In the Polish city of Poznan, pro-abortion demonstrators defaced the statue of John Paul II with paint, tapes, banners, and coat hangers on Sunday night. The past few days saw a number of similar incidents when activists damaged the monuments of the one-time pope to provoke the Catholic church and community.
A new ruling by Poland’s constitutional court has tightened abortion regulations, drawing crowds of leftist activists into the street across the country. Following Saturday’s protest in Warsaw, another demonstration – staged in Poznan on Sunday – had seven thousand participants, according to police sources, while organisers put the tally at twenty thousand people.
Templomokat rongálnak és rendĹ‘röket dobálnak a baloldali tüntetĹ‘k
Left-wing protesters vandalise churches and attack police
Agressive protests were held in the liberal capital during the weekend. Protesters sprayed graffitis on church facades and attacked police officers….
According to press reports, organisers planned to disrupt the evening mass in the Poznan Cathedral, just like they did in the capital on Saturday. Chanting obscenities, the crowd marched through Poznan’s streets towards the church only to find that the cathedral’s entrance was guarded by mounted officers and that there is no mass.
The protesters then marched to the headquarters of governing PiS party, chanting slogans such as “my body, my business”, “leave my womb alone”, or “this is war”. They also shouted vulgar anti-government and anti-PiS slogans.
The demonstrators also damaged the statue of Pope John Paul II. The former pope of Polish descent is revered by Catholics as a saint, so the destruction of the statue is another provocation against the church and the Catholic community.
“Obscenity, and the defacing of churches and monuments is not the way to dialogue,” former deputy prime minister Jadwiga Emilewicz said on social media, reacting to the incident.
In recent days, several John Paul II monuments have been damaged across Poland.
Saturday night saw the desecration of another John Paul II statue in a park of a small town. The pope’s hands were spray-painted red.
The monument was quickly cleaned up, and a police investigation is under way.
In a town north of Warsaw, posters were glued to a statue of John Paul II, whereas in Krakow, a poster exhibition about the pope’s life was again vandalised with red spray paint.
“This is how far-left militias fight for their rights. The ruined exhibition in the Plantach Park in Krakow is just another rough and vulgar act during a protest which they described as a ‘spontaneous walk'”, Szczecin town representative Dariusz Matecki wrote, reacting to the vandalism. The politician added that defacing public property is simply a crime and, of course, “moral savagery.”