Polish president strips former priest of state order after sex abuse conviction

President Andrzej Duda has stripped a former priest of one of Poland’s highest honours. Although no official reason was given, media reports indicate that the decision was taken due to the man being convicted of sexually abusing a disabled person.

Krzysztof Kuryłowicz, a former priest from the Society of Christ Fathers religious congregation, which serves Polish Catholic communities abroad, in 2011 received the Order of Polonia Restituta for “his outstanding merits in activities for the Polish community and the propagation of Polishness in Kazakhstan”.

Kuryłowicz arrived in Kazakhstan in 1991. After leaving the Central Asian country, he went on to serve as a chaplain to Poles in Riga, Latvia, reports broadcaster RMF.

Last month, Onet, a leading news website, reported that the council of the Order of Polonia Restituta – a committee responsible for giving its opinion on requests to award and revoke the order – asked Duda to revoke Kuryłowicz’s honour.

It did so after receiving information from the foreign ministry that Kuryłowicz was convicted last year of sexually abusing a person with an intellectual disability, reported Onet.

A spokesman for the Society of Christ Fathers told the Catholic News Agency (KAI) that they first received a notification of Kuryłowicz’s crimes in 2014, which led them to initiative internal church proceedings against him as well as notify state prosecutors.

In 2018, he was removed from the priesthood and in 2023 he was convicted by a Polish court of sexual abuse and sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

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According to Polish law, a president may decide to strip a person of an order they have received if they “committed an act that has rendered him or her unworthy of holding it”. In practice, presidents rarely do so.

In 2019, Duda stripped state honours from an academic for plagiarism and from a civil servant who had received a conviction.

Last year, he withdrew two state orders from Andrzej Malinowski, the former longstanding president of the Employers of Poland association, after he was found guilty of giving false testimony regarding his cooperation with Poland’s former communist regime.

The Catholic church in Poland has in recent years been hit by a series of revelations of cases of sex abuse by members of the clergy and of negligence in dealing with them by bishops, several of whom have been punished by the Vatican as a result.

Main image credit: Krzysztof Sitkowski/KPRP

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.