'Being Jewish has become hip and fashionable in Poland’, wrote Haaretz this past July.
The population of Jewish people has risen over the past number of years, with the 2011 and 2022 census showing almost a doubling from 7,500 to 15,700.
Census figures show that 71% of the total population are Catholics, this figure however has a clear divide when it comes to age groups. Only 69% of young people consider themselves with only 4% of those being ‘deep believers’.
What is causing this?
Certainly, the increasing globalisation of Poland does not help, nor does the pressure from the likes of George Soros and various abortion advocates.
But the church must acknowledge its own mistakes, trust in the institution has fallen from 65 to 48 percent in the space of 10 years. In the past week, a bizarre male prostitution scandal will not have helped matters.
A report prepared by KAI had some interesting highlights:
Mass attendance has fallen from 47% to 28%.
Only 13% of population attend and receive Communion at Mass, down from 19%.
1,743 Poles serve missions in 99 countries
27,000 people belong to institutes of consecrated life
The numbers of consecrated people has decreased by over a quarter
There are 34,700 priests (!)
The most interesting excerpt:
In recent years, more and more new evangelization initiatives and even new forms of apostolate have appeared in the church space, such as the Lednica meetings, Epiphany Processions, extreme Stations of the Cross or numerous Christian music festivals. Apart from the pandemic, pilgrimage traffic is not decreasing and is finding many new forms and shapes. We are therefore observing a process of spiritual and intellectual deepening of those circles that are strongly rooted in the Church and feel called to participate in the new evangelization. New evangelistic media are also developing intensively.
When people compare the globalisation of Ireland with that of Poland and the decline of faith, it is important to note this last part.
Although Ireland is now experiencing something of a renewal in evangelisation projects, it did not have a plethora of these two or three decades ago when the collapse intensified.
These will be crucial to maintaining the church in Poland.
With a rise in influence from the English speaking world, the attention and pressure of anti life lobbies from within the EU and the USA and the influence of German news outlets, Catholicism will continue to come under pressure and decline, but it is important to remember that the quality need not suffer.
If Poland can continue to attract vocations, steadily but smaller, and continue to harness its popular forms of public devotion through its own mass media outlets, it certainly stands a better chance of maintaining its faith than Ireland did.
As in Ireland, current trends of rabid anti Catholicism will eventually give way to mindless consumerism as the false promises of a post Catholic society dawn on their proponents.
