WARSAW, Poland (AP) Activists in Poland pulled down a statue of a priest early Thursday after increasing allegations that he sexually abused minors, a stunt they said was to protest the failure of the Polish Catholic Church to resolve the problem of clergy sex abuse.

The protest comes as Pope Francis gathered church leaders from around the world at the Vatican to grapple with the churchs sex abuse crisis.

Video footage showed three men attaching a rope around the statue of the late Monsignor Henryk Jankowski in the northern city of Gdansk and then pulling it down to the ground under the cover of darkness. The activists then placed childrens underwear in one of the statues hands and a small white laced church vestment worn by altar boys on the statues body to symbolize the suffering of children molested by the prelate.

It was a striking act in a country where more than 90 percent of the population identifies as Roman Catholic and where the church still enjoys significant authority in public life. That position appears to be changing as secularization grows hand-in-hand with a flourishing economy.