WARSAW, Poland (AP) — The leaders of Poland’s influential Catholic Church on Thursday selected reasonable Archbishop Tadeusz Wojda to be their new principal, at a time when the church remains to be struggling to reckon with the abuse of minors by some Polish clergy, whereas the variety of Poles going to church has fallen sharply.
At a two-day convention, bishops and archbishops elected Gdansk Archpishop Wojda, 67, to switch the conservative Archbp. Stanislaw Gądecki, of Poznan, as the top of the Polish Episcopate, for a five-year time period, a communique stated.
Greater than 90% of Poles, a nation of some 38 million, are nonetheless formally members of the Catholic Church, however figures from 2022 confirmed lower than a 3rd of Catholics attended mass, in keeping with the church’s statistical institute.
For 27 years, from 1990 till 2017, Wojda served on the Vatican’s Congregation for the Evangelizations of Peoples, through the phrases of three popes: Polish-born John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis. He was then appointed archbishop of Bialystok, in japanese Poland, bordering Belarus. In 2021, he was made archbishop of Gdansk.
Throughout his tenure in Bialystok, when 1000’s of migrants arrived on the border with Belarus, Wojda referred to as for openness and tolerance, but additionally pressured that borders have to be protected. At the moment he additionally spoke strongly in opposition to equality parades of the LGBT+ group within the area and stated homosexuality was a “sin.”
Observers don’t anticipate Wojda to alter the Church’s strongly defensive course within the face of revealed circumstances of abuse of minors by clergymen.
Quite a lot of Poland’s archbishops and bishops have retired or stepped down, with the Vatican’s approval, for ignoring or making an attempt to cowl up abuses circumstances and for downplaying the trauma of the victims.
In a number of the circumstances, the perpetrators have been indicted in court docket circumstances and ordered to pay damages to the victims. In a latest case, the diocese of Kalisz paid 300,000 zlotys ( $76,000) to the sufferer of a pedophile priest, in September.
The earlier right-wing authorities cast shut ties with the Church and supported a few of its establishments financially, successful the gratitude of many believers. That authorities was additionally of comparable thoughts with the Church on condemning abortion and selling conventional household values.
The present pro-European Union authorities is searching for to chop the Church’s hyperlinks to politics and likewise to restrict its privileged monetary place that exempts the church from taxation.
Traditionally, the Catholic Church has been held in excessive esteem by Poles, having been near the nation and supporting its tradition and freedom drives through the nation’s division within the nineteenth century, throughout World Conflict II and through greater than 40 years of Moscow-controlled communist rule, till 1989.
