Profile : A Shoulder to Cry On : In Poland, an ombudsman takes pity on citizens buffeted by the winds of change.

Tadeusz Zielinski is a man of the people--35,236 of them in 1992, to be exact.

Zielinski is Poland’s government ombudsman, and that’s the number of letters the Krakow-born lawyer received last year from those seeking help and direction as the country makes the wrenching transition from communism to free-market democracy.

As problems grow and Zielinski’s office becomes better known, the mailbag grows.

Letters now are arriving at a rate of 300 a day. They ask and sometimes demand action on a bewildering variety of subjects ranging from well-organized class-action challenges to divorce settlements.

Zielinski recently has been swept into the heated political debate on the role of religion in newly democratic Poland, a country that, despite 40 years of communism, remains as staunchly Roman Catholic as Ireland or Italy.

The outcome of that struggle will do much to define the division between church and state in the fledgling democracy.

“I have to be a professional, not a politician, but this office has become a center of public life,” Zielinski said. “It plays an important role.”

Zielinski is officially known as the commissioner for civil rights protection. His main role is that of a watchdog, ensuring that Poland’s tentative new democracy abides by its laws, that injustices are corrected and ambiguities clarified.

Now in it’s sixth year of operation, the ombudsman’s office was created during the twilight of Communist rule in an attempt to generate badly needed legitimacy. But it was starved of staff, facilities and funds, and its impact was minimal until the arrival of democratic rule.

Today, ensconced in the former offices of the Warsaw city Communist Party, backed by adequate funds and a staff of up to 30 people, Zielinski has become a full-fledged player in the political process.

Seated next to neat stacks of letters on his desk awaiting attention, Zielinski exudes energy.

He leans forward, punctuating his rapid-fire comments with gestures, then tapping his glasses nervously on a coffee table, waiting for the next question to end.

While Zielinski cannot make legal judgments, he can demand explanations from government ministers and other officials.

He also takes suspected wrongs before either the Constitutional Tribunal, which reviews alleged civil rights and constitutional violations, or the Supreme Court, in cases of alleged errors in criminal or civil cases.

“My job is to guarantee the basic rights of individuals,” he said. “It is often not easy.”

While there are government ombudsmen in some countries of Western Europe, such as Portugal, Spain and France, Zielinski is the only such officer in the formerly Communist parts of Europe. His role thus is partly to educate, informing citizens of new rights or letting them know that Communist-era services they thought were rights--such as access to cheap housing and day-care centers for working mothers--are not rights at all.

“People complain, but I can’t do anything for them,” he said. “It’s part of the shift to a market economy.”

In modern Poland, it’s not just the average citizen who is confused by the rapid changes. In a country whose political leadership had been largely unaccountable to the electorate for most of the last half-century, public servants too must learn new rules.

Zielinski’s predecessor, Ewa Letowska, recalled how a senior government official once telephoned a judge and simply demanded a certain verdict.

“The very existence of this office . . . is a kind of warning to people in authority that they can be slapped down if they act outside the law,” Zielinski said.

Many Poles see the ombudsman as a potential solver of all their problems. As a result, about 70% of the mail--the letters pleading for money or for help in finding affordable housing or resolving such personal problems as divorce disputes--falls outside the ombudsman’s purview.

One woman even contended that the annual switch to daylight-saving time violated her civil rights and, therefore, that the ombudsman should act on her behalf to stop it.

Many of the more serious cases, however, have resulted in landmark decisions.

Cases taken up by the ombudsman, for example, have led to court rejection of the idea of collective guilt (a policeman had been denied his pension because he was part of the Communist apparatus) as well as of ex post facto justice (conviction for an act that was made illegal only after the act was committed).

Poland’s ombudsman has also ventured onto tricky moral ground.

In a celebrated case brought by the ombudsman last year, the Constitutional Tribunal ruled that the country’s national medical authority could not discipline doctors who performed abortions in violation of the authority’s 1991 ban on the procedure.

Abortion was legal at the time, and the tribunal’s ruling freed physicians from the dilemma of choosing between a legal operation and the power of the professional organization that issued their permits to practice.

“Law must be in accordance with moral values, but (someone’s interpretation of) morality cannot be above the law,” said Zielinski.

As the church begins to pressure other professional groups in its struggle for influence, this precedent could be important.

More recently, Zielinski has been embroiled in another church-state debate with a distinctly American echo: the role of religious teaching in public schools.

His position that eight instructions by the Ministry of Education for mandatory religious teaching constituted a breach of civil rights brought strong criticism from the pulpit and a split decision earlier this month from the Constitutional Tribunal, which upheld his view in only three instances.

“In three instances, the ministry has been forced to issue new rules, so in spite of it all, I accomplished something,” said Zielinski.

With civil rights advocates increasingly worried about the church’s attempt to influence state matters, and with Poland’s Cardinal Jozef Glemp pushing to formalize a so-called “system of Christian values,” Zielinski is bracing for more criticism from the clergy.

“These issues will be coming across my desk with greater frequency,” he predicted. “And in conflicts between religious laws and the constitution, I am bound to uphold the constitution.”

Biography

* Name: Tadeusz Zielinski

* Title: Commissioner for Civil Rights Protection (Ombudsman)

* Age: 66

* Personal: Born in southern city of Cracow, studied law at Jagiellonian University (Cracow), graduated 1947; during the Communist era specialized in labor, criminal law, first practicing, then teaching at Jagiellonian and Silesian University (Katowice). From 1980-89, legal advisor to Solidarity, co-founder of Citizens Advisory Committee to former Solidarity leader and Poland’s current president, Lech Walesa, active in human rights struggle during 1980s, member of Helsinki Committee in Poland, participant in 1989 “Round Table” talks that led to formation of country’s first non-communist government since World War II, member of the Senate, the upper house of the Polish parliament 1989-91, chairman, Labor Legislation Reform Commission since 1990, assumed office as Poland’s second ombudsman on Feb. 13, 1992. Married (to a retired judge), two children, two grandchildren.

* Quote: “I have to be a professional, not a politician, but this office is the center of public life”.