The release of the data, which church officials said was only a prelude to a closer examination of the issue, came weeks after a landmark Vatican meeting on sexual abuse at which Pope Francis called “for an all-out battle against the abuse of minors” and said that the church needed to protect children “from ravenous wolves.”

The church in Poland is one of the most powerful in the world, with about 87 percent of the country’s 38 million people saying they are Catholic.

But the church’s record on tackling abuse is patchy at best. In 2012, Archbishop Jozef Michalik, a former president of the Episcopal Conference, blamed divorced parents and feminists — as well as children he said had lured priests — for abuse by clergy.

Other senior religious figures have deflected the subject of abuse, conflating it with homosexuality despite research finding no connection between being gay and abusing children.

After pressure from Pope Francis, Poland’s church has changed its tone in recent years, with top figures publicly apologizing to abuse victims. The church now underlines the need to report those accused of hurting children or committing other crimes.

Before the Vatican meeting, Archbishop Gadecki met with those who had suffered abuse as children.

The publication of the statistics is the first time the church has presented any data about the scale of the problem in Poland. For decades, clergy who were told about the sexual abuse of minors were not required by their superiors to report the information to the police. Instead, they were supposed to investigate the allegations and, if proven credible, inform the Vatican.