The Constitutional Court has granted the request of the First President of the Supreme Court and issued a preliminary ruling, suspending the application of the regulation of the Ministry of National Education on the conditions for organizing religious education classes, the President of the Constitutional Court, Julia Przyłębska, said. The Constitutional Court will issue a ruling soon, she announced.
The First President of the Supreme Court, Małgorzata Manowska, appealed to the Constitutional Court against the July regulation of the Ministry of National Education concerning the conditions for organizing religious education classes. She accused the regulation of, among other things, violating the principle of “a consensual way of regulating relations between the State and the Churches” and preventing “the teaching of religion in the form specified in the curriculum of this subject” in connection with the creation of the basis for the organization of religious education at inter-school or inter-class groups. The application addressed to the Constitutional Court was accompanied by a request for suspension of the application of the contested provisions.
On Thursday, the President of the Constitutional Court, Julia Przyłębska, in an interview with wPolsce.pl, said that “the Court agreed with the request of the First President of the Supreme Court and issued a protective order.” It ensured this by suspending the application of this legal act, that is, the regulation, until the Constitutional Court issues a decision. – she explained.
Przyłębska also announced that In the near future, the Constitutional Court will pronounce itself on the regulation of the Ministry of National Education.
In an interview with PAP, Education Minister Barbara Nowacka said that the concordat obliges the Polish state to organize religion classes, but The way these classes are organized depends on the decision of the Minister of Education. When asked how she interpreted the decision to appeal the Ministry of National Education’s regulation to the Constitutional Court, she replied: “I read it as a fight they want to cause.”
President Manowska’s motion regarding the regulation of July 26 amending the rules for the conditions and methods of organizing religious education in kindergartens and public schools was issued in response to recent petitions from the Episcopal Presidium and the Polish Ecumenical Council. According to the authors of these petitions, among others: when issuing the regulation by the Minister of Education, he limited himself to giving representatives of churches and other interested associations the opportunity to express their opinions, while art. 12. section 2 of the Education System Act requires the competent minister to act “in consultation with the authorities of the Catholic Church and the Polish Autocephalous Orthodox Church and other churches and religious associations” when issuing a regulation specifying the conditions and method of organizing religious education.
“The teaching of the Catholic religion must be carried out in accordance with the program developed by the ecclesiastical authorities. It is important that the programs developed in this modality provide separate content for each level of education, that is, for each class. Teaching in interclass groups will, by its very nature, be provided in a manner different from that planned in the programs developed by authorized ecclesiastical authorities. This constitutes a violation of art. 12, section 2 of the Concordat between the Holy See and the Republic of Poland,” episcopal spokesman Father Leszek Gęsiak said last week.
As President Manowska noted in the justification for the request to the Constitutional Court published on the Supreme Court’s website, “there is no doubt that the new conditions and form of organisation of religious education in kindergartens and state schools were determined by the Minister responsible for education and upbringing unilaterally, without reaching a consensus with religious associations. “The consequence of the changes introduced by the contested provisions could be a situation where religious education is taught in classes reconstituted every year, with students unknown to other classes and departments, and in conditions of insufficient ordering of the content taught,” this was noted in the justification.
Therefore – according to President Manowska – “statistically, this will result in an increase in the number of dropouts in the receipt of religious education and a decrease in the number of groups within which religion is taught.” “This will have a negative impact on the implementation of the obligation to ensure a pluralistic transfer of information and knowledge, especially in the context of the decision to replace family life education (…) with compulsory health education, including curricular content in the field of sex education, provoking significant social protests from organizations representing the interests of parents,” wrote the First President of the Supreme Court.
“It must be acknowledged that the provisions of the regulation do not sufficiently respect the constitutionally guaranteed right of parents to determine the direction of their children’s education and moral and religious teaching. It is impossible to prepare curricula and textbooks suitable for this type of educational experience, which was previously unknown in the Polish education system,” Manowska stressed.
He further stressed that the application of the regulation “will lead to an unexpected reduction in the demand for work for religion teachers in educational institutions, given the vacatio legis of only one month, which – due to the lack of opportunity to provide teachers with the opportunity to acquire qualifications to teach other subjects – represents for them a real threat of sudden job loss.”
At the same time, the First President of the Supreme Court appealed to the Constitutional Court for safety, suspending the application of this regulation due to the fact that the contested regulation comes into force on 1 September.
Currently, according to the regulations, kindergartens and schools organize religious lessons in a kindergarten section or a classroom section if at least seven pupils from a given kindergarten section or pupils from a given school section enroll in religious education. If a smaller number of children enroll in religious education, the kindergarten and school organize learning for them in an inter-school group or an inter-class group.
The change by the Ministry of National Education expands the possibilities of organizing the teaching of religion and ethics in interclass and interclass classes, also composed of students who have not been combined in these classes with students from other departments or classes until now. According to this the school principal (kindergarten) may group children from departments or classes in which seven or more students are enrolled in religious education.
At the same time, it was stipulated that in primary schools, students in grades I-III or IV-VI or VII and VIII may be grouped together in a single group.
The maximum number of people who can participate in the classes has also been specified.: in grades I-III of primary schools it is 25, for other students in all types of schools – 28. The same applies to ethics classes.
