KNOXVILLE (Washington Insider Magazine) – In a case filed this week, a former Tennessee church organist says that he had been molested by a member of the church who was a disciple of a prominent Polish priest and that the bishop of Knoxville attempted to cover it up.
According to court documents, the accuser, identified as John Doe, claimed that the seminarian, Wojciech Sobczuk, sexually molested him on February 5, 2019, and that Bishop Rick Stika afterward informed another fellow priest that Doe was the instigator and had abused Sobczuk.
The complaint seeks unspecified damages from the Diocese and Stika for their roles in aiding Sobczuk’s abuse of Doe, forcing Doe into silence and slandering Doe to preserve their image and reputation, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in court Tuesday and names the Diocese and Stika as defendants. According to NBC NEWS, Sobczuk is not mentioned as a respondent in the complaint.
According to a November, 2018, article in the Knoxville Diocese’s formal publication authored by diocesan spokesman Jim Wogan, Sobczuk, who is now in his early twenties, came into the diocese around 4 years ago at the suggestion of Stanislaw Dziwisz, the previous archbishop of Krakow, Poland.
According to the lawsuit, Doe served at the Knoxville diocese between December 2015 to August 2019. He claims he was originally introduced to Sobczuk by a coworker, and that the seminarian quickly told him he was gay during dinner.
According to the lawsuit, Doe felt awful about Sobczuk and tried to help.
Doe claims that Sobczuk forced him to have short sexual touches and oral sex on rare occasions, as well as anal sex, which he constantly rejected.
According to the lawsuit, Sobczuk apologized for being overbearing by stating he was naive sexually and that if Doe told anybody about what transpired, Sobczuk would be expelled from the Church and deported back to anti-gay Poland.
Then, according to the lawsuit, Sobczuk anally raped Doe in a painful, forcible manner one night and then ordered him to shower to remove evidence of the rape.
Doe claims Sobczuk stalked him and handed him a pricey Catholic prayer book personalized by Stika as well as a Valentine’s Day card.
Doe said he contacted the Knoxville Police Station 9 days later to notify the alleged sexual assault, but the officers told him he may lose his job.
Doe stated in the lawsuit that he left the diocese in August 2019.
The lawsuit was filed ten months since The Pillar, a local Catholic publication, flagged up that the Vatican already had heard grievances from priests and parishioners in the diocese that Stika had reportedly meddled in a diocesan ongoing investigation of an unidentified seminarian charged with raping a male church worker.