How a priest’s detention shook Poland
Fr. Michał Olszewski was released on bail last Friday after almost seven months in custody
Polish priest Fr. Michał Olszewski was released on bail last Friday after almost seven months in custody.
Olszewski, who belongs to the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (Dehonians), was greeted with flowers as he emerged from a remand center in Warsaw at 1 p.m. local time Oct. 25, following a bail payment of 350,000 Polish złotys (around $87,000), paid by another member of the order.
“Your prayers brought me out,” Olszewski told well-wishers as he choked back tears.
His order described his release from detention as “a day of hope.” But it noted Olszewski still faces trial for alleged financial crimes.
“Today is not the end of the matter, it is another stage,” the order said, urging Catholics to renew their prayers.
Why was Fr. Olszewski in detention? Why has his case caused tremors in Poland’s political landscape? And what’s likely to happen next?
The Pillar takes a look.
Why was Fr Olszewski detained?
In 1997, the Polish government established the Justice Fund (Fundusz Sprawiedliwości) to support crime victims.
Olszewski, the head of his order’s Profeto Foundation, successfully applied for a grant from the fund for a project known as “Archipelago – Islands Free from Violence.”
The money — reportedly 68 million Polish złotys (roughly $16.9 million) — would be used to build a center in Warsaw’s Wilanów district for people “affected by physical, psychological, spiritual, or economic violence.” Construction began in 2022 and was due to be completed in the second quarter of this year.
The grant was awarded via Poland’s Ministry of Justice, led at the time by Zbigniew Ziobro, a member of the Law and Justice party (PiS).
In October 2023, a general election ended the party’s eight-year stint in power. A new ruling coalition, led by veteran politician Donald Tusk, promised to undertake a “rozliczenie” (“reckoning”) following what it claimed were years of corruption and mismanagement.
The Civic Coalition, a big tent alliance that included left-wing, anti-clerical elements, focused its attention on the Justice Fund.
In February this year, Olszewski issued a statement saying there was a “great battle” over the Archipelago project and criticizing media for contacting his ill mother.
He received support from Bishop Artur Ważny, chairman of the Polish bishops’ new evangelization team, to which Olszewski belonged.
On March 26 — Holy Tuesday — Olszewski was taken into pre-trial detention for alleged irregularities in obtaining money from the Justice Fund. The authorities raided three of his order’s houses the same day. A court ruled that Olszewski could be held for three months.
Also detained were two civil servants who worked in the Ministry of Justice, identified in the Polish media only as Urszula D. and Karolina K.
According to case files seen by the center-left newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, prosecutors raised suspicions about 11 transactions by Olszewski, reportedly worth 13 million Polish złotys (around $3.2 million), which they argued were unrelated to the Archipelago project.
But the priest’s lawyer Krzysztof Wąsowski has denied that any money from the Profeto Foundation’s account was used to cover Olszewski’s personal expenses.
At the end of June, the conservative weekly Sieci published a letter from Olszewski to his relatives in which he alleged he had been badly treated by the authorities and kept under a harsh “special surveillance” regime.
The letter described how Olszewski was detained at 6 a.m. at a friend’s house by balaclava-clad members of Poland’s Internal Security Agency. He said that on a journey to Warsaw, he was forced to wait in handcuffs inside a gas station while officers ordered hot dogs. The priest, who reportedly suffers from intestinal problems, said he was only able to eat 60 hours after his detention. He recalled that he was initially isolated from other prisoners, constantly handcuffed, watched by cameras, and woken frequently by bright lights.
In a July 2 statement, Olszewski’s order said it was “deeply concerned” by the priest’s description of his first days in custody.
“The issue of detention is rightly causing concern,” it said. “Violations of fundamental human rights, psychological torture, denial of physiological needs are actions reminiscent of the worst pages of our history.”
The Polish Catholic legal organization Ordo Iuris later said the priest’s treatment amounted to “illegal and irregular detention,” and invited “charges of cruel and inhumane treatment of a detainee.”
After Olszewki’s letter was published, Prime Minister Donald Tusk described the suggestion the priest had suffered what amounted to torture as “so absurd that I do not even want to comment on it.” He nevertheless ordered an investigation of the Prison Service’s actions.
The Prison Service, meanwhile, released a statement urging politicians and journalists to “stop repeating false information … about the alleged use of torture against Michał Olszewski by officers of the Prison Service.”
Olszewski’s lawyer and his order continued to express concern about the authorities’ treatment of the priest, who was ordered to be held for a further three months.
On Sept. 6, Olszewski was questioned in court. In a video recorded that day, he looked pale and thin as he was escorted in handcuffs to a police van while supporters chanted “Release the priest!” The cleric, who previously sported a long salt-and-pepper beard, was clean shaven and wearing a black Our Lady of Guadalupe T-shirt.
The following day, the Dehonians said their local superior still had not been allowed to meet with Olszewski. They expressed concern about the priest’s health, as well as the “protracted investigative procedures” and changes to the charges, which now included “money laundering” and “participation in an organized crime group.”
Olszewski also received significant public support.
Poles held up banners supporting Olszewski in St. Peter’s Square as they gathered for Pope Francis’ Sept. 22 Angelus address. The banners said in Polish, English, and Italian: “Free Fr. Michał Olszewski, S.C.J. A Polish prisoner of conscience.”
At an Oct. 19 march in Warsaw, marking the 40th anniversary of the murder of Solidarity priest Bl. Jerzy Popiełuszko, participants held signs saying “Free Fr. Michał,” “Free political prisoners,” and “Do not kill the priest!”
When Olszewski was released from detention a few days later, his order confirmed he was free to resume his ministry as he was not subject to any Church restrictions.
He is banned from leaving the country and having contact with witnesses in the Justice Fund case, and must report regularly to police.
Why does the case have a political dimension?
Like many countries, Poland is deeply politically polarized. As the Olszewski case grew in prominence, two contrasting narratives battled for supremacy.
Champions of the new government argued that Olszewski’s detention was a mark of its fearless commitment to holding perpetrators of corruption to account, regardless of their social standing.
Supporters of the previous government, meanwhile, suggested the authorities were dragging Poland back to the communist era, when priests were routinely persecuted.
Aleks Szczerbiak, a professor of politics at England’s University of Sussex, said that amid the political debate around the case, Poland’s bishops seemed reserved, with the exception of a few retired prelates who publicly expressed support for the priest.
Szczerbiak suggested the bishops — long portrayed as being close to the Law and Justice party — didn’t want to “try and open up new fronts with the government,” given they were already at loggerheads over abortion, religion classes in public schools, and state support via the Church Fund (Fundusz Kościelny).
He noted that the Church underwent a leadership change earlier this year, with the experienced Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki making way for the younger Archbishop Tadeusz Wojda as bishops’ conference president.
Szczerbiak said some Polish Catholics felt the Church’s new leaders didn’t measure up to those of the past, seeing them as “a very risk-averse group of people.”
“They should make a clear statement on this one way or the other,” he argued. “If they think everything the government is doing is fine, make that clear. If they don’t, make it clear.”
“Hoping it will go away, which is what they’re doing, is very problematic, and I think symptomatic of how they’re approaching other issues. They don’t really have a strategy on how to respond to this.”
Szczerbiak noted that lengthy periods in pre-trial detention were not uncommon in Poland. But he said there was a theory that Olszewski was treated especially harshly to nudge him into cooperating with prosecutors, or to send an intimidating message to others who might be vulnerable to similar charges.
“The government obviously denies all of this,” Szczerbiak said. “It simply says it is trying to deal with abuses of power, and that if it means prosecuting the clergy, there are no sacred cows, unlike under Law and Justice.”
“They argue that there has been no mistreatment of Fr. Olszewski,” pointing to the time gap between the priest’s detention and the publication of his letter.
What’s next?
Poland’s National Public Prosecutor’s Office has said it will soon present an indictment against the cleric.
But a verdict is unlikely to arrive quickly, given the comparative slowness of the Polish justice system.
Any judgment will be controversial, and not just because the case has divided the Polish public along political lines.
The justice system itself is at the center of a fierce political debate, stemming from Law and Justice’s decision to overhaul Poland’s National Council of the Judiciary, the body responsible for nominating judges.
Opposition parties argued that the changes, which gave politicians greater power over nominations, violated the principle of the separation of powers. They claimed that thousands of judges nominated after the overhaul — dubbed “neo-sędziowie” (“neo-judges”) — were therefore illegitimate.
Szczerbiak said that as the Olszewski case passes through the justice system, it could “start to intersect with these disputes over who is and who isn’t a judge.”
“What happens if one of these ‘neo-judges’ rules in Fr. Olszewski’s favor?” he asked. “What happens in that circumstance? Does the government recognize it or doesn’t it recognize it?”
“That’s not come up yet in this case, but it could be heading down the line.”
This was a really interesting piece that I had heard nothing about.
Thanks so much to the Pillar for publicising an important case that seems to have got so little attention anywhere else. It seems astonishing when past generations of Polish priests suffered so much under the Nazi and Communist regimes. But, hey, we are all democratic and touchie-feelie now!
When I was a prison visitor in the early 1980s, I was very aware of a similar injustice in UK prisons. In true Alice in Wonderland style, you could spend longer in prison if you were innocent than if you were guilty.
The iniquity centred on the long periods people could spend on remand awaiting trial. You were not granted bail for various reasons. So you were legally innocent and detained on the remand wing of a prison. It looked exactly the same as the rest of the prison, but, as an innocent person, you had a few theoretical privileges.
Unlike the case of Fr Michal, I never heard any allegations of direct abuse of prisoners. Sharing a 15 x 8 cell with two prisoners and three chamber pots was degrading enough. In Victorian times that cell was designed for one inmate.
You could easily spend 12 months or more on remand thanks to the backlog in the courts. You then went to court. Maybe you were found guilty. You were given an 12 month sentence. One third off for good conduct means 8 months in prison. But you have already served 12+ months, so you were released immediately.
Obviously, if you were found not guilty you were released immediately. Equally obvious, you have probably lost your reputation, your career, your home, your family....Tough luck suing anyone, unless you could prove the police had acted with negligence or malice.
But if you had been tried soon after arrest and found guilty and given 12 months, you would have been released in 8 months.
Prisoners anywhere, apart from possibly Sweden, have a horrible time, and zero public sympathy. No wonder the only guy who we are confident is in Heaven is the convicted thief crucified beside Jesus.