The Legal Position of the Parish Records

Abstract

The problem of neglected parish and monastic records has raised the interest and concern of the Centre for Church Archives, Libraries and Museums at the Catholic University of Lublin. The present paper contains a discussion of the legal position of parish records in the light of canon law and the Polish State law. From the point of view of canon law it is worth postulating that regulations and a statute of the parish records should be compiled in every diocese. Sometimes the people managing parishes do not fully appreciate the significance of parish records, which does not follow from ill will but from lack of experience and adequate knowledge. Such a statute or such regulations would be a sound basis for defining the range and form of inspection − be it a bishop's or a dean's one − of parish records. Moreover, Church diocesan archives, and even parish ones, already use computer programmes adjusted to Church archives; they also have a lot of experience and their own systems of collecting, describing and rendering the acts accessible to the public. On the other hand it is also worth suggesting that Church archivists should be acquainted with the possibilities to apply some regulations in the Polish law concerning the technique of collecting, transferring, describing, conservation and rendering the acts accessible to the public in state archives. The Church has experience in this matter that is many centuries old and it should not be given up, but state archives are usually run by experts and co-operation with them may be useful for the good of Polish culture.