Bishop Andrzej Jeż of the city of Tarnów, southeast of Kraków, Poland, last Easter gave a sermon in the style of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in which he accused the Jews of using the Zionist Congress more than a century ago to plot a conspiracy against Christianity and to denounce the Catholic Church, Kan 11 reported Thursday night, at the end of Holocaust Memorial Day.
ההגמון של העיר טארנוב שבדרום פולין ציטט מתוך מאמר אנטישמי שהאשים את היהודים כי זממו לסכסך בין הנוצרים: “עלינו לזרוק בהם השמצות ושנאה. עלינו לעורר שערוריות ביחס לחייהם הפרטיים על מנת לעורר בעיני כל שנאה וגיחוך כלפיהם”. חשיפתו של דב גיל-הר ב- pic.twitter.com/uGEqooFJa3
— כאן חדשות (@kann_news)
Citing an anti-Semitic article from 1937, the Bishop claimed these anti-Christian plots had been conceived in the congress of a nation whose name he cannot mention for fear of getting in trouble – referring to the Tenth Zionist Congress of 1911 which assembled in Basel, Switzerland.
Citing the anti-Semitic article—which was libelous from start to finish— Bishop Jeż that the minutes of that “anonymous nation’s congress” included statements such as, “Our natural enemy is the Catholic Church. So we have to pour a spirit of displeasure on this cursed tree, lack of faith, lack of morality and grime of all kinds. We must stir up a struggle between the various Christian sects.”
Jeż then incorporated a modern theme, blaming the enormous wave of exposed pedophilic priests—which brought the church to the brink of financial ruin and a catastrophic drop in attendance—on guess who. Citing from the 1937 article, he accused the anonymous nation’s congress of saying: “First of all, we must begin an uncompromising struggle on all fronts against Catholic priests. We must slander them. We must provoke scandals about their private lives in order to evoke hatred and ridicule in the eyes of all who see them.”
Poland’s Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich said in response to the Bishop’s accusations: “It’s a terrible thing. There is a problem within the Catholic Church that they need to take care of. They must not remain silent. What was said is contrary to the Catholic faith of today.”
Naturally. But you must admit, blaming the Jews for pedophilic priests is an ingenious idea. I mean, we’ve been blamed for everything else, we should be able to account for that one, too. According to Wikipedia, in 2013 the Polish public—Poland being one of the most densely Catholic countries in Europe—became concerned about reports of child sex abuse scandals within the church, some of which reached the courts, and the poor response by the church. The church resisted demands to pay compensation to victims.
In October 2013, the Catholic Church in Poland explicitly refused to publish data on sexual abuse, but said that, if the data were to be published, the scale would be seen to be very low. Bishop Antoni Dydycz said that priests should not be pressed to report sexual abuse to state authorities, invoking the ecclesiastical “seal of confession,” which bans them from revealing what is said in the rite of confession.
On September 27, 2018, Bishop Romuald Kamiński of the Warsaw-Praga Diocese issued an apology to those who had been sexually abused by priests in his Diocese and that church leaders in Poland had completed work on a document to address the abuse of minors and suggest ways to prevent it. According to Archbishop Wojciech Polak, the head of Poland’s Catholic Church, the document will also include data on the scale of priestly sex abuse in Poland. However, as of early 2019 it still wasn’t made public.
Now, as it turns out, it was all because of the Jews.