We present an interview we conducted on April 2 with Ekke Overbeek about his latest book, “Maxima culpa. Jan Paweł II wiedział”. In the interview, we discuss the pope’s responsibility for concealing predators in clerical robes.
Grażyna Hanaf: “Is it you—or rather your book—more of a drop that wears away a stone, or perhaps more of a revolutionary work that leads the aristocracy, in this case the Church aristocracy, straight to the scaffold, as during the French Revolution? How do you assess what happened after the publication of “Maxima culpa”?”
Ekke Overbeek: “I think it is more of a drop.”
“But isn’t that sad?”
“Well, overall it is a sad book, in every respect. It is a very gloomy book. It is difficult, but sometimes you have to talk about matters that are unpleasant and sad.”
“The book is overwhelming, that is true, but if someone picks it up, we really encourage them to read it. It would make a good crime novel if it were not based on facts and documented. Please tell me, because I asked whether it is not sad that in this country, where both of us essentially live, so many things have to be done to stand in the truth—or rather, for the Catholic Church to stand in the truth. How do you see it?”
“This is not only the case in Poland. All over the world, the sexual abuse of minors by clergy was covered up for a very, very long time. Pope Francis himself confirmed this in response to the book and Gutowski’s report: that until 2002, covering up this type of crime was even normal practice. In reality, everywhere in the world, if there are no journalists, public outrage and public authorities willing to take action, then without external pressure the Catholic Church does not reveal the full truth. I do not know of any country where the Church investigated this problem on its own, without outside pressure, in a reasonably objective and neutral manner, and revealed its scale.”
“Nevertheless, diocesan curias are opening their archives to secular authorities in other countries. Here, as you also write in your book, they are locked away. Sealed tight. Is there any hope that they will be opened to us?”
“People are talking about it now, of course. We have hit a sensitive point, so they can no longer deny that they are hiding something. Now the question is whom they want to give access to these archives. I do not think they would want to give me access. How objective will the researchers be? Will there be an objective commission to investigate this? There is also the question of how much material is actually there. We have to ask how much was written down during communist times, and how much was simply not named directly for security reasons. I have seen many descriptions, within diocesan curias, at deanery level and at various levels within the Church, where this subject is not mentioned at all. It is possible that very little was recorded. In addition, we do not know what is happening in these archives now. No one except the bishops knows what is happening there at this moment. Are documents disappearing right now?”
“You said that they probably would not give you access. In your book, you describe in great detail the mechanism the Catholic Church uses to cover up this secret. It is both a disgrace and an attack on the Church. It is a very well-oiled machine. Do you experience this machine yourself, and if so, how?”
“Unfortunately, it is not a cheerful situation. The way the public debate is conducted in Poland is—how should I put it… counterproductive, let’s call it that. There are emotions above all. There is very little argumentation. No one is really disputing the substance of the book. No one is really challenging its main content, but a great deal of time is spent splitting hairs. A lot of emotions are stirred up. This happens at various levels, unfortunately also at the political level. I would like to use this opportunity, while we are talking, to say that this is very bad. Both the fact that politicians are beginning to use John Paul II as a political tool—that is, in my opinion, insulting to the memory of John Paul II—not to mention the cream cakes on PKP. But on the other hand, the vandalized monuments to John Paul II, what happened in Łódź. I do not support that either and strongly advise against it; that is not the way. It only inflames the atmosphere and arouses even stronger emotions. We have had enough of emotions. A little more reason would be useful here. And calm.”
“I would even add that the emotions on the side of those who respond emotionally in support of the victims will actually benefit the Church the more intense they become, because the familiar mechanism of ‘an attack on the Church’ and discrediting everyone who attacks it will be useful to the Church. So we would also appeal for common sense here, right?”
“In this entire discussion, we see very little of the victims. This is a major problem in Poland: there is a great deal of discussion about the Church, John Paul, Poland’s good name, national traditions, everything—but the victims are often left out. Yet I wrote this book primarily for them: for all those who fell victim to such crimes at the hands of clergy. But not only in Poland. In a sense, it is a book about Poland, but in reality it concerns the entire Church. John Paul II was not the pope of Poland; he was the pope of the entire Catholic Church. The essence of the book is that, as an archbishop, he knew, and this is confronted with the problem of the sexual abuse of minors by priests. That is a fact. These are simply facts. On the other hand, for almost his entire pontificate he did not respond to this. He took no steps. The juxtaposition of these two facts is really what is most outrageous.”
“That is why let us talk a little about the victims. As a mother, I found it very difficult to read.”
“As a father, I did too.”
“We have Lenart, who abused three girls, three sisters, whom you reached and who are still struggling with this difficult situation to this day. This is Kamesznica, Sucha Beskidzka, Trzemieśnia. There is Lorenz, who frightened me the most. He used a terrifying coat to cover the girls and force them to touch him in intimate places. And he did it in front of the class; the children knew about it. It is humiliating. One mother starts a revolution there—the only one in the entire village. Surgent, who abused boys. And one of the most terrible stories, which ultimately ended in court, is that of priest Słodkowski from Niemodlin, who also abused boys. The Church used the struggle against the communist regime to cover up this case. These are the people you write and talk about, and you say that when you meet them—as I heard in an interview with Marek Sekielski—some of these victims expend enormous strength trying to repress it, trying to stop remembering. And it destroys them. What other experiences have you had in these conversations? What were the conversations with the victims like?”
“The hardest thing is when you see, when you know from the documents that you are talking to someone who experienced abuse, and who is trying to deny it in every possible way. You do not realize how incredibly thankless this role is: after so many years—we are talking about half a century—you come face to face with someone who simply repressed their trauma. You come and remind them of it. It is extremely difficult. Both Gutowski and I are accused of relying so heavily on the SB files. But the SB files are only the starting point for our journalistic investigations. Besides, these are not only SB files. They include court records from that era. There are also witnesses who confirm what is written in those files—not only the abuse, but other details as well. All of this shows that the materials are credible. The idea that the SB was concerned only with falsifying documents is a myth. It is obvious nonsense, because no intelligence service operates that way, nor could it.”
“In this book, you document the Church’s cooperation with the SB quite well. A priest who cooperated with the SB was a priest whose scandals were silenced. And they were silenced by those bad communists whom we fight so much. Anyone who would inform on the Church was useful to them. You have a chapter titled ‘Black and Red’; it is a kind of Polish danse macabre. Did you discover this while writing the book, or had it already been apparent in 2013? What impression did it make on you?”
“There were many moments when I was surprised by what I found. I never realized to what extent the Polish People’s Republic was, paradoxically, a friendly environment for the Church. At first, of course, there were the terrible Stalinist years, and then there really was harsh terror and an attempt to destroy the Church. But later, a kind of balance gradually emerged between the Church and the state. And that worked to the Church’s advantage. This can also be seen in relation to sexual abuse. It is highly paradoxical that when a priest committed such a crime, he could count on protection from the SB if he agreed to cooperate. Even if he did not, the communist authorities were still very reluctant to launch an investigation and bring the matter to court. They had partly fallen victim to their own anti-clerical propaganda, in the sense that the credibility of the communist authorities was very low, especially when they accused priests. People had enormous trust in the Church and very little in the communist authorities. The Church could easily present everything as a provocation, as untrue—even in cases where it was true. That is the paradox. When I began investigating these cases and archives, I expected to find examples of the SB fabricating documents to accuse priests. But that was not the case. I found nothing like that. Quite the contrary. In the book, I show many examples where the SB had information that a clergyman had done such things. Sometimes even a preliminary investigation had already been conducted, yet the matter was still not brought to court. To complicate the picture further, sometimes court cases did take place. This is where Poland differed from the West. In the West, including the Netherlands, where I come from, these cases were actually covered up for much longer. Of course, for ideological reasons, but as early as the 1950s—even the first case I found, from the late 1940s—there were instances in which priests were accused and even sentenced to prison. Polish bishops, including Karol Wojtyła, had this experience for a long time before the crisis erupted in the United States in the mid-1980s, when the first priest in the United States was accused and convicted of this. This also shows that it is simply untrue that Wojtyła did not know when the crisis began in the United States, or that he did not understand it, or that he thought these were provocations. It is simply untrue, and we know that now.”
“Now we come to that. Wojtyła was very afraid of journalists. He warned against those agitators of public opinion who are not always objective, implying that they are subjective. Do you think that today the Church uses, for example, PR agencies to inflame the situation and again divert the dialogue—or information about priests’ crimes—in order to silence it? Do you think such actions are being taken?”
“Which period does the question concern?”
“I mean the present, today.”
“Certainly. They have a very efficient damage-control machine; that is clear. They have developed it through experience. It began in the mid-1980s, so one can calculate how long it has been in place. They know how harmful this is and what enormous damage it can do to the Church. But they are wiser now, and this can also be seen in the Polish episcopate’s response. The episcopate’s response is more restrained than that of the politicians. At the moment, it is the politicians—apart from a few bishops who say terrible things—who are stoking these emotions.”
“The Church has learned. We know that at the end of the 1990s, an acquaintance of the editor-in-chief of istotne.pl worked for an agency that was supposed to silence all scandals. Do you think this restraint by the episcopate that you mention is precisely the right response: we will wait until they all tear one another apart…”
“Of course the Church knows that these are facts. They cannot deny them. They also know they must do something about it, and they are trying to defuse it in their own way—defuse this potential bomb beneath the Church. The question is why they waited so long. They could have conducted investigations long ago and been more open about these matters.”
“The only priest was Isakowicz-Zaleski, who wrote cautiously about the period of priests’ cooperation with the SB. In many matters—as you also emphasize in your book—he somehow did not release information about abuse or beatings of children. Your book is not only about abuse. There are rapes and abuse, but also extraordinary aggression by these priests toward children in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. This is also emphasized in your book.”
“As for priest Isakowicz-Zaleski, he stresses that he had an order from above, from Cardinal Dziwisz, not to reveal moral scandals in his book—primarily homosexual ones, as he himself puts it. That was a long time ago; the book was published 17 years ago. Some things have changed since then.”
“The book contains a huge number of threads. We encourage people to read it because it is genuinely very well written and thoroughly documented. It is worth reading precisely so as not to be swept up in the emotions that Ekke Overbeek says do not help at all. And finally, since this is how you conclude the book—similarly to Gutowski with Sapieha… John Paul II was his altar boy. Should we prepare for another moral scandal titled ‘Sapieha’s altar boy’ concerning John Paul II?”
“I do not know. Nevertheless, I decided to describe it because I did not want to be among those who had seen this material, these documents, and did nothing about it. I doubt that we will have harder evidence or firmer documents, or much more information on the subject. Those who might have been witnesses are already dead. So it would have to be new documents shedding new light on the matter. As for Sapieha, what I find outrageous is that many people became familiar with these documents, yet no one described them. Why did no one describe them, saying that they were yet another terrible attempt to discredit Archbishop Sapieha? That the evil UB was once again preparing some terrible accusation? Why was that not done? And now the people who knew these documents and did not describe them for so many years say that they are inherently unreliable. In my opinion, the arguments that appear—that the credibility of these witnesses should be rejected a priori, that is, from the outset—are very weak. Returning to your question about whether there will be more revelations: it is difficult to say. As I said, there are probably, or almost certainly, no surviving witnesses. So new documents would simply have to emerge.”
“If your book is, as you say, a drop that wears away a stone, and many people are also working on this, then fortunately you are not the only one. We previously had ‘Tell No One’. TVN prepared a great deal of material, and there was your 2013 book and now the 2023 one. There are more drops. So when the stone breaks, we can prepare for anything. We recommend thoughtful discussions around the Easter tables, without emotions…”
“So that we listen to one another and also respect the other side’s emotions. I understand that these facts now coming to light may be very painful for many people, especially in Poland. We must respect these emotions too, rather than inflame them or use them politically. We should simply talk. Talk. This is not an attack on the Church; it is not an attack on Poland. Faith is not dying. The Church is certainly not dying. Poland is not dying. So we need to talk calmly, rather than stoke these fears and anxieties.”
“I will end on a somewhat more positive note, then. Thank you very much for giving us your time during this intense period of promoting the book. Thank you, everyone. Thank you very much, goodbye.”
“Thank you, goodbye.”