TOP STORY: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH: Poles look to West—not the Church—for moral guidance

c. 1996 Religion News Service KRAKOW, Poland (RNS)-It’s Friday night, and Kasia, 16, Marek, 17, and their gang are eating pizzas and drinking sodas at the Pizza Hut across from Krakow’s Baroque 17th-century Saints Peter and Paul Church, one of more than 50 in this bastion of Polish Catholicism.”Sure, I’m Catholic,”says Kasia, who has radio […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

KRAKOW, Poland (RNS)-It’s Friday night, and Kasia, 16, Marek, 17, and their gang are eating pizzas and drinking sodas at the Pizza Hut across from Krakow’s Baroque 17th-century Saints Peter and Paul Church, one of more than 50 in this bastion of Polish Catholicism.”Sure, I’m Catholic,”says Kasia, who has radio headphones hanging from her neck.”But I only go to church because I have to. I think the Church is old-fashioned. They don’t understand what young people like to do.” Marek, a high school senior, wants to go to college in the United States.”It’s so hypocritical here. The Church says you can’t have sex before marriage, but everyone does it anyway. We call it Vatican roulette,”he says, referring to the Church’s hard-line stance against contraception,”and that’s how girls get pregnant.” Six years after the demise of communism, Poland’s Roman Catholic Church is grappling with a crisis that few would have predicted in the euphoric days of 1989. Although the Church is this country’s most powerful institution, it finds its hands tied when it tries to exercise that power. Opinion polls show its popularity steadily declining and its moral authority undermined.

In overwhelmingly Catholic Poland, young people are questioning the moral certainties of earlier generations. They increasingly look toward Western lifestyles and values for their orientation. The Church, they say, is out of touch.


Surveys by the Warsaw-based Public Opinion Research Center show that fewer than half of Poles approve of the Catholic Church as a public institution, while 40 percent disapprove. Meanwhile, fewer than 13 percent of Poles agree with the Church that abortion should be banned.

Nowhere has the disconnection between Polish citizens-notably the young-and the Church been greater than in national politics. In the presidential election last year, nearly 60 percent of people under 29 voted for the post-communist candidate, Aleksander Kwasniewski, over incumbent president Lech Walesa, a devout Catholic and the obvious candidate of the church hierarchy.

Kwasniewski’s victory put all three branches of power-parliament, government and the presidency-in the hands of the former communists, a situation that Church leaders admit is a heavy blow to Catholic prestige and authority. In every election since 1989, the religious hierarchy publicly backed candidates of its choice and came out strongly against the representatives of the old regime. Yet, the post-communists won the 1993 parliamentary vote, while explicitly pro-Catholic parties failed to gain a single seat.”Kwasniewski’s victory sent a signal that the Church couldn’t ignore,”says Andrzej Wroblewski, an editor of the influential weekly Polityka.”Even though Poles are Catholic, they don’t want the Church telling them how to vote.”The Church, says Wroblewski, has been forced to step back and begin a major rethinking of its strategy.”The Catholic Church and large sections of the Catholic community are feeling deeply lost,”admits Adam Szostkiewicz, a leading Catholic intellectual.”They are desperately seeking a way out of the confusion caused by the last two elections.”(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

The Church has been conspicuously quiet since Kwasniewski took office this year, and Catholic insiders say the religious hierarchy is in transition.”The bishops are pragmatic,”says Szostkiewicz.”They want a workable agenda for church-state relations, and surprisingly, Kwasniewski and his party have also backed down from their confrontational rhetoric.” There is wide speculation, for example, that the Church and government are ready to strike a deal over the ratification of a concordat between Poland and the Holy See. For three years, the government and pro-Catholic forces have been locked in a dispute over the draft treaty, which establishes a special relationship between Poland and the Vatican.

If the concordat is ratified, the Church hierarchy seems willing to concede its demand that the word”God”be included in the preamble to the new constitution. Yet, in both camps, there is still opposition to the deal, evidence that the lines of division remain.

On the issue of abortion, however, the Church remains unwavering. In 1993, pro-Church forces succeeded in banning the procedure, except in cases of rape and incest. The post-communists have proposed that women in difficult personal circumstances, such as poverty, should also have the right to terminate their pregnancies. But the bill, lacking enthusiastic support, has been shelved for the foreseeable future.”A lot of women are very disappointed,”says Slawomira Walczewska of Krakow’s Women’s Center, which runs a hotline for battered women.”Kwasniewski and his party came to power promising this law would be changed. But it looks like they want to stay on good terms with the bishops.” (END OPTIONAL TRIM)

Within Church ranks, there is new discussion over how to address moral issues in which Poles often ignore the admonitions of the Church-issues such as pre-marital sex, contraception, pornography and abortion.”The Church knows it’s losing the support of the broad Catholic masses,”says Szostkiewicz.”There are people within the Church who say it should be more in tune with the realities of the moment than how it wishes things should be.” On the political level, too, Catholic forces are rethinking strategy. The half-dozen major pro-Church parties are in disarray, their membership negligible, their platforms thin. Recent attempts to form a broad coalition have once again ended in internecine squabbling.


Since communism’s fall, Poland’s small Christian-Democratic parties have been unable to attract a broad following.”Poland needs a party that stands for something in between socialism and capitalism,”says Taduesz Wludyka, a member of Civitas Christiana, a Catholic association.”But it seems we’re as far away as ever.” A newly formed rightist party, the Reconstruction of Poland, headed by former Prime Minister Jan Olszewski, wants to unite opposition forces on a minimum anti-communist platform. Since the presidential elections, Reconstruction has jumped to second spot in popularity ratings.

The movement hopes to bring Catholics under its umbrella without associating itself directly with the Church.”In Western Europe, Christian Democratic parties are independent of their churches,”says Stanislaw Gebhardt, vice-chairman of Reconstruction as well as of the World Union of Christian Democratic Parties.”We want to have a Christian, moral program, but entirely separate from the Church as an institution.”

LJB END HOCKENOS

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!