POLAND
The President of the Republic of Poland signed in recent days the new law concerning the vetting of citizens registered by the security services of the Communist regime as collaborators or sources of information of the secret services. The archives of the secret police, now preserved by the National Institute of Memory (IPN), contains files involving some 400,000 citizens. In the period 1944-1990 some citizens willingly collaborated with the secret police, others did so unconsciously, others again refused any form of collaboration, but were nonetheless included among the “sources of information” of the secret police. “Vetting ought to be conducted in a civil way”, said the Right Rev. Kazimierz Nycz, Bishop of Koszalin-Kolobrzeg and chairman of the Commission for Catholic Education of the Polish Bishops’ Conference, explaining that the documentation preserved in the archives of the IPN was not prepared by impartial historians, but by “enemies of the freedom of individuals, institutions and organizations” and therefore often gives a “distorted image” of what actually took place. Monsignor Nycz also explained that the new law ought to contain guarantees for all citizens, who are too easily defamed or even summarily condemned today, especially by the media. The need to apply the Christian principle of respect for the person in vetting procedures was also underlined by the Archbishop of Lublin, Jozef Zycinski. The question is agitating public opinion given that what is at stake is not just public officials who have been unjustly accused, but also representatives of the Church, accused of collaborating with the regime on the basis of false evidence, such as Msgr. Witold Skworc, Archbishop of Tarnow. In the Memorandum of the Polish episcopate on the collaboration of some priests with the security services in Poland in the period 1944-1989, signed on 25 August this year, the diocesan bishops observe that today “the Church is often accused of wishing to protect those responsible of collaboration with the secret services and of forgetting the victims of such acts. It is too easily forgotten that during the Communist regime the Polish Church constantly opposed the coercion of society and represented the only oasis of freedom and truth.
