ŚWINOUJŚCIE, Poland (ChurchMilitant.com) – A Polish Salesian priest who was charged with masturbating before minors on a beach in Poland has committed suicide.
Fr. Piotr Ziółkowski, S.D.B.
Father Piotr Ziółkowski, a catechist at a primary school and priest at Our Lady of the Rosary parish in Szczecin, northwestern Poland, was found dead on Saturday after he threw himself in front of a train.
Police arrested and fined Fr. Ziółkowski under Article 140 of the Code of Offenses, for “committing an indecent act in a public place,” but they refused to confirm if the priest had masturbated on Świnoujście Beach in the presence of children as reported by witnesses.
On Friday, local politician Dominika Jackowski posted on social media a complaint from a mother residing in Swinoujście who had expressed her concern that “a man was seen masturbating on a public beach in their presence when she was with her child.”
The mother included a photo of the perpetrator, who was fined on the spot by the police, Jackowski noted, adding that locals recognized the “Szczecin catechist” in the picture.
Police Cover-Up?
“For reasons unknown to me, the police informed me that there were no children on site,” Jackowski wrote, insisting that the police were trying to sweep the matter “under the rug.” The politician later said that Facebook had deleted her posts as well as the mother’s posts.
Jackowski blasted Radio Szczecin for a report that claimed Fr. Ziółkowski “usually masturbated on the beach among people, but children did not see it.”
“Masturbation in public, whether children are watching or adults only, is not normal. There is no way to defend it. This is how disturbed people behave, and such people cannot have contact with children,” she commented.
Polish Salesians issued a statement on Saturday confirming that the religious order founded by St. John Bosco had reported the matter regarding Fr. Ziółkowski to the police and competent authorities.
“The superior of the province of St. Wojciecha based in Piła has been informed about the case and, the explanatory process is underway,” Fr. Krzysztof Rudziński, spokesman for the province, noted in the statement.
Later in the day, the Salesian website announced that the 57-year-old priest who prepared children for their first Holy Communion was dead.
In May, the primate of Poland, Abp. Wojciech Polak, apologized for the failure of the Catholic Church in Poland to deal appropriately with the clerical sex abuse of minors after a new report indicated that priests had abused over 1,100 victims during the communist period.
At least 300 priests and two lay people have been implicated in the sexual abuse cases that occurred between 1944 and 1989.
“There were ‘ordinary priests,’ of course, among the abusers, but also highly respected names of university professors, authors and translators of books, builders of sanctuaries, social activists, famous researchers of the Bible or Catholic editors,” Tomasz Krzyzak, coauthor of the investigation, noted.
Clergy Suicides Plague Brazil, France, India, Ireland
Last month, Church Militant reported that from 2016 to 2023, at least 40 priests had committed suicide in Brazil.
Several priests who committed suicide during that seven-year period were accused of sexual abuse. Several priests killed themselves after being found guilty of abusing minors.
Dominika Jackowski
In a letter that went viral on Portuguese social media networks, Brazilian priest Fr. Simeão do Espírito Santo warned that the Church’s failure to care for priests who may have been wrongly accused of sexual abuse could be triggering a wave of clergy suicides.
France is also reporting a spate of clergy suicides, with the most recent death being that of Fr. Benjamin Sellier, who threw himself in front of a freight train in the early hours of July 11 after learning that he was being investigated for the sexual abuse of a young woman.
Father Sellier was the fifth accused French priest in the last five years to take his own life.
Three French priests committed suicide in 2020, and two others did the same in 2018.
Except for one priest from the diocese of Metz, all four were involved in cases of “inappropriate acts” or sexual assault.
In India, five priests committed suicide in just 10 months between October 2019 and July 2020. Fr. Mahesh D’Souza, former principal of Don Bosco School in Shirva, Karnataka state, killed himself in November 2019.
The 200-plus page final police investigation report revealed explosive transcripts of his chats with five different women, one of whom was a married non-Christian, dating from 2015 up to the day he committed suicide. The chat content is highly unbecoming of a priest, as the report stated.
Three of the priests committed suicide in a period of 10 days, with Fr. Xavier Alwin, 36, hanging himself from the ceiling fan of his residence in the Tuticorin diocese in India’s Tamil Nadu state.
As many as eight priests in Ireland have died by suicide over the past decade as an aging cohort of priests struggle with isolation, dropping income, an increasing workload, mental health issues and an overriding sense of futility, the Irish Times reported in 2017.
At least 24 nuns have committed suicide or died in unexplained circumstances since 1987 in Indian convents, at a rate of almost one death a year, Church Militant reported.
In 1980, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared suicide to be “equally as wrong as murder,” noting that “such an action on the part of a person is to be considered a rejection of God’s sovereignty and loving plan.”