POLAND
Catholic News Service
By Jonathan Luxmoore
Catholic News Service
WARSAW, Poland (CNS) — Poland’s Catholic Church has held a penitential service for victims of sexual abuse by priests, after calls for more action to curb molestation in the country.
“It was said this was America’s problem, and then a problem of Anglo-Saxon countries, and then a problem for the West — the frontiers were pushed ever further so we could insist it didn’t affect us,” said Bishop Piotr Libera of Plock, a former bishops’ conference secretary-general.
“As bishops, we must admit that, instead of putting the good of children in first place, we too often allowed ourselves to be deceived by the fraud, duplicity and denial mechanisms of perpetrators of the crime of pedophilia.”
“Ashamed and repentant, we ask for forgiveness,” he said in a June 20 Mass in Krakow’s Jesuit basilica. “We ask God and we ask people who were hurt by the priests.”
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