FEATURE
St Mary’s Basilica, Krakow: the Polish Church still provides around a third of all priestly vocations in Europe
Weathering the storm Polish Catholics rally to their Church undeterred by a new crisis, as Jonathan Luxmoore explains
K
arczew, Poland - In this market town southeast of Warsaw, a vast crowd of all ages moves slowly away from the baroque tree-lined St Vitus church along a shopping street festooned with confetti and rose petals, repeating religious refrains chanted over loudspeakers. Up ahead, watched by white-gloved police and firefighters, a brass band falls quiet, as a priest intones prayers at one of the ornate altars marking the traditional two-hour procession route. When Corpus Christi was marked this summer with similar ceremonies across Poland, it was a reminder of the vibrancy of popular devotions in this overwhelmingly Catholic country. Today, that vibrancy has been called into question by a spate of scandals and controversies, which many Polish Catholics fear could damage the Church's authority. Others are confident, however, that the Church will survive the latest challenges, just as it survived earlier decades of foreign occupation and communist misrule. "The negative publicity has certainly provoked discussion - but it only affects a small number of clergy, and is unlikely to affect church attendance or seriously erode public loyalties", explained
AUTUMN 2019
Malgorzata Glabisz-Pniewska, a senior Catholic presenter with Polish Radio. "The most devout Catholics, who were brought up under communist rule, remain deeply unwilling to speak or act against the Church, knowing how this could damage it. It often happens that the hardest blows are answered by the strongest shows of support." Over the three decades since the peaceful overthrow of communism, the Polish Church has weathered numerous storms over its place in public life, as well as over such issues as abortion and school religion, land and property profiteering, and accusations that its clergy were infiltrated by communist informers. To this turbulent litany has been added intermittent accusations of clerical sex abuse, which exploded into the open last May when a TV documentary exposed how crimes by priests had been ignored and covered up. "This film has proved a significant catalyst for a cleansing process - it's no longer enough to seek improper, superficial, communist-style ways out," Fr Adam Zak, a Jesuit priest acting as the Church's national co-ordinator for child protection, admitted to Poland's Catholic Information Agency, KAI. "We have to admit we made mistakes and
failed to follow the right path - we have to stop proudly believing we're better than others and hiding behind our historical experiences of persecution.” When Fr Zak was appointed in 2013, amid growing media accusations of inaction, Poland's Catholic bishops had already adopted abuse guidelines in line with Vatican directives. By September 2018, all 43 dioceses had child-protection officers, while hundreds of clergy had been trained in prevention and counselling by a special Church centre in Krakow. This failed to deter a barrage of criticisms, which reached a head when a salacious anti-clerical cinema film, Kler (Clergy), broke box-office records that autumn. In a November 2018 statement, the bishops apologised to "God, the victims, their families and the Church community" for clerical abuse and pledged "illumination, strength and courage" in countering the "moral and spiritual corruption" which had caused it. And in February, on the eve of a Vatican child protection summit, Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki of Poznan, the Bishops Conference President, agreed for the first time to meet abuse survivors. However, in a report that same month, a victims’ support group, Nie Lekajcie Sie
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