POLAND
KEP: countering the enemies of the faith”The new Europe is ill, but it’s our Europe, and we must all have its good health at heart”, said Archbishop Jozef Michalik, President of the Polish Bishops’ Conference (KEP) on 18 June, during his homily in the eucharistic celebration at the end of the KEP’s 344th plenary session. “Today the post-conciliar Church has a need of serenity and not of clamour; she must increase her efforts to proclaim the gospel to the world, and to counter, with clear and unambiguous doctrine, the enemies of the faith and of tradition, of whom there is no shortage”. In short, the Church “ought not to pretend that all is going well and that the problems arising from the secularisation now underway can be solved by diluting principles”, said the Archbishop. Michalik’s remarks were directed in particular against those who “have a quite precise purpose: destroying morality, poisoning consciences, stifling the truth with lies, relativizing all that is good and noble, and propagating moral anarchy”, with the ultimate goal of leading man to lose his “yearning for truth and goodness”. On the occasion of the Pope’s proclamation of the Pauline Year, Mgr. Michalik, in his press conference at the end of the plenary, announced a series of ecclesial initiatives with an essentially formative character based on the Letters of St. Paul. During its plenary, the KEP especially debated the issues of bioethics and the admissibility of new biotechnologies. The Polish bishops “expressed a critical opinion on those ideas that express the precedence of modern technologies over ethics”. Placing the emphasis on “the inviolable dignity of the human person and the sanctity of family life”, the bishops underlined “the need to oppose, by quickening people’s consciences, any attitude that is exploitative towards the person”. In announcing the setting up of a special work group for bioethics, the episcopate expressed gratitude for those who “with a sense of Christian responsibility, united in the safeguard of maternal dignity and in their solicitude for the inviolability of the human person, have defended life in the dramatic case of the pregnant 14-year-old schoolgirl”. “The worst fanaticism is that which exploits the dignity of the person and makes the right to life conditional on the opinion of those circles that claim a monopoly of modernity and progress”, declared Archbishop Jozef Zycinski of Lublin on 16 June, intervening in the debate on the case of the pregnant schoolgirl who has recently been at the centre of a clash between pro-abortion and pro-life activists. Perhaps also in consideration of the attitude of the media, not always exempt from sensationalism, in their reporting on the girl’s plight, the bishops, in their final communiqué, recalled the words of Benedict XVI on the means of communication which “at times see commercial competitiveness force communicators to lower their standards” and emphasized the need for “actions in which the dignity of the human person and the well-being of culture are more important that financial profits and political gains”.The Polish bishops also encouraged the young to participate in the forthcoming meetings with the Pope in Sydney. Archbishop Michalik, recalling that the young are the future of the Church, informed the press that in spite of the economic problems over 2,000 Polish youngsters will participate in WYD in Sydney from 15 to 20 July.Accusations of collaboration against Lech Walesa”I’m linked to the city of Gdansk for almost fifty years. I remember very well what happened there in December 1970, and also later. As a person who fought against the Communist system, Walesa achieved a great deal. And not only for Poland”, recently declared the Most Rev. Tadeusz Goclowski , archbishop emeritus of Gdansk, replying to a question about Lech Walesa. A recently published book written by two scholars of the National Institute of Memory (IPN), Slawomir Cenckiewicz and Piotr Gontarczyk, is now prominently displayed in Polish bookshops. In this book they describe what they claim as Walesa’s collaboration with the security services (SB) of Communist Poland. The founder of Solidarnosc, former President of Poland and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, according to the authors, began his collaboration with the SB in 1970, but after becoming Head of State (1990) allegedly took steps to destroy any incriminating documents that involved him. “The book does not deserve to be considered as a serious monograph. It is merely an attempt to diminish Walesa’s role”, says Dominican Father Maciej Zieba , director of the European Centre of Solidarnosc in Gdansk. In his view the material collected by the two scholars was chosen “solely to draw up an act of indignment against Walesa”. Father Zieba dismisses as an absurdity the thesis that his contacts with officers of the secret services in the 1970s could have made the Polish President open to blackmail.
