When Poland’s bishops attend their spring plenary assembly in Warsaw this week, they will face no shortage of controversial issues.
The March 12-14 meeting will address the increasingly bitter battle over the teaching of religion in public schools, the challenges facing Church media, changes to seminary formation, and the pastoral care of vocations.
Perhaps most contentious of all will be a discussion about plans to establish an independent national commission examining the Church’s handling of child sexual abuse.
The bishops announced the commission’s creation in March 2023, as the Church in Poland faced an onslaught of abuse claims. Two years on, the commission’s architects have produced a draft document setting out its guiding principles.
The document was recently scrutinized by the bishops’ legal advisory council. Polish media reported March 5 that the legal council had issued a negative verdict, prompting an outcry from abuse survivor advocates.
What’s the background to the dispute? What are people saying about the legal council’s verdict? And what’s likely to happen next? The Pillar takes a look.
What’s the background?
The idea of an independent commission first emerged at the bishops’ plenary assembly on March 13-14, 2023.
Archbishop Wojciech Polak, the delegate of the child protection office of the Polish bishops’ conference, said: “The bishops have decided to start work on appointing a team of independent experts to investigate the sexual abuse of minors by some clergy in the church in Poland.”
Polak, Poland’s Primate, said the bishops had unanimously agreed to take the step.
“Their task will be to diligently examine the documents both in the state archives and in the Church archives in order to show the content in its entirety, taking into account the law and the state of knowledge, as well as the sociocultural context,” he explained.
The announcement followed the airing of a controversial documentary accusing Pope John Paul II of covering up abuse when he was Archbishop of Kraków from 1964 to 1978.
At their next plenary assembly, on June 12-14, 2023, the bishops reportedly voted in favor of a motion to establish a commission addressing the period from 1945 to the creation of the new body.
Other European countries such as France, Germany, Portugal, and Spain have established similar bodies examining the Church’s handling of abuse cases in the post-war period. The resulting reports have generated global media coverage and considerable turbulence in the local Church.
After June 2023, the media spotlight swung away from the abuse commission initiative. But in May 2024, a group of clerical abuse survivors wrote an open letter to the Polish bishop’s conference’s permanent council calling for “a precise date for the launch of an independent commission investigating sexual abuse in the Church since 1945.”
The letter led to a groundbreaking meeting between the survivors’ group and bishops in November 2024, but no further news about the commission.
Then on Feb. 28 this year, the bishops’ conference’s secretary general Bishop Marek Marczak sent diocesan curias a copy of the legal council’s negative opinion on the commission’s draft operating principles.
On March 5, the Polish news website RMF24 published the council’s two-page verdict, which raised a welter of objections to the commission.
The council recalled that in March 2023, the Polish bishops adopted a resolution expressing their readiness to create “a Church panel to investigate the sexual abuse of minors by some clergy,” with a historical focus.
But the council questioned the legitimacy of the proceedings at the bishops’ meeting in June 2023. It said that Polak had proposed a commission examing the period from 1945 to the date of the investigative body’s creation. A vote was then taken by a show of hands, “without prior notice that the matter was to be voted on,” it said.
As the resolution was not written down, the council argued, “the nature of the decision taken is questionable.” It called for the bishops to hold a new vote.
The council also criticized the commission’s draft operating principles for proposing a body that would have “an investigative character and not a scientific-historical one,” for not excluding the possibility that bishops would be questioned about their actions, and for potentially usurping the Vatican’s right to judge senior churchmen.
It expressed alarm that material gathered by the commission might be used for civil lawsuits against Church bodies. It raised concerns that a mandate to cooperate with NGOs and other outside parties could lead to “participation in the commission’s work by persons who do not necessarily have the good and credibility of the Church in mind.” It also faulted the lack of a cost estimate for the commission’s work.
Finally, the council underlined its negative opinion on the draft operating principles and urged Poland’s bishops not to endorse the commission on the basis of the draft document.
How are people reacting?
Tomasz Terlikowski, a journalist known for his criticism of the Polish Church’s response to abuse, described the legal council’s verdict as “scandalous.”
“The bishops do not have to follow the position of the legal council, and the decision will be made at the March meeting of the Polish bishops’ conference,” he wrote at RMF24.
“The bishops’ conference can appoint the commission against the position of the legal council, and its credibility with the faithful will also depend on whether it does so.”
Archbishop Polak, the Polish bishops’ point man on abuse, also emphasized that the legal council’s opinion was not binding, rejecting the assertion that the committee would have the power to question bishops.
The Polish bishops’ spokesman, Fr. Leszek Gęsiak, S.J., insisted that the commission’s creation remained a priority for the bishops.
“It is well known that this is also a hugely important issue for those who have been abused,” he said. “However, it is a very complex issue ... so there is a great responsibility in implementing it.”
Not surprisingly, abuse survivor advocates expressed dismay at the council’s opinion.
Robert Fidura, an organizer of the landmark meeting between bishops and victims, lamented that the opinion emerged on the eve of the Polish Church’s annual day of prayer for abuse survivors.
“When 24 hours before the day of solidarity and prayer for victims of abuse we learn that the lawyers of the bishops’ conference question an initiative that would help the Church heal and transparently talk about Polish cases, I am simply thinking — where is the truth,” he told OSV News. “What do they really think of it? And is the day of prayer only good PR?”
Meanwhile, Zbigniew Nosowski, editor-in-chief of the Catholic journal Więź, suggested that the legal council’s opinion was “not only the initiative of its members or even its chairman,” Bishop Ryszard Kasyna.
“There are many indications that the council is acting on the advice of the episcopal leadership, which itself cannot openly speak out against the appointment of the commission, but is keen to hide behind canonical arguments or even pseudo-arguments (because the opinion of the legal council does not actually present any canonical objections),” Nosowski said, arguing that ultimate responsibility lay with bishops’ conference president Archbishop Tadeusz Wojda.
The Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny argued that the legal council’s opinion was “sloppy” because it criticized a section of the principles already removed from the latest draft.
“This lack of substance and sloppiness shows that neither the bishops of the legal council nor the bishops’ conference president behind them are at all concerned with a substantive discussion of the planned commission,” it claimed.
Lawyer Michał Królikowski, who helped to shape the commission’s operating principles, said the council’s objections were deeper than a simple dissatisfaction with the draft document.
“The dispute concerns the very idea of a team of experts who would remain independent and who would conduct comprehensive research on the phenomenon of sexual abuse of minors in various dimensions of the life of the Catholic Church, as well as ways of responding to it from the institutional side,” he wrote at Więź.
He said that if the commission were to be truly independent, the bishops would have no right to intervene in its work or influence staff appointments beyond the nomination of a lay chairman.
“For these reasons, the trust that the bishops and religious superiors would have to place in the ‘unknown’ would have to be crucial, and then they would have to trust themselves as to the choice of the person to head or chair this commission,” he wrote.
“It would be this person who would have to oversee its composition, organize its work, define, together with the team, the methodology to be followed, ensure the reliability, credibility of the work and its results.”
