Poland's Constitution Unlikely To End Squabble Over Church And State.

Poland's voters have adopted a new constitution by a narrow margin, but the charter is unlikely to end the country's long-simmering debate over church-state relations.

Results from the May 25 vote show 52.7 percent backing the new constitution and 45.8 opposing it. (The remaining votes were invalid.) Nationwide, turnout was light -- about 43 percent.

Since the fall of communism in 1989, Poland has been struggling toward democracy. One especially contentious issue has been the role of the Roman Catholic Church in society. Poland is overwhelmingly Catholic, but many Poles seem wary of giving the church an official role in public life.

Church officials had insisted that the constitution contain explicit references to God and that it ban abortion. In addition, Marian Krzaklewski, chief of the powerful Solidarity labor union, demanded that the constitution elevate Christian principles over human laws.

But the government, headed by President Aleksander Kwasniewski, an ex-communist, opposed those moves. As a result, church officials and leaders of the Solidarity movement urged a no vote.

In an attempt at compromise, the charter's preamble opens with the rambling words, "We, the Polish nation, all citizens of the Republic, equally those believing in God as the source of truth, justice, goodness and beauty, and those not sharing that faith and drawing these universal truths from other sources, equal in their rights and duties toward Poland...."

Poland's non-Catholic religious groups welcomed the new charter. Henryk Paprocki told Ecumenical News International, "The constitution ensures equality for all confessions under the law and gives minority churches the same tights as the [Catholic] majority."

Just days after the constitution was ratified, however, Poland's highest court complicated matters by striking down the country's permissive abortion law. By a 9-3 ruling the Constitutional Tribunal, reflecting Catholic teaching on abortion, declared, "The highest value in a democracy is human life, which must be protected from its start to the end."

The court struck down provisions in the five-month-old law permitting abortions before the twelfth week for "difficult personal reasons." Abortions will still be permitted in cases of rape, incest or grossly deformed fetuses. Parliament has six months to consider the ruling and could set it aside by a two-thirds vote, but abortion rights supporters do not believe they have enough votes.

Touring Poland in early June, Pope John Paul II condemned abortion and urged that the law remain struck down. "A civilization which rejects the defenseless would deserve to be called a barbarian civilization even if it had great successes in the fields of economics, technology, art and sciences," said the pope.

Church leaders in Poland, meanwhile, are starting to play hardball over the issue. In May clerics in the Diocese of Lodz denied funeral rites to a well-known medical professor, Dr. Waclav Dec, because he had supported legalized abortion.

According to The New York Times, former prime minister and lay Catholic Tadeusz Mazowiecki has warned that the militant "fundamentalist" wing of the Catholic hierarchy is turning believers away from the church and undercutting its moral authority.