Atheist Nobel Prize-winner Won’t Share An Honour With A Bishop

A DECISION by members of the Lower Silesian Regional Council in Poland to award honorary citizenships to hate-preaching Catholic bishop Ignacy Dec, above, and Nobel Prize-winning writer and atheist Olga Tokarczuk, inset, has exposed a deep ideological rift in the region.

According to this report, on learning that she was chosen to share the honour with Dec, Tokarczuk effectively said “shove it!”

In a tweet yesterday (Friday) the writer said that while she appreciated being considered, she “sadly” couldn’t accept the honour as it would highlight the “painful rift” in Poland over LGBT rights.

Tokarczuk, who lives in the southwestern city of Wroclaw, explained her reasons behind declining the honour.

Instead of being a joyous celebration of a sense of community, it is a vivid illustration of the painful rift in our society.

Polish News explained yesterday how the choices were made, and reproduced a couple of Dec’s hateful quotes directed at members of the LGBT community.

One councillor who voted for Dec, Andrzej Jaroch, pointed out that the bishop is a professor of theological sciences and throughout his career he combined:

Pastoral mission with an outstanding scientific position.

Those opposed referred to controversial public statements that Dec has made. These include:

• Currently, the most serious threat to humanity is not infectious diseases or hunger, or even ecological catastrophes, but precisely the gender ideology, which is a new variant of Marxism, especially the philosophy of Frederick Engels, which strikes at marriage and family, reducing people to the level of degenerate beings, unable to transmit further life.

• The elders say that even in the communist era there was no such anti-church and blasphemous activities as today. They say the devil has shed his red robes and changed into rainbow robes.

Another councillor, Tytus Czartoryski, who opposed awarding the honour to Tokarczuk said:

Bishop Ignacy Dec builds the moral order. The content of his life was to build a moral order without which societies cannot function normally. On the other hand, Ms Olga Tokarczuk destroys the moral order with her statements and is therefore a person whose harmfulness in social discourse is compounded by the Nobel Prize .

Earlier this year Poland’s Catholic Bishops issued a new document regarding homosexuality, in which it controversially proposed “gay cure” clinics. It came at a time when LGBT+ people in that nation were facing increased prejudice, such as the introduction of so-called “LGBT Free Zones” in some towns, and the re-election of Andrzej Duda, who was backed by the dominant Law and Justice Party that made opposition to LGBTQ equality a centerpiece of its campaign.

Theologian Stanislaw Obirek and attorney Artur Nowak published an article chastising the bishops for seeking to impose Christian teaching as the law, rather than advancing a pluralistic, democratic society. They said:

Listening to Polish clergy, one gets the impression that Jesus did not come to earth to bring the Good News, but to regulate the sexual life of his followers in detail.