DABROWA GORNICZA, Poland (LifeSiteNews) — A Polish basilica was set alight after news of a sex scandal involving local priests swept the country.
On Thursday, September 21, an unidentified person or persons set fire to the wooden doors of the Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels in Dąbrowa Górnicza, a small city in southwestern Poland. The arson occurred the day after a story broke in a national left-wing newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, claiming that a homosexual orgy had taken place in the rooms of one of the priests serving at the Basilica.
Bishop Grzegorz Kaszak, the ordinary for the Diocese of Sosnowiec, said that setting fire to the church was like “kicking a man when he’s down.”
Firefighters put out the blaze and the building suffered no other damage.
According to Wyborcza, a newspaper often severely critical of the Roman Catholic Church, a party had recently taken place in the parish building where the priest lived. It alleged that guests included other priests and a male prostitute. During the party, Wyborcza reported, the sex worker, who had been using chemsex drugs, lost consciousness. One of the guests allegedly called an ambulance, but when the first responders arrived, they were not allowed to enter the building. Police were called, and the paramedics were able to help the unconscious man. It is now believed that charges for refusing to render assistance may be brought against one or more of the participants.
A spokesman for the diocese stated that an investigation into who was at the party, particularly if there were indeed other priests from the Sosnowiec diocese, had begun. While confirming that the involvement of a Fr. Tomasz Z. “in what happened in Dąbrowa Górnicza on the night of 30-31 August is beyond doubt,” the diocese would not confirm that other priests were involved.
“The priest who lived in the building claims that no other clergy was there at the time of the incident. The other two clergy [living there] testified that they have no knowledge of the participants in the event,” said Fr. Przemysław Lech, the diocesan spokesman.
The diocese further stated that Fr. Tomasz Z., who cannot be fully named due to Polish privacy laws, has been suspended on September 21. This means he was “was stripped of all church offices and functions until the matter is clarified and directed to live outside the parish.”
It is being reported in the Polish press today that Fr. Tomasz Z. had been the Sosnowiec diocesan editor for the popular Catholic weekly Niedziela (“Sunday”) and has now been dismissed from that role. It has also been reported that he is 48 years old.
Bishop Kaszak has made two official statements confirming that there is both a civil and a canonical investigation into “recent events” in Dąbrowa Górnicza. On September 22, he wrote to the priests of the Sosnowiec diocese to express his sorrow and ask for penitential services in reparation for the “recent events.”
“The recent events in Dąbrowa Górnicza have filled us with great pain, shame, and anger,” Kaszak wrote.
“We don’t exactly know everything [that happened]. The procurator’s office is investigating the case as a violation of the civil law whereas our commission is investigating it as a violation of divine and canon law,” he continued.
“As I write these words, the work is still going on, and it is difficult therefore to say exactly what happened.”
Kaszak also stated that it would be unfair to “pin a badge” on all priests of Dąbrowa Górnicza, that is, to tar them with the same brush.
The bishop apologized to those who “have been affected and very saddened and even also scandalized by the situation taking place in Dąbrowa Górnicza.” He also condemned the arson of the basilica doors, stating that he and his readers wouldn’t “wish it on [their] worst enemy.”
The following day, the bishop wrote to the faithful of the Sosnowiec diocese, asking them for their own spiritual sacrifices as a response to the scandal, which he did not describe in detail:
After the very painful events in Dąbrowa Górnicza, I asked the priests of the Diocese of Sosnowiec to undertake penance and to celebrate a service to make reparation to the Lord God and to sustain the spirits of the faithful, who are suffering greatly because of what happened. Today I turn to you, beloved in Christ the Lord, to ask for prayer and fasting — instruments of victory over a particularly powerful evil destroying man, which our Saviour has shown us.
In the letter, Kaszak asked the faithful “to pray for and support aching and ashamed priests” — presumably those involved in clerical sexual misconduct — “as well as those who have done nothing wrong but are suffering very much, and it is very difficult for them.” The bishop emphasized that he was thinking here “in a special way” of women religious and catechists.
In asking for prayers, Kaszak confirmed that at least one of the priests had “committed a scandalous act.”
“The world does not understand this, perhaps, but the Lord Jesus does not want the death of the sinner. So let us pray for the conversion of our brother who has committed a scandalous act,” he wrote.
“As I have already written, I wish to stress in the strongest terms that there is no condoning of a moral evil,” he continued. “Anyone found guilty will be punished according to canon law, regardless of the verdict of a civil court.”
Filip Mazurczak, a Polish American reporter and translator based in Krakow, told LifeSiteNews in response to the story that, in the past, many men in Poland and elsewhere entered the seminary “for the wrong reasons.”
“Some became priests for socio-political advancement, while others to conceal their homosexuality,” he said. “Naturally, not all priests entered the seminary for those reasons in the past, but those were common reasons. I think that now only men with a genuine vocation become priests.”
Mazurczak added that “although a lot of people were outraged when Benedict XVI banned men with deeply rooted homosexual tendences from entering seminaries, stories like this show why he was right.”
There have been concerns about the existence of a “lavender mafia” in Poland for some years. Fr. Dariusz Oko, a priest of the Archdiocese of Krakow who teaches at the John Paul II Pontifical University in that city and has written several works about homosexual clergy, has called for a synod to discuss the problem.
“Almost all major scandals of the Church in recent decades, and those which are most discrediting, have been stirred up by clergyman who succumbed to their homosexual inclinations,” Oko wrote in 2021.