Longtime head of Polish Catholic news agency resigns, as bishops seek tighter control

(OSV News) -- The veteran head of one of Europe's largest Catholic news agencies has resigned in protest over proposed church media reforms, accusing his country's bishops of acting illegally and reviving "solutions known from totalitarian times."

"These reforms are superficial and unnecessary," said Marcin Przeciszewski, president of Poland's Catholic Information Agency, KAI.

"We've tried to provide honest, responsible coverage of various issues, rather than just putting out propaganda. But most bishops seem to believe KAI should just be offering PR apologetics," he said.

The lay Catholic spoke with OSV News after confirming his resignation in a June 26 statement, accusing Poland's bishops of "effectively liquidating" his agency by removing "any possibility for journalistic autonomy."

His resignation followed a major shakeup drawn up by the Polish bishops' spokesman, Jesuit Father Leszek Gesiak, directing that KAI will be incorporated into a new "Bishops' Conference Media Group," coordinated by 60-year-old Father Gesiak, who was reappointed for a second five-year term June 6.

The new media project, approved in March but still unpublished, was discussed again at the bishops' June 10-12 plenary in Katowice, with a final decision postponed pending legal advice.
Przeciszewski said KAI staffers had sought their own legal guidance about the reforms and had received "supportive messages" from many fellow journalists.

"Everything KAI published fully accorded with church teaching, and I think we well understood our editorial tasks," Przeciszewski told OSV News.

"However, most of today's bishops seem to confuse our role with that of a press office, completely failing to grasp that Catholic media must have a degree of independence to fulfil their role," he added.

Created by the Polish bishops' conference in 1993 as the first Catholic news agency in post-communist Eastern Europe, KAI has been headed for 32 years by Przeciszewski, with Tomasz Krolak as vice president. It has a program council of five bishops, currently headed by Archbishop Adrian Galbas of Warsaw.

The agency cooperates with other Catholic agencies, such as the Austrian Kathpress and German KNA, and has worked alongside a separate online service, Opoka.pl, founded by Poland's bishops in 1998, achieving prominence as a key source for church news in Poland and abroad.

In a June 27 interview with the Polish Press Agency, PAP, Father Gesiak said his proposed reform had followed lengthy talks between Poland's bishops on "the functional principles" of Catholic media.

He added that KAI, Opoka and his own press office had all been created by the bishops' conference, and he said there had been "no doubt" among church leaders that they required "restructuring" -- "mostly for financial reasons" -- adding it was indispensable to ensure KAI's output was made "consistent with the bishops' message."

Over the years of KAI's independent reporting, it was hard for the bishops "to reconcile" the fact that Przeciszewski and the agency had "directly criticized" some recent decisions, Father Gesiak told PAP.

"For some time now, we've observed certain financial problems with KAI and the Opoka news portal, while KAI communiques have also appeared which are not entirely consistent with the institutional message of the Catholic Church in Poland," the Jesuit spokesman said.

"The aim is to optimize the expenses of the three entities ... and minimize the disinformation that may appear," he said.

However, Przeciszewski rejected the claims. He said his agency had been created in 1993 by the late Archbishop Józef Zycinski of Lublin, with support from Cardinals Józef Glemp and Franciszek Macharski, on the basis of best Catholic media practices abroad, to supplement official bishops' conference communications with "attractive information responding to media needs."

He added that KAI's autonomy had benefited the church by enabling the agency to "present the Catholic viewpoint in public debates" without involving the bishops' authority.

Father Gesiak's reform would destroy KAI's media credibility, Przeciszewski warned, by ensuring all decisions are "issued in a mandatory manner, for immediate implementation."

"Apart from being against the law -- since media groups or consortiums must respect the autonomy of the boards of member-companies -- this solution means a return to solutions known from totalitarian times," the KAI chairman said.

"This will be unfavorable to the church in Poland, especially given the enormous media challenges it faces in these difficult times."

Although sometimes criticized for being subservient to official church positions, KAI played a role in exposing sexual abuse cover-ups by Polish bishops, and bitterly criticized an early June decision to dismiss Poland's Catholic primate, Archbishop Wojciech Polak, from his role as a leader of the team of experts preparing the ground for a much-needed independent commission that would investigate cases of abuse of minors by clergy from the past in the country.

Other KAI dispatches known to have offended Polish bishops include an April 28 interview with Catholic theologian Monika Bialkowska, who told the agency the church did not "need a clerical caste that uses its own language and does not want to talk to people."

In his OSV News interview, Przeciszewski said KAI's first generation of journalists had received training at Catholic News Service in the United States, adding that he still hoped for an "understanding" which enabled the agency to "continue functioning normally."

"Our staffers want to be honest journalists rather than PR officials, but this seems to be becoming more difficult," said the KAI president, who holds a papal knighthood of St. Gregory the Great for his services to the church.

"Catholic media shouldn't just inform -- they should also deal with problems in the church's public life. Unfortunately, some seem to have forgotten this," he said.

Another veteran Catholic journalist said KAI had provided a "vital and valuable source" of news at a critically important time for the Polish church, when the country's post-communist secular media were often ill informed about it.

She added that no firm action had been taken against other Catholic media in Poland that have routinely criticized the church hierarchy, adding that the bishops would face difficulty if they sought to control church news coverage at a time of intense media pluralism.

"Although KAI has been managed by laypeople, it's required (to get) the church hierarchy's approval -- even when reporting criticism, it's done this within a clear framework reflecting the church's position," Malgorzata Glabisz-Pniewska, a senior Polish Radio presenter, told OSV News.

"Its approach has also been nuanced, so one can understand that some bishops have had doubts about its reporting record. But if it now switches to relaying only positive news, I don't think this will interest anyone."