Poland: Religion

Religion, as we Indians know only too well, has a tendency to become a very important factor in a country’s social, political and even economic issues. In India, religion becomes significant in the context of its heterogeneity. Poland, however, is an interesting study due to the fact that it is so starkly different from India in terms of religious unity. Although the Polish Constitution guarantees freedom of religion to its citizens, more than 95 percent of Poland’s population is Roman Catholic, and most of them devoutly so. Although Poland has a had a history of ever-changing international borders and substantial immigration across these borders, in the period post WW II, Poland was found to become an almost entirely Roman Catholic state. The fact that Karol Wojtyla, a native of Poland, reigned as Pope John Paul II for more than two and a half decades also served to strengthen the position of the Catholic Church in Poland. The religious minorities that do exist are the Eastern Orthodox Christians, Protestants, Jehovah’s Witnesses as well as sparse pockets of Jewish populations.

The Catholic Church of Poland, largely due to the substantial majority of followers that it enjoys, has thus become an institution in itself, and an extremely powerful one at that. The Church has regularly been involved in the political scenario of the country. In fact, during the Soviet-backed communist regime in Poland, the Church became an important vehicle of support for the movement against communism. The Church became a symbol of the Polish patriotism and identified with the ideals of freedom, human rights and democracy. The opposition to the totalitarian regime began to be identified with the Church as much as with the opposition leaders. Such was the Church’s influence that during the Round Table talks between the ruling communist party and the opposition in 1989, the Church sat in as a third party.

After the collapse of communism, the remarkable expansion of the Church became a characteristic feature of Poland’s subsequent socio-political life, as the Catholic Church soon filled in the vaccum left by the communists. The Catholic Church claimed land, power and “the role of the moral arbiter of the nation.” The Church was strongly supported by the first President of democratic Poland, Lech Wałesa, and hence enjoyed significant influence in the political sphere under his Presidency. As the Church began to heavily influence political agenda, its crusade against abortion came to the forefront in the early 1990s, neglecting pressing economic issues in the process. Abortion had been legalized in the year 1956, but the Church pressed for a ban and managed to have the law passed in Parliament in 1993, despite the fact that only about 10 percent of the total population of the country supported a complete ban on abortion. The Church introduced voluntary religious education in primary schools in 1990, but had made it mandatory within two years.

It was perhaps this interference of the Church in the political sphere that ultimately resulted in the loss of some popular support. Compulsory religious education, strong anti-abortion laws, all the legislation that that Church had had enforced during Wałesa’s presidency seems to have caused the development of resentment towards the Church among the Polish public. Ironically, the loss of popularity of the Church and Wałesa resulted in the return of power of the communist party, which both, the Church and Wałesa had fought so hard against.

Despite this slump in popularity of the Church in the mid-1990s, a vast majority of the Polish population still remains devoutly Roman Catholic and a follower of the Catholic Church. In the past decade, several people in Poland have been looking towards newer religions or towards atheism. However, this new trend hardly makes a dent on the total population of Poland that still remains Roman Catholic. This majority of the Polish people are the ones who attend mass every Sunday, who religiously donate a percentage of their wages to the Church, and those who still look to the Catholic Church in times of hardship.