News
Featured Image
Archbishop Marek Jedraszewski

August 6, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – The archbishop of Krakow, Poland, has said that his country is under siege from the “rainbow disease” of LGBT activism.

While his country is no longer beleaguered by the “red plague” of Soviet communism, Archbishop Marek Jedraszewski said, it is now afflicted by the “rainbow” plague of LGBT ideology, which denies human dignity and aims to control the souls, hearts, and minds of the Polish people.

“A red plague is not gripping our land anymore,” the archbishop said, “which does not mean that there is not a new one that wants to control our souls, hearts and minds.” 

“Not Marxist, Bolshevik, but born of the same spirit, neo-Marxist,” he said. “Not red, but rainbow.”

The archbishop’s remarks came in his sermon during Mass at St. Mary's Basilica marking the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, CNS News reports.

Jedraszewski recalled in his homily the heroism of Poland’s Home Army against Nazi occupation, and the country’s struggles under fascism and then decades of 'Bolshevism' rule as a Soviet satellite state, a report from the Irish Times said.

He said that “promoting LGBTI ideology denies human dignity” because the “rainbow disease” was “neo-Marxist” in its absolutist ambition.

The day before at the Polish Catholic pilgrimage site of Czestochowa, Jedraszewski had urged the Catholic faithful to “defend the truth about the creation of a woman and a man to live together and to have children.”

Jedraszewski’s homily remarks about LGBT ideology drew denunciation from U.S.-based LGBT activist Jesuit Father James Martin, who called the archbishop’s comments incendiary, adding that they promote hatred and violence toward LGBT individuals.

The Catholic Church teaches that homosexual tendencies are “objectively disordered,” and that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered,” against natural law and cannot be approved under any circumstances.

People with same-sex attraction are called to chastity, the Church’s teaching says, as are all people.

Same-sex sexual activity has never been criminalized in Poland and its legality was reconfirmed in 1932. Homosexuality does not have special protection in Polish law, and gay “marriage” and the adoption of children by gay couples in Poland remain illegal.

The majority Catholic country is having turmoil and tension between LGBT activists working to advance their agenda and traditional Poles.

Jedraszewski, 70, was appointed auxiliary bishop of Poznań in 1997 by then Pope St. John Paul II, just before Jedraszewski’s episcopal consecration. The two clerics were close friends, CNS reports. 

Pope Benedict XVI appointed Jedraszewski the archbishop of Lodz in 2012, and in 2017 Pope Francis named him archbishop of Krakow. 

In remarks made in 2013, Jedraszewski said gender ideology is the “direct path to the self-destruction of our civilization.”

“It is an extremely dangerous ideology that leads directly to the death of our civilization,” he said.