Pledge to fight poverty under new president

The head of Poland’s bishops’ conference has criticised his country’s “neo-liberal” economic system and committed the Church to do more to protect the poor and marginalised under the new president.

“St Paul compared the Church to the body – and when the Church fails to react to suffering and poverty, this means it is sick,” said Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki. “The huge mass of poor now present in Poland, despite the changes, should trouble the consciences of us all. The economic model accepted after 1989 is not fully adequate. It needs social correction.”

The Poznan-based archbishop was speaking as Poland’s Catholic bishops prepared to debate poverty and exclusion at their summer plenary. He told Poland’s Catholic information agency (KAI) the state would risk becoming a “bureaucratic instrument” if it sought to “guarantee everything” for the poor and marginalised. On the other hand, poverty affected 40 per cent of large families, and the flight of up to three million young people abroad since Poland’s 2004 accession to the European Union highlighted the “weakness of neo-liberal solutions”.

The Bishops’ Conference plenary took place a fortnight after the late-May presidential election victory of a conservative, Andrzej Duda, who unseated the incumbent Bronislaw Komorowski.

Duda, a 43-year-old law lecturer at Krakow’s Jagiellonian University, is a devout Catholic, and visited Poland’s Jasna Gora national sanctuary a day after his election, telling well-wishers he had come to thank the Virgin Mary for “all the strength” received during his campaign.