The Church’s response to the scandalous accusations against the priest: we learned about pornography from the media

As Bishop Arūnas Poniškaitis said, he was only aware of the priest’s property dispute, in which he appears as the victim, but he did not know about possession of child pornography and accusations of having sex with a minor, which he read this morning in the publication of Delfi journalist Dainius Sinkevičius.

“That news broke this morning about all the other stuff. Therefore, priest Kęstutis Palikša resigns from all duties. While the investigation is ongoing, his withdrawal is satisfied, accepted. What does an investigation mean? Today we learned that the investigation was carried out by law enforcement authorities and certain decisions were made, we are starting the canonical process today. We are appealing to law enforcement authorities to provide us with any information they can provide so that we know what really happened, what the decisions were, what the charges were, what was confirmed, what was not confirmed. Then we will have to do an investigation on this matter,” said the bishop.

According to A. Poniskaitis, the accusations against the priest are very serious, so the clergy community is shocked.

“We have a proven procedure, a process, when these kinds of accusations are received, concrete steps are taken. One of them is informing the public about the received accusations. I go back to the fact that we learned about those accusations from the media, we just accept the situation as it is,” he said.

He mentioned that today he communicated with priest K. Palikša only through messages.

“I wanted to speak live, but priest Kęstutis Palikša said that he was very upset about this situation, he expressed that the accusations made were wrong, that he did not want to communicate live. In the message, I offered help if he needed some kind of support so that he would not be alone with this situation and asked him to contact him if he needed psychological or spiritual help,” said the bishop.

During the press conference, the journalist pointed out that K. Palikša lived with other priests and asked why they did not report the search conducted by the law enforcement.

“I repeat, what I said, we knew that there was a certain kind of property dispute, when money was fraudulently taken and law enforcement authorities are interested in something, look at the computer,” he answered. – But there was no mention of a search, pornography or something like that. Information about this arrived this morning.”