Pope John Paul II ‘covered up child abuse while a cardinal in Poland’

The late Polish Pope John Paul II knew about child abuse in Poland’s Catholic Church years before he became pontiff and helped cover it up, a new report claims.

Michal Gutowski, the investigator behind the report for private broadcaster TVN, said that Karol Wojtyla, as he was then, knew of cases of pedophile priests inside the church when he was still a cardinal in Krakow.

He transferred the priests to other dioceses, one as far away as Austria, to make sure no scandal occurred, the investigator said.

Wojtyla, who was pope for 27 years from 1978 until his death in 2005, wrote a letter of recommendation for a priest accused of abuse to Vienna Cardinal Franz Koenig, without mentioning the allegations, Gutowski says.

During his investigation, Gutowski says he spoke with victims of pedophile priests, their families and former employees of the church’s diocese.

He cites documents from the former communist-era SB secret police and rare church documents he gained access to.

But Gutowski said the Krakow diocese had denied him access to its own documentary files for his investigation.

The Polish church has refused in the past to provide documents to the judiciary or a public commission of inquiry investigating cases of church abuse of minors.

One of Gutowski’s sources said, on condition of anonymity, that he had personally told Wojtyla about acts of pedophilia involving a priest in 1973.

“Wojtyla first wanted to make sure it wasn’t a hoax,” the source said.

“He asked that it not be reported anywhere, he said he would take care of it.”

The then-Cardinal had explicitly requested that the alleged affair be kept strictly secret, the source is reported to have told Gutowski.

Thomas Doyle, a former American Catholic priest, canon law scholar and author of one of the first reports on abuses by Catholic clergy in the United States, said Gutowski’s research was groundbreaking.

It showed that John Paul II knew this problem existed even before he became Pope, he argued.

The broadcast of the investigation in traditionally Catholic Poland comes shortly after a Polish-based Dutch journalist, Ekke Overbeek, made similar allegations.

Overbeek’s book, Maxima Culpa, will go on sale in Poland this week.

In the past two years, and amid several reports of child abuse in the Polish church, the Vatican has sanctioned several high-ranking church officials for covering up pedophilia by clergy.

At the time of his election, John Paul II was the first non-Italian pope since the 16th century and the longest-serving pope in modern history after Pius IX in the 19th century.

He is credited with being instrumental in the downfall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, and even survived three assassination attempts, one of which saw him shot and another saw him narrowly avoid being stabbed.

He made public apologies to many groups that had suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church over the centuries.

He apologized for wrongdoing, including the role of the church hierarchy in the burnings at the stake, the injustices committed against women, and for the inactivity and silence of many Catholics during the Nazi Holocaust in World War II.

Upon his death in 2005, he was succeeded by Benedict XVI and later canonized as Pope Saint John Paul II. Several in the Vatican refer to him as ‘John Paul the Great’; in theory, he only the fourth pontiff to be hailed as ‘The Great’.

However, he has previously been criticized for not responding quickly enough to sexual abuse scandals within the Church, responding by saying that “there is no place in the priesthood and religious life for those who harm the young.”

There have been several cases of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, nuns and other members of the Church, resulting in many complaints, investigations, trials and convictions, as well as acknowledgments and apologies.