FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
WARSAW – Even today, like every Sunday. This time it will be in the church in Otwock, about twenty kilometers from the capital. Because big cities are better left alone. It’s the suburbs and rural villages that matter. Where there are “forgotten men” and a priest who can remind them from the pulpit that the sacristy will soon be empty and a new cult will take hold, that of pedophiles and gays, who in the vision of many are often the same thing Polish priest.
Before the Mass, a Candidate of Law and Justice (Pis) presents the officiating priest in front of the faithful with a large check for the restoration of the altar, pews or stained glass windows. It is the usual seal of a tacit pact that the very religious ruling party signs with the national leaders of the Curia. The guide to Catholic elections published a month ago by the Polish Bishops’ Conference lists some principles that “the good believer” must adhere to in the secrecy of voting and which also follow the ultra-conservative law and justice agenda. Among other things, the protection of “the right to life throughout its entire cycle, from conception to its natural end” and family rights “based exclusively on monogamous marriage between people of the opposite sex”.
In the most Catholic country in the world, two social blocs with opposing visions now coexist. The man who has been in government for eight years supports the great influence of the clergy in public life and finds nothing objectionable in its frequent intermingling with the work of Parliament, which often gives direction. The other is taking to the streets, as he did ten days ago in Warsaw, to demand a more secular society or at least a clearer separation between secular and spiritual power. Never before have we seen such explicit protests in Poland against an institution that is considered inviolable. The words “Church out of state” or short-lived murals depicting high-ranking prelates with a lot of money are appearing more and more often on the walls of Warsaw and Krakow.
A few days ago, Jacek Grybowski, one of the capital’s four bishops, traveled to the suburb of Zabki to address the faithful by advocating for increasing religious hours in schools, one of the strengths in the current ruling party’s program. “Two a week is no longer enough because it is not enough to develop faith and active worship in our young people.” From his point of view, he is not entirely wrong. Over the past two years, the proportion of believers who say they go to Mass once a week has fallen by 8 percent to 28 percent, which would still make any other European country happy. However, according to the Statistical Institute of the Polish Catholic Church, the percentage is in the range of believers between 18 and 40 years old. “If you don’t make the right decisions,” the bishop concluded, our churches will soon be empty. Just as it is happening in that Europe against which law and justice are hurling their arrows.
After years of coexistence, the marriage between the government and the leaders of the Polish Curia dates back to 2015. Immediately after his return to power, the progenitor of the Pis, Jaroslav Kaczynski, put his name in the new financing law of the Curia, an ecclesiastical state fund, which from that moment on was no longer limited to paying priests’ pensions, but became a kind of charity organization. This year it distributed a record sum of 52 million euros in donations to individual churches. The compromise seems obvious, as does the ideological orientation. In 2017, Parliament voted on a resolution defining the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima as “objective fact.” In 2019, the government covered up cases of pedophilia among priests described using first and last names in the documentary “Tell No One” by director Marek Sekielsky. Until the highly controversial 2020 law banning abortions even if the fetus was diagnosed with a birth defect, which was so restrictive at the instigation of the Curia that it led to deviations that could alienate the Pis from the favor of the female electorate.
But for the first time, the demand for more secularity in the state is at the center of the public debate. And it forms the thread that holds together a broad and diverse front, from the moderate center-right of Donald Tusk to the pure centrists of Terza Via to the pure left of Lewica. Everyone agrees that they are calling, with different tones, for a reduction in the role of the church. Whatever happens, today’s elections are already historic elections for Poland.