poles marching on Sunday said they did not believe the claims made against the late pope.
“I felt the need to show my connection with his teaching,” Ms Donata Pronczuk said, a retired teacher from northern Poland. “John Paul II did nothing wrong. Any charges against him are false and have been manipulated.”
The controversy over the late pope’s record on clerical sexual abuse has cranked up further an emotional culture war between the nationalist right and more secular left over Polish identity.
“John Paul II’s defenders consider an ‘attack’ on him as an ‘attack’ on Poland, our values and history, which evokes a very strong defensive reaction,” Mr Ignacy Dudkiewicz said, editor of the liberal Catholic magazine Kontakt. “It is extremely difficult to talk rationally about the real merits of John Paul II, and his undoubted mistakes and faults because this conversation is about identity – not truth.”
Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, which faces a tight election race for a third term in the autumn, has lead the vocal pushback against the claims, and a backer of the Sunday rallies.
Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki said there was “abundant evidence that John Paul II sought to combat evildoing, including within the church, and no – or only very dubious – evidence only very dubious evidence that he wilfully ignored such acts”.
That stance was challenged by German film-maker and author Christoph Röhl, who has documented the consistent failure of Pope John Paul II, and his successor Benedict XVI, to address systemic sexual abuse and abusers. Among them Fr Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legion of Christ movement for priests, a serial abuser of seminarians and a major donor to key Holy See officials.
“Some Catholics still have a deep-seated need to make exceptions for the holy father,” Mr Röhl said. “In reality, the popes worked in the same way as everyone else on child abuse for the simple reason that the system required it. It is all laid out explicitly in canon law.”
