Tested by Rome and Brussels, Poland’s bishops struggle to find their voice

When the president of Poland's Bishops Conference called last week for a return to domestic "harmony and peace", he expressed a growing unease about the depth of political antagonisms now dividing the country.

In the past, such appeals encountered scepticism, since Church leaders themselves were generally held to be exacerbating tensions with their over-easy resort to inflammatory rhetoric.

Could things be different now?

Though widely accused of being in league with the ruling Law and Justice party (PIS), Poland's bishops have in reality kept their distance from it, at least in public. And when an angry row erupted this March over the government's abortive attempts to bar the re-election of Poland's Donald Tusk as European Council president, several veteran Church dignitaries urged against leaving Poles isolated and unpopular in Europe.

Over the past decade, PIS's leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has waged a personal vendetta against Tusk, who headed the previous liberal Civic Platform government in 2007-2014, accusing him of failing to investigate the April 2010 Smolensk air disaster in which his brother, President Lech Kaczynski, and 95 senior Polish officials died.

But Tusk, for all his personal dullness, is well regarded for his European Union functions in Polish opinion surveys. When it comes to the clan-like rift between PIS and the Platform, the Church has avoided being drawn in too directly.
 
Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki made his appeal during a Bishops’ Conference plenary in Warsaw, as the Polish Church prepared to celebrate the 25th anniversary of its post-communist structural reorganisation by Pope John Paul II, and as a survey by the CBOS agency showed a new drop in its approval ratings. The subsequent communique would normally have attracted little public interest. But there was a bit more to this one.  The plenary was attended by the Vatican's newly appointed nuncio, Archbishop Salvatore Pennacchio, and observers from 13 other Bishops’ Conferences, giving it an international profile. And besides Gadecki's appeal for "mutual respect", it backed a new initiative by the Solidarity union to restrict Sunday trading, as well as calls for the beatification of two EU Catholic founding fathers, Robert Schumann and Alcide de Gasperi.  

It also made a new effort to deflate criticism of the Polish Church's dismissive attitude to Middle East refugees, by stressing the aid disbursed to displaced Syrians by its Caritas organisation and announcing a nationwide collection for refugees on the upcoming Divine Mercy Sunday.

The Polish Church still thinks of itself as poor, so the funds involved are relatively minimal compared to the help given by Catholics in Germany, Austria and elsewhere. And while the bishops followed their Italian and Spanish counterparts in declaring support for "humanitarian corridors", they know Prime Minister Beata Szydlo's Government will veto the idea.
 
 But it was their discussion of Amoris Laetitia, the Pope's April 2016 Apostolic Exhortation on marriage and family, which drew most interest, by highlighting once again their uneasy relations with the reforming Argentinian pontiff.

The communique talked of stepping up the Polish Church's work with married couples, and of making sure those in "irregular situations" were, as the Exhortation recommended, not made to "feel excommunicated".

And it revealed that guidelines on implementing Amoris Laetitia, "suited to the conditions of the Catholic Church in Poland", would be issued shortly by a team led by Archbishop Henryk Hoser of Warsaw-Praga.

But it also made clear the Polish bishops would, unlike their German neighbours, be sticking to a conservative position - not least on the vexed question of whether divorced Catholics living in new unions could receive Holy Communion.

Those without a church annulment could only do this, the plenary stressed, if "they refrain from marital relations, repair the damage and injustice inflicted during their marriage and cause no scandal".

The plenary sent a letter thanking Francis for his four years of "small, close and concrete witness to God", and pledging its "unity and fraternal bond". But signs of unease have been visible since the Pope's 2013 election, in a Church wedded to the firm line of his revered Polish predecessor, whose teachings are still evoked today, a dozen years after his death, much more enthusiastically.
   
Not surprisingly, the country's media have reported reservations about Francis's open, conciliatory attitudes, and these appear to have worsened since his visit for World Youth Day last summer.

"Having stressed the Pope's infallibility under St John Paul II, expecting submission without demur to all papal pronouncements, the bishops can hardly now question the actions of his successor", is how Malgorzata Glabisz-Pniewska, a senior Catholic radio presenter, explained the problems recently. "For those who've been in office for decades, presenting everything as black-and-white, the changed attitudes of the last four years have been too much to bear. Most count on sitting out this pontificate hoping the next Pope will be different".
 
Whatever his preferences, Francis cannot afford to alienate Poland's bishops. Although seminary admissions have dropped sharply, halving the number of priestly ordinations, the country still provides at least a quarter of all Europe's vocations and supplies clergy for dioceses worldwide. And while participation is falling, 94 per cent of Poland's 38.5 million inhabitants still described themselves as Catholics in a survey last May, while average Sunday Mass attendance still stands, according to Church statistics, at a remarkable 39 per cent.

But the Pope has his supporters in Poland too, and will certainly push his agenda for change. The character of any national church may well be measured less by the relative strength of conservatives and liberals, than by the degree of effective central control exercised by its hierarchy. And while discipline, obedience and uniformity have been Polish Church features, they may not pass unchallenged forever.

With old firebrands like Archbishop Slawoj Glodz of Gdansk and Damian Zimon of Katowice now less prominent on the national stage, the Church's present hierarchy looks weak and uninspiring - reflected in the elderly, exhausted faces peering from the Bishops’ Conference website. Poland's youthful Primate, Archbishop Wojciech Polak of Gniezno, provides an obvious exception, and has worked hard to salvage the Church's image on key issues such as clerical sex abuse.

But the primate's role has been reduced to a largely honorary one since the retirement of the late Cardinal Jozef Glemp a decade ago, and executive headship has now passed to the Bishops’ Conference president. It remains to be seen whether the dry and humourless Archbishop Gadecki, and the equally lacklustre Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz of Warsaw and Marek Jedraszewski of Krakow, who replaced Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz last autumn, can provide the leadership needed in the face of today's multiple new challenges.