Lithuania gives ultimatum over street named after Polish cardinal implicated in sexual abuse

A representative of Lithuania’s government has demanded that Vilnius district municipality, which is located around the country’s capital, change the names of streets that continue to honour Polish Cardinal Henryk Gulbinowicz despite him being sanctioned by the Vatican following sexual abuse allegations.

However, the local council, which is controlled by representatives of Lithuania’s ethnic Polish community and which has already refused twice to strip Glubinowicz of his honours, has argued there is no clear evidence of wrongdoing and that the cardinal died before he had an opportunity to defend himself.

Gulbinowicz, who served as Catholic bishop of the Polish city of Wrocław between 1976 and 2004, was in 2019 accused of both covering up cases of child sexual abuse by a priest under his authority and of carrying out abuse himself.

In 2020, the Vatican announced that, following an investigation into the accusations against Gulbinowicz, it was imposing sanctions on him, including banning him from participating in public events and ordering him to make a donation to the Polish church’s fund for counteracting sexual abuse.

While the Vatican did not provide specific reasons for the cardinal being punished, media reports at the time said it was linked to accusations of sexual abuse, “homosexual acts” and past ties to Poland’s communist-era security services. The cardinal died days after the sanctions were announced.

The sanctions prompted the Polish cities of Białystok and Wrocław, in both of which Gulbinowicz had spent many years, to strip him of honorary citizenship. However, he has remained an honorary citizen of the Vilnius district, where he was born in 1923 (when the area was part of Poland).

In September, the Vilnius district municipality council rejected a proposal to revoke Gulbinowicz’s honorary citizenship, reported Lithuanian news website Delfi at the time. In February, it also voted against renaming streets bearing his name, reported public broadcaster LRT.

Councillors from the Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania–Christian Families Alliance (AWPL-ZChR), which holds a majority on the council, rejected the accusations against the cardinal and dismissed the allegations as unproven or politically motivated.

“Talk about the cardinal’s guilt is disinformation. No one has seriously accused him, the situation is not unambiguous. Let’s not embarrass ourselves,” said LLRA-KŠS representative Tadeusz Andrzejewski, quoted by LRT. However, the council did agree to survey residents of the streets in question on the issue.

In March this year, renewed proposals to change the street names were submitted, reports TVP Wilno, a branch of Poland’s state broadcaster aimed at the Polish minority in Lithuania, which makes up just over 6% of the country’s population.

They have received strong backing from Gedmantė Eimontienė, the representative of the Lithuanian government for the Vilnius district, who demanded that the changes be “implemented within a month, [or] legal action will be taken”.

“If circumstances concerning a given person are revealed that are inconsistent with generally accepted standards of morality and ethics…the local government council is obliged to immediately remove such a street name,” she added, quoted by LRT.

However, TVP Wilno notes that the Lithuanian government’s justice minister, Rita Tamašunienė, who is also a member of the ethnic Polish community, has said that she does not support stripping Gulbinowicz of his honours.

The Catholic church in Poland has in recent years been hit by a series of revelations regarding historical abuse of minors by members of the clergy and allegations that bishops covered cases up.

The Vatican has taken action against a number of Polish bishops over the issue. Most recently, in 2024, it announced the resignation of the bishop of Łowicz, Andrzej Dziuba, due to his “negligence in handling cases of sexual abuse against minors”.

Last month also marked the first time a bishop in Poland has gone to trial over accusations he failed to promptly inform the law enforcement authorities about allegations of child sex abuse committed by priests under his authority.

Main image credit: EpiskopatNews/Flickr (under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is deputy editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She has written for Clean Energy Wire and The Times, and she hosts her own podcast, The Warsaw Wire, on Poland’s economy and energy sector. She previously worked for Reuters.