WARSAW (EJP)---Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski stood up on Tuesday for the fundamentalist and anti-Semitic Catholic Radio Maryja, contradicting the archbishop of Krakow, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, who called for a change at the top of this influential station.

Speaking to the press, Kaczynski hailed the role of the radio which, he said, “reinforced the Church of Poland and Polish Catholicism.”
He also defended the founder and manager of the radio, Father Tadeusz Rydzyk.

“This radio, it is one single man. Remove this man and it doesn’t exist anymore,” he added.

Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, director of Radio Maryja.

Cardinal Dziwisz, who was the former secretary of Pope John II, has called for a change at the top of Radio Maryja, saying that the controversial anti-Semitic broadcaster threatens the unity of Polish Catholicism.

His call, made in an address delivered end August at a meeting of the Polish hierarchy, was published this week by the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny.

The cardinal said that Radio Maryja is part of a worrisome trend in which the work of the Catholic Church is "gradually slipping out of the bishops’ control."

Radio Maryja claims some three million listeners, which is only a fraction of the more than 90 percent of Poland’s 38.2 million people who say they are Catholic. But it wields considerable political influence in Poland and has campaigned openly for the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, even though it has begun sniping at Poland’s conservative leaders for allegedly going soft. The Radio Maryja media empire also includes a television station.

Cardinal Dziwisz urged the replacement of Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, the Redemptorist priest who founded Radio Maryja, with a new director whose guidance of the station would be more in line with the wishes of the Polish hierarchy.

Father Rydzyk has been under heavy criticism for making anti-Semitic remarks.

Earlier this year, Rydzyk criticized Polish President Kaczynski for bowing to pressure to compensate people — some of them Jews — for property nationalized by the postwar communist government, and for donating land for a future Jewish museum when Kaczynski was Warsaw’s mayor.

"You know that it’s about Poland giving 65 billion dollars" to the Jews, Rydzyk purportedly said in a recording that surfaced this summer.

They will come to you and say: give me your coat. Take off your pants. Give me your shoes."

Rydzyk also referred to the leading Polish daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, whose founder Adam Michnik has Jewish roots, as a "Talmudic" publication.

According to the Zycie Warszawy newspaper, at the meeting of the Polish hierarchy, which took place in Czestochowa, Cardinal Dziwisz’s suggestions drew support from the Polish primate Cardinal Jozef Glemp and Archbishop Kazimierz Kazimierz Nycz of Warsaw.

However, the hierarchy was not unanimous, the newspaper said.

The bishops decided against taking any public action on the issue.

Father Joszef Kloch, the bishops’ spokesman, observed that any disciplinary action against Father Rydzyk should be taken by his superiors in the Redemptorist order rather than by the bishops