Poland has lodged an official complaint with the Vatican after two Polish bishops criticised the Tusk government and mass immigration.
Poland’s foreign ministry called the duo’s remarks “harmful and misleading” and “indicating clear support for nationalist groups”. The ambassador to the Holy See, Adam Kwiatkowski, delivered the message after the bishop emeritus of Wlocławek, Wiesław Mering, described Poland as “ruled by political gangsters” in a homily delivered on Sunday, July 13th. He also
- called the ruling party “people who call themselves Germans”;
- quoted a 17th-century poet who said that “a German will not be a brother to a Pole”
- announced that “our borders are threatened from both the west and the east.”
Earlier during the same pilgrimage to the Jasna Góra monastery, the auxiliary bishop emeritus of Częstochowa, Antoni Długosz, warned that
- “for decades, the Islamisation of Europe has been progressing through mass immigration”
- “illegal immigrants…create serious problems in the countries they arrive in.”
Mostly mainstream national conservative opinions? Not according to Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski, who publicly criticised the remarks, as he “considers inciting against refugees in the name of the church, whose founder was a refugee, intellectually inconsistent”:
The words of the two bishops mentioned are shameful and unworthy of the institution they represent and the faithful …. The voice of the Catholic church in Poland is respected…We wouldn’t want such comments to be labelled as incitement or even hate speech … We kindly suggest that appropriate consequences be taken against the bishops
While the prevalence of Catholicism in Poland drives a close relationship with Rome, this can inform occasional conflicts arising from the Brussels left-liberalism of the Tusk government.
