Polish Bishop Defends Suspended Professor Who Claimed Pride Marchers Are “Traveling Rapists”

A bishop in Poland has called a state university professor victim of the LGBTQ movement’s “intellectual terror” after the school suspended him for writing a homophobic article

Bishop Wieslaw Mering of Wloclawek issued an open letter in defense of Professor Aleksander Nalaskowski who was suspended for three months by Nicolaus Copernicus University over a magazine article he wrote that viciously attacked LGBTQ people and allies. Bishop Mering’s letter expressed his “admiration” to Nalaskowski , referring to him as a “symbol of faithfulness to truth,” reported The Tablet. The bishop added:

” ‘How painful and sad it is that political correctness has contrived to become more important than normality . . . The madness of LGBT ideology has become a form of intellectual terror, directed against everyone who exercises a healthy judgement.’ “

Nalaskowski’s offending comments appeared in the Polish weekly Sieci in an essay about Pride celebrations entitled “Traveling Rapists,” a term he used  repeatedly to describe LGBTQ people. In a particularly vicious section, Nalaskowski wrote, as quoted in Gazeta.pl (via Google Translate):

“[Pride marchers are] effeminate dandies, dependent on mommy, guys wanting to have fun forever, sloppy, fat, tattooed babes who ostentatiously kiss like on promiscuous movies and individuals who are hard to attribute to some gender.”

The Tablet reported that in an interview following the suspension, Nalaskowski said LGBTQ people were out to “destroy the Church.”

Relations between the LGBTQ community and Polish church leaders have been increasingly tense since the summer. Several Pride marches in Polish cities have become the targets of Catholic bishops’ criticism. Archbishop Tadeusz Wojda of Bialystok took two days to condemn right wing extremists’ violent attacks against LGBTQ marchers in that city, after he had already condemned the Pride march as “an act of discrimination against Catholics” in the weeks leading up to it. Poland’s bishops have remained silent about anti-LGBTQ violence in the past.

Elsewhere, Archbishop Marek Jedraszewski of Krakow escalated tensions when he referred to LGBTQ advocacy as a “rainbow disease” during a homily to mark the Warsaw Rising in World War II. Some Catholics, like Dominican Fr. Pawel Gużyński, and veterans of the Rising condemned Jedraszewski’s homily. But many church leaders offered support, including Bishop Mering who said the archbishop was being persecuted like Jesus for refusing to “submit to political correctness.” Several other Polish bishops, as well as church leaders in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary expressed their support.

Aleksander Nalaskowski’s rhetoric about LGBTQ people is indefensible. Despite Bishop Mering’s claims, the issue is not one of political correctness, but of basic human decency. It is not “intellectual terror” to expect LGBTQ people be treated with the “respect, compassion, and sensitivity” that church teaching demands of Catholics, bishops included. By continuing to issue extreme statements, church leaders in Poland are encouraging discrimination and endangering lives. Their violent rhetoric must stop.

—Robert Shine, New Ways Ministry, September 19, 2019