LETTER FROM WARSAW

Some remind him of his nickname of "catho-taliban" or "ayatollah of the Bible," others now refer to him as "the traitor" or a "sold-out to leftist liberals." Journalist Tomasz Terlikowski, who is 49 and a philosopher by training, has had the gift – or a certain courage – for making enemies on both sides of the solid barricade that separates conservative, Catholic Poland from its liberal, secular half. A leader among ultra-Catholic polemicists just a few years ago, Terlikowski's career path led him to a turnaround as spectacular as it was atypical. While, according to him, his religious convictions have "not changed," this is certainly not the case with his view of the Church as an institution, of which he has become one of Poland's most acerbic and listened-to critics.

Terlikowski has come a long way. From 2009 to 2015, he was director of the ultra-Catholic publishing house Fronda, then editor-in-chief of its news portal. From 2014 to 2017, he was editor-in-chief of TV Republika, a channel close to the most radical nationalist circles in Polish public debate. His style at the time contrasted sharply with the erudition he has displayed recently. Then, he wielded verbal violence and hate speech with little restraint. In 2013, on the death of Nelson Mandela, he wrote that he was a "simple communist," who was "equally racist towards whites" and that, by enacting a law liberalizing abortion, he was responsible "for the deaths of far more black children than the worst of South Africa's racists."

"I very much regret what I said and wrote back then. I'm ashamed of the language I used," he told Le Monde in November. "I assumed that to break through the din of public debate, you had to hit hard. Since then, I've come to understand that these kinds of sharp-edged opinions can be deeply hurtful and that they are intolerable from a Christian point of view." This repentance particularly focuses on remarks he may have made about the homosexual and trans communities: "I have publicly apologized on multiple occasions and will continue to do so as necessary."

Although he was one of the first people in Poland to take an interest in the issue of pedophilia within the Catholic Church some 15 years ago, the year 2020 is when he began a veritable crusade on the subject. Charged by the Dominicans with leading a commission of inquiry into a large-scale scandal within this religious order, he was overwhelmed by the experience, which became the starting point of his evolution. "My relationship with the institution changed profoundly. Investigation after investigation, I became aware of the scale of the phenomenon, of the fact that it was not, as I had previously thought, a question of isolated individuals, but that the institution could in itself be the setting of a systemic evil."

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