WARSAW — Tax breaks, bishops dictating the law, and priests promoted according to the principle of “mediocre, passive, but faithful.” This was the state of the Catholic Church and the baggage that accompanied it for over a quarter a century in the long shadow cast by Pope John Paul II, when Jorge Bergoglio first became Pope 12 years ago. Pope Francis did more for the Polish Church than John Paul II.
For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here.
Karol Wojtyła’s (John Paul II’s) pontificate fell on the time of the anti-communist Solidarity movement, and the systemic transformation and the power of the Catholic Church in newly-free Poland. Pope Francis, on the other hand, tried to sort out everything that the Polish Pope had messed up.
When Jorge Bergoglio, a Cardinal from Buenos Aires who wasn’t widely known in Europe became pope, Poland was still a Catholic powerhouse. Over 350,000 children were baptized annually, 130,000 sacraments of marriage were administered, and 39% of Catholics attended Sunday masses regularly.
Today, 270,000 children are baptized, 70,000 couples get married in churches, and 29 percent of faithful in Poland attend mass. And the number of alumni, or future priests studying in seminaries, has dropped from 3,900 to 1,594.
Even if we take into account that fewer children are being born, fewer couples want to legalize their unions, and young men choose a different type of social advancement than working in parishes, rapid secularization is visible to the naked eye.
Did Pope Francis contribute to secularization?
The answer is complicated, and it is worth remembering the state of the Polish Church after the long pontificate of John Paul II and the short reign of Benedict XVI. During the reign of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, bishops wrote Polish law. They exercised enormous political and legal influence, as in the case of the anti-abortion law, which the Polish Sejm adopted in 1993, despite fierce opposition from society.
The episcopate lobbied just as effectively in temporal matters: the Church enjoys numerous tax breaks — for example, bishops do not have to pay taxes on buildings in which diocesan offices are located — and after 1989 it regained, with interest, hundreds of thousands of hectares of land, including those that never belonged to it.
That’s one. Two: churches were full until 2004, children were baptized, young people went to confirmation and then had church weddings. The power of the Church resulted from the combination of the power that Karol Wojtyła had over Poles, and the position of bishops and priests who stood on the side of the democratic opposition during communism. So after the first free elections of 1989, they automatically became part of the winning camp.
And thirdly: Wojtyła shaped the episcopate according to the principle of “mediocre, passive, but faithful.” The bishops he appointed to high-ranking positions were not intellectuals like Father Józef Tischner or Father Alfred Wierzbicki, but representatives of folk Catholicism and church careerists.
It is this baggage that Pope Francis had to reckon with in the Polish Church.
At the same time, this Church was large, powerful, and influential but not effective in creating real change. Poles weren’t truly deepening their spiritual connection with the faith, Sunday masses were treated as part of tradition, and masses were used at the most important events in life, starting from birth, through adult initiation into adulthood and death, by force of habit and social pressure.
What’s more, the bishops, satisfied with the state of their possessions, did not care about true evangelization. Polish parishioners could only dream of something that was the norm for Germans, i.e. Sunday schools, where the Holy Scripture was analyzed and dogmas were argued.
And then, the arrival of the Pope from Latin America, who calls Europe a “sterile grandmother”. He says that all the ideals that inspired the whole world for centuries have lost their significance, and Europeans have become self-satisfied fat cats.
He notices that the heart of Catholicism and new ideas no longer beats in the countries of the old West. That is why he visits countries such as Indonesia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Romania, Egypt and Bangladesh. During his papacy, he visited Poland, the last stronghold of traditional Catholicism in “old” Europe, once, for the World Youth Days.
For the bishops, it was a dream come true: the new boss looks elsewhere, he won’t interfere. And yet they had a tough nut to crack with him. All because of his religious program, and the views he expressed.
His first pillar was helping the weaker. Especially refugees arriving via the Mediterranean Sea. Francis visited the Italian city of Lampedusa, which has become a symbol of the so-called migration crisis.
The Polish Bishop Conference had a problem with this interpretation of faith.
He spoke a lot about the poor, and under his guidance, Polish Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, personally distributed food and basic necessities to the poor of Rome every day.
He paid tribute to ecologists, invited women to and commanded thigh standings in the Vatican, and expressed respect for LGBT+ people.
These gestures were often symbolic, and were not followed by real reforms of church institutions or teaching, but they changed the atmosphere. They were a first step.
The Polish Bishop Conference had a problem with this interpretation of faith. It is true that the bishops stood — although mainly declaratively — on the side of refugees, and even criticized the then Law and Justice government for its anti-refugee propaganda, but the other points of the papal program were not so good.
The Pope’s words about minorities, the change of emphasis from the Church that commands to the Church that listens, encouraged the creation of new religious groups.
An example is the Catholic Congress, which, without looking at the bishops, is creating a critical mass among the involved laypeople and lower-level clergy, taking up topics such as the priesthood of women, the blessing of same-sex couples, church finances or toxic relations between the state and the episcopate.
130,000 church weddings were celebrated in Poland annually when Bergoglio became pope. Today, there are 70,000.
This discussion, which many bishops do not like, became possible thanks to Francis — who, by the way, organized the Synod on Synodality (a meeting of bishops often described as the most important event in the Catholic Church since the reforms of Vatican II) with the participation of laypeople. This decision was met with criticism from the chairman of the Polish Episcopal Conference. Polish Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki could not stand that his voice was treated on an equal footing with the opinions of students, mothers or singles.
Resignations and Dismissals Under Pope Francis
In Poland, 14 bishops were dismissed under Francis, which is more than one per year. Cardinal Henryk Gulbinowicz, the legendary patron of the Solidarity movement, and the beloved bishop of Wrocław, Archbishop Sławoj Leszek Głódź, the first field bishop of the Polish Army after 1989, later the metropolitan of Gdańsk, Bishop Edward Janiak of Kalisz and others, all said goodbye to their offices and honors.
They either hid pedophile priests or were accused of molesting minors or clerics themselves.
They have one thing in common: they either hid pedophile priests or were accused of molesting minors or clerics themselves.
And this was the second pillar of Francis’ policy: the principle of “zero tolerance” for sex offenders.
The sense of crisis in the institutional Polish Church was all the stronger because most of the dismissed hierarchs were promoted by Karol Wojtyła, Pope John Paul II.
And then there is the issue of so-called big politics (as if human rights or the climate crisis were not such issues).
In recent weeks, Francis has strongly criticized U.S. Vice President JD Vance, a recent convert to Catholicism who uses his expertise in theology for political purposes. The Holy See has repeatedly distanced itself from the new Trump administration, and although Vance eventually met with the Pope, the Vatican maintains that conservatism has little in common with the Trumpist — disruptive, revolutionary and oligarchic at the same time — alt-right.
The same cannot be said about the episcopate, which still has a soft spot for the increasingly Trumpist Polish right.
So: has Francis’ pontificate changed the Polish Church? Yes and no.
The painfully conservative episcopate looked with distaste at the pope’s subsequent gestures, words and decisions. We still do not have a single church hierarch in Poland who would side with women, sexual minorities or ecology, although there are thousands of such bishops around the world.
39 percent of Poles went to Sunday masses regularly at the beginning of Francis’ pontificate. Today, that number has fallen to 29 percent.
And still all ideological disputes and discussions — and there are quite a few of them — in the episcopate take place quietly, muffled by the carpets and flooring of the curia corridors, so that nothing gets through to the faithful.
Over these 12 years, the faithful have been leaving the Church not because of a too liberal or revolutionary pope, but because of the pedophile scandals and the episcopate’s rapprochement with politics. No pope would be able to stop this trend. Not even a liberal pope like Francis.
At the same time, Francis made several mistakes.
He appointed Marek Jędraszewski as Archbishop of Kraków, who has insulted opponents of the right, gays, women and the broadly understood left-wing-liberal environment with subsequent scandalous statements.
So: has Francis’ pontificate changed the Polish Church? Yes and no.
The Pope also lacked the strength and determination to explain the unclear role of Archbishop Stanisław Dziwisz in covering up the pedophilia scandals under John Paul II.
But the picture becomes more complicated — as everything in the case of Francis — when we look at other nominations. Archbishop Adrian Galbas, who criticizes clericalism, speaks clearly about the errors of the Church and does not expose his privileges, became the Metropolitan of Warsaw. And the only Polish cardinal who will elect a new pope is Grzegorz Ryś, also far from the hardliners in the episcopate — and the cardinal’s biretta was given to the Metropolitan of Łódź by Bergoglio.
The Church in Poland after Francis will continue to secularize, centrifugal movements will burst the conservative shell, and further pedophilia scandals and the results of the announced commission investigating all cases of sexual crimes since 1945 will further weaken the church statistics.
