(POLAND)
Polskie Radio [Warsaw, Poland]
March 12, 2026
By PAP
Poland’s Catholic bishops on Wednesday established an independent commission to examine the sexual abuse of minors in the Catholic Church in Poland and granted it public legal personality, the Polish Bishops’ Conference said.
The decision was taken on the second day of the bishops’ 404th plenary meeting, after they adopted the commission’s operating principles and statute, spokesperson Leszek Gesiak said.
“After adopting these documents, the Polish Bishops’ Conference established the commission of independent experts to examine the phenomenon of sexual abuse of minors in the Catholic Church in Poland and granted it public legal personality,” Gesiak said.
He added that the bishops also approved an agreement on the commission’s creation between the bishops’ conference and the conferences of male and female religious superiors in Poland.
Gesiak said the texts of the documents would be made public and discussed at a news conference on Thursday.
The bishops first decided in March 2023 to begin work on creating an independent expert commission to study the sexual abuse of minors by some clergy in Poland. A team led by Poland’s primate, Archbishop Wojciech Polak, drafted the initial documents.
At a plenary meeting in June last year, bishops decided that Polak’s team would finish its work on the project and replaced it with a new team led by Bishop Sławomir Oder, who said its task was to refine the legal and technical framework.
The project later drew criticism. Former St. Joseph Foundation board member Father Grzegorz Strzelczyk and a group of anonymous experts wrote in an open letter in December that Oder’s draft weakened the commission’s independence and gave bishops the ability to interfere in its work.
Father Piotr Studnicki, who had worked on Polak’s earlier team, also warned that provisions allowing bishops to interfere in research and limiting the commission’s ability to demand information from church superiors could undermine its effectiveness.
He said in December he feared “the bishops will decide to establish it, but will not give it real tools to work.”
“If that happens, appointing it will make no sense,” he said.
Several dioceses have already created similar bodies of their own, Polish state news agency PAP reported.