Polish Archbishop Resigns as Rumors Swirl

WARSAW —  A Polish archbishop accused of making homosexual advances toward seminarians and young priests announced his resignation Thursday in a bid to end a scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church in Pope John Paul II’s homeland.

Archbishop Juliusz Paetz, 67, has repeatedly denied the allegations, which erupted in the Polish media late last month.

“My kindness and spontaneity have been taken advantage of,” Paetz told his congregation in the western Polish city of Poznan at his farewell Mass on Thursday. “My words, gestures and behavior were distorted and misrepresented.”

Polish media have reported in recent weeks that rumors of Paetz’s alleged advances had circulated among priests in Poznan for at least the last three years. The rumors became public in February when Rzeczpospolita, a Polish daily widely seen as responsible and cautious, reported the allegations on its front page, quoting unnamed priests.

In Rome, the Vatican confirmed that John Paul had accepted the resignation of Paetz, who served as a top aide to the Polish-born pope from 1978 to 1982.

The Paetz case differs from sex scandals that recently hit the Catholic Church in the United States in that the charges in Poland were raised by priests rather than parishioners. Also, in heavily Catholic Poland, issues of sexual behavior by priests have almost never been spoken of openly in the media.

“For the Polish church, this is an experience without precedent,” Father Adam Boniecki, editor in chief of Krakow-based Tygodnik Powszechny, a weekly publication largely focused on church issues, said Thursday on state-run television. “Never before has such a problem been discussed publicly.”

In Polish media reports, Paetz was accused of making homosexual advances such as touching, cuddling and kissing and of paying unannounced visits to the lodgings of seminarians, sometimes using a 200-yard underground tunnel leading to their dormitory.

Rzeczpospolita, in its original article, reported that the rector of the seminary eventually banned Paetz from visiting unless the archbishop made arrangements in advance.

No victims of sexual abuse have come forward publicly or sought legal redress.

“All the priests talking about the case do not have evidence for homosexual acts,” Marcin Przeciszewski, head of the Catholic Information Agency, a religious news service run by the church in Poland, said recently. “These accusations are only about the behavior of the archbishop, gestures. These clerics considered them as proposals. The archbishop says he is innocent and that he is like a father to them. The situation is not very clear.”

But some sought more aggressively Thursday to distance the church from Paetz.

“Is this going to paralyze and dispirit us? No,” Jozef Zycinski, the archbishop of Lublin, said at a Mass. “After all, among the apostles, there was a drama of betrayal by Judas, and the fact that Judas was a traitor did not erase the fact that John was faithful.”

Paetz said Thursday that he was resigning because “the church in Poznan, to live and grow, needs unity and peace.”

Earlier, in a letter that Paetz distributed to be read in Poznan churches March 17, he denied “all the information published by the media” and declared: “The biggest criminals have a right to anonymity unless a court decides otherwise. I was deprived of that. Mass media have already judged me and sentenced me.”

Some priests refused to read the letter to their congregations, according to media reports.

The Vatican announced Thursday that John Paul had named Stanislaw Gadecki, 52, an auxiliary bishop from nearby Gniezno, as Paetz’s successor.

The pope’s action came a week after John Paul broke his silence on sex abuse cases in the United States and several European countries by saying that those who were guilty had succumbed to evil and had cast a shadow of suspicion over all priests.

John Paul referred to the issue again in a homily at the Vatican on Thursday, inviting prayers for “those priestly brothers of ours who have not lived up to the commitments they made when they were ordained or who are going through a period of difficulty and crisis.”

Vatican officials have said the pope has been deeply saddened by the Paetz scandal.

Polish media have reported that at the urging of local priests, the Vatican sent an investigative team to Poland in November to look into the allegations, and that no direct evidence was found that Paetz had sexually abused anyone. But it did conclude that he should be removed from his post for unspecified inappropriate behavior toward seminarians and priests, the reports said.

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Ela Kasprzycka of The Times’ Warsaw Bureau contributed to this report.