26 Life
Faith According to official statistics, 34.6m out of 38m citizens of Poland are members of some religious group. Over 33m are Roman Catholics The ties between the nation and its main religion strengthened first after the Second World War and then in the seventies when churches and catholic institutions became places of resistance or at least a break from the omnipresence of the communist state. John Paul’s II presence in the Vatican and his visits to the home country became a source of strength for Poles – religious or not. As a result of this religious resurgence, some 2000 churches were built between 1976 and 1989. Statistics aside, the relationship between the church and the nation is more complex. There are different levels of engagement within the majority. To be baptised does not necessarily mean to be a devout Catholic. When asked about moral choices, Poles frequently disagree with the church’s official stance. In big cities, such as Warsaw and Łódź, attendance on Sunday mass has been decreasing gradually. One thing is certain, Poles are very much attached to their rituals and are eager to show it at Christmas and Easter and on rites of passage such as weddings, christenings, first communions or funerals. In some bigger cities bishops are important figures of public life (for example Kraków’s Stanisław Dziwisz - the former personal secretary of John Paul II) and it is hard to imagine the opening of a new school or new stretch of a motorway without them. Small as other denominations may seem in proportion to the Catholic majority on the scale of the whole country, a Protestant or a Russian Orthodox can find a church in every major city. Sometimes it is a sign of a lively local community, sometimes a testimony to the city’s multicultural past, as in Łódź, dubbed a ‘city of four religions’ before the Second World War. There are very few mosques and functioning synagogues, but their number has been growing over the last years. The plan to build a new mosque in Warsaw caused a local media storm. However, there are cities and regions in Poland where non-Roman Catholics constitute a sizeable group. One example is Białystok and its immediate surroundings, where school holidays double up because of a large Orthodox community. On the southern end of the country, close to the Czech border, around Cieszyn and in the valleys of the Beskid mountains, there is a lively Protestant community.