The Catholic Church in Poland Discloses 368 New Allegations of Child Sex Abuse

While the U.S. Catholic Church continues to play politics with communion wafers — as if Joe Biden is making Catholics look bad by promoting pro-choice public policies — let’s not forget that the Catholic Church on the whole remains a corrupt hotbed of child molestation and cover-ups.

Yesterday, the Catholic Church in Poland admitted that over the past three years — since July of 2018 — they have heard new complaints against 292 clergy members who allegedly abused 368 children — nearly half of whom were under the age of 15 — over the course of 62 years.

(To repeat: It’s not that this abuse occurred in the past three years, only that Catholic officials learned about the allegations in the past three years.)

… the figures, compiled by the church in a voluntary survey of dioceses and monasteries across Poland, gave no clear indication of whether the problem had grown worse in recent years. More than three quarters of complaints reported on Monday related to incidents of alleged abuse that occurred before 2018, with some dating back to 1958.

An earlier survey released in 2019 found that 382 abuse complaints had been received by the church over the previous 28 years.

That number is especially damning when you realize that the Church’s previous report, covering allegations they learned about between 1990 and 2018, implicated 382 priests who allegedly abused 625 victims. That means more people are reporting their abuse at a faster rate than before. That may have been spurred in part by two eye-popping documentaries about Church abuse recently released by Polish filmmakers. The public awareness of the Church’s crimes seems to be at an all-time high, and films like those help more victims find the courage to tell their own stories.

Church officials said 144 of the more recent complaints have been “confirmed or considered credible” while another 186 are being investigated. (Another 38 have been rejected.)

At what point do Church members decide they’ve had enough? How many credible allegations need to be made before they recognize the harm the Catholic Church has unleashed upon the world and decide they can no longer support a crime syndicate? At some point, the blame has to shift beyond the abusers and to the people who continue defending the institution.

(Image via Shutterstock. Thanks to Som for the link)