Pope John Paul II allegedly covered up child abuse in the Polish Catholic church and sent away offending priests to other jurisdictions to avoid a scandal, according to an investigation.

The former Pope, who was born Karol Wojtyla, knew of paedophile priests while he was a cardinal in the Polish church in Krakow, a report by broadcaster TVN claims.

Wojtyla sent paedophile priests away to other dioceses to distance them from their crimes, including one as far away as Austria.

Wojtyla, who was pontiff for 27 years from 1978 until he died in 2005, also gave a letter of recommendation for a priest accused of abusing children to Viennese cardinal Franz Koenig.

The former cardinal demanded that his actions remained hidden, according to TVN.

But the investigation, led by Michal Gutowski, got hold of documents from the former Communist country's secret police, as well as the church.

Bosses at the Krakow diocese itself refused to give Gutowski access to their archives.

A source said that he had first come to Wojtyla with allegations of abuse in 1973, but that the cardinal had asked him to not to tell anyone else.

"Wojtyla first wanted to make sure it wasn't a bluff," the whistleblower said. "He asked it not be reported anywhere - he said he would deal with it."

Former Catholic priest Thomas Doyle, who wrote one of the first reports of Catholic clergy abuse in the United States, said that the TVN report was a landmark investigation, because it shows that John Paul II allegedly knew about the paedophile priest problem even before he was in the Vatican.

Gutowski's investigation comes amid similar accusations from a Dutch journalist of several instances of alleged child abuse by priests in Poland.

John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope since the 16th century, was hugely popular as leader of the Catholic church during his tenure, and was made a saint when he died in 2005.

He is credited with helping to bring down the Soviet Union and its eastern bloc satellite regimes during the 1980s, and survived several assassination attempts.

he pope apologised for wrongdoing against women and the inactivity of much of the Catholic hierarchy during the Second World War.

But he was also criticised for failing to tackle the problem of child sexual abuse across the Church, saying simply that "there is no place in the priesthood and religious life for those who would harm the young".