A Polish bishop has defended a leading educationist dismissed for describing gay rights campaigners as "travelling rapists", and accused LGBT groups of waging a terror campaign in the traditionally Catholic country.

"How painful and sad it is that political correctness has contrived to become more important than normality", said Bishop Wieslaw Mering of Wloclawek. "The madness of LGBT ideology has become a form of intellectual terror, directed against everyone who exercises a healthy judgement".

The 73-year-old bishop was reacting to the decision by the state-owned Copernicus University in Torun to suspend Professor Aleksander Nalaskowski, former dean of its Pedagogical Studies Centre, from his teaching post for a magazine article branding gay and lesbian demonstrators an "obscene rainbow plague", and characterising pro-LGBT marchers as "gross, fat tattooed grannies behaving as if in a porn movie".

Interviewed on Sunday by Polish TV, Professor Nalaskowski blamed his dismissal on a "nightmare understanding" and said he had merely told the "truth the truth loudly", adding that he believed the aim of Poland's LGBT movement was "to destroy the Church" and "oust Christianity from national life".

However, the spokesman for Poland's Democratic Left Alliance, Anna Maria Zukowska, told Polish Radio Torun University had acted correctly in suspending him, and said the country's current law against hate speech should be extended to cover incitement on grounds of "sexual identity and orientation".

In his open letter, Bishop Mering said he was unable to understand the university's decision, and had read Professor Nalaskowski's commentaries in the Siec (Network) weekly with "the greatest attention and support".

"I completely agree with them, and I'm glad they present a discerning, deeply Christian view of reality, free of any opportunism", the bishop told the suspended educationist. "I wish to assure you of my admiration. You have become another symbol of faithfulness to truth, and to those values which, at least in theory, should be served by any university".

Ties between the Polish Church and LGBT campaigners are currently tense after a series of nationwide gay rights rallies, some of which included parodies of Christian symbols, were denounced by the country's bishops.