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Poland sees first anti-paedophilia rally against Catholic Church

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AFP Warsaw
Last Updated : Oct 08 2018 | 12:00 AM IST

Some 200 people took to the streets of Warsaw on Sunday to protest child sex abuse in the Catholic Church, in the first major such rally in staunchly Catholic Poland.

The demonstrators marched through the capital waving banners reading "Bishop, protecting paedophiles is a crime" and "We are fed up with the clergy's cowardice".

They also carried a map of the country with black crosses to mark places where complaints about child sex abuse had been made against clerics.

There are no official statistics on the number of Polish priests convicted of child sex abuse, but a Polish association that helps victims estimates there were around 56 over nearly two decades, including clergy convicted of possessing child pornography.

The protesters stopped in front of four churches in Warsaw to read out victims' accounts.

Before the archbishop's seat, a long list of Polish cities and towns with documented paedophilia cases was read out to the sound of drums and with the crowd occasionally shouting "Shame!"

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First Published: Oct 08 2018 | 12:00 AM IST

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