In 2010, a court found Father Pawel guilty of possessing child pornography. Two years later, the priest was found in a hotel room with a boy and arrested. In 2015, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for rape and child molestation. Earlier this year, the church finally expelled him from the priesthood.

The film quotes a letter from an altar boy in the Bydgoszcz parish where Father Pawel worked. The priest would take him on weekend trips, where he would rape him. “He would threaten me. ‘Don’t tell anyone, or I’ll tell your parents everything,’ ” the boy writes. “If you don’t come with me, I’ll take your brother.’” The author of the letter agreed to go on a trip to the Canary Islands to protect his younger brother from the pedophile priest. “I defended myself, I tried to push him away, but he was stronger.” He said that Father Pawel “laughed at my resistance. He laughed at my helplessness.”

The influence of the Catholic Church in Poland is immense — almost 40 percent of the population attends Mass weekly. And it is politically connected, particularly on the right: The church enjoys significant financial privileges from the state, while the ruling Law and Justice party benefits from the support of Catholic media outlets and church sermons. The strength of the church is the strength of Law and Justice, and a crisis in the church is a crisis for Law and Justice.

Law and Justice is also implicated in the abuse cover-ups. One of the party’s best-known figures, Stanislaw Piotrowicz, made his name in 2001, when as a prosecutor in the town of Krosno he dismissed a case against a priest accused of raping six girls. Mr. Piotrowicz argued, “The priest confirmed that he took children into his lap, children would run up to him during catechism, they would hug him, he, too, would hug them, caress them, he sometimes kissed them. The children were happy, they were content. There was no sexual subtext.” After the case was transferred to a different jurisdiction, the priest was convicted.

Mr. Piotrowicz, meanwhile, received a medal from Archbishop Jozef Michalik, who expressed compassion for the convicted priest and accused the media of trampling the truth and displaying hostility toward the church. He encouraged the faithful to maintain their trust in the clergyman. As he said of the victims, “A child clings to you, it searches and loses itself and draws the other person in.”