“The defence of human life ought to be given maximum guarantees in the Polish Constitution”, declared the President of the Polish Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop Jozef Michalik at the end of the 339th plenary session held in recent days. In the communiqué published at the end of the plenary, the bishops “express their gratitude to all those who with great coherence pray for and make efforts to secure an effective defence at the legal level of human life from conception to natural death. The episcopate unequivocally supports all actions aimed at introducing constitutional guarantees for such defence. The dignity and inviolability of human life from conception to natural death flow from the natural laws that have always been recognized by the teaching of the Church, as repeatedly pointed out by the Servant of God John Paul II”. The parliamentary debate on the constitutional amendment, aimed at introducing into the Polish Constitution the principle of the defence of life “from conception to the natural death”, is due to begin at the end of March. Also during its plenary session, the Polish episcopate decided to set up a group of four experts to flank the historical Commission whose task it is to analyse the documentation on members of the clergy compiled by the former Communist secret services and now in the archives of the National Institute of Memory (IPN). As explained by Msgr. Slawoj Leszek Glodz, chairman of the historical Commission, the experts would have the task of conducting “a legal and ethical evaluation of the documentation of the IPN”, analysing its “validity as proof” and checking it against the contents of documents in ecclesiastical archives.
