The proportion of Catholics in Poland attending mass has fallen from 37% to 28% in two years, according to the new figures published by the church’s statistical institute.
The church notes that the latest data – which come from 2021 – are likely to have been affected by the pandemic. But it also admits that “socio-cultural factors” have played a part in the decline.
Since 1980, the Catholic church in Poland has conducted an annual study of how many people attend mass and take communion. On one Sunday each year, every parish in the country records figures and submits them to the Institute for Catholic Church Statistics (ISKK).
The ISKK then calculates nationally what proportion of Catholics required to attend mass – meaning people aged over seven and excluding the bedridden and elderly with limited mobility – actually did so on that day.
The latest figures show that 28.3% attended mass in 2021, which was down from 36.9% in 2019 (the survey was not conducted in 2020 due to the pandemic). In 2011, the number stood at 40%; in 2001 at 46.8%; in 1991 at 47.6%; and in 1981 at 52.7%.
Meanwhile, the proportion who took communion fell to 12.9% in 2021, having stood at 16.7% in 2019. In contrast to attendance figures, those taking communion had previously been rising: from 8.1% in 1981 to 10.8% in 1991, 16.5% in 2001 and 16.1% in 2011.
“The [2021] numbers were influenced by the pandemic situation,” notes ISKK’s deputy director Marcin Jewdokimow. “It should be remembered that in 2020, due to COVID-19 restrictions, no data were collected. In 2021, we collected data despite the fact that some restrictions were [still] in force.
The latest data were gathered on 26 September 2021, at a time when entry to churches was restricted to 50% capacity and attendees were obliged to wear masks.
“In previous years, the declines in the dominicantes [mass attendance] index were constant,” added Jewdokimow, quoted by the Polish Press Agency (PAP). “This time we’re dealing with a collapse. Therefore, I believe that next year we will have a rebound, the statistics will show an increase.”
At the same time, Jewdokimow admitted that “socio-cultural factors” had also had an impact on church attendance. But he noted that the ISKK does not conduct research into the reasons behind changes in the numbers it records.
“In the long term, we are dealing with processes of socio-cultural changes,” said Jewdokimow. “On the other hand, there is a certain reconfiguration of Catholicism and the place of religion in public space. People’s religious needs are changing and the way religious institutions function is changing.”
Other research has also indicated a decline in religious practice over recent years. Polling by CBOS, a state research agency, found that in August 2021 43% of Poles said they practice their religion at least once a week, down from 69.5% in 1992. However, 87% still declared themselves to be believers.
Among those aged 18-24, religious practice fell from 69% in 1992 to just 23% in 2021. Young Poles have been particularly prominent in protests against the church. An IBRiS poll in 2020 found that just 9% of those aged 18-29 held a positive view of the church.
— Pope Francis and the leaders of Protestant churches in England and Scotland have denounced the criminalisation of homosexuality.
Pope Francis said those with “homosexual tendencies” should be welcomed by their churches
Speaking to reporters after visiting South Sudan, the Pope said such laws were a sin and “an injustice”.
He added people with “homosexual tendencies” are children of God and should be welcomed by their churches.
His comments were backed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Moderator of the Church of Scotland.
Archbishop Justin Welby and Iain Greenshields, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, travelled with the Pope to South Sudan where they jointly called for peace in the war-torn country.
It is the first time the leaders of the three traditions have come together for such a journey in 500 years.
Archbishop Welby and Dr Greenshields praised the Pope’s comments during a news conference with reporters on board the papal plane as they travelled from Juba to Rome.
“I entirely agree with every word he said there,” said Archbishop Welby, noting that the Anglican church had its own internal divisions over gay rights.
Last month the Church of England said it would refuse to allow same-sex couples to be married in its churches.
Expressing his own support, Dr Greenshields referred to the Bible, saying: “There is nowhere in the four Gospels that I see anything other than Jesus expressing love to whoever he meets, and as Christians that is the only expression that we can give to any human being in any circumstance”.
Archbishop Justin Welby (right) and the Rt Rev Iain Greenshields (left) expressed their support for the Pope’s comments in a press conference
During the news conference Pope Francis repeated his view that the Catholic Church cannot permit sacramental marriage of same-sex couples.
But he said he supported so-called civil union legislation, and stressed that laws banning homosexuality were “a problem that cannot be ignored”.
He suggested that 50 countries criminalise LGBT people “in one way or another”, and about 10 have laws carrying the death penalty.
Currently 66 UN member states criminalise consensual same-sex relations, according to ILGA World – the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association.
“This is not right. Persons with homosexual tendencies are children of God,” said the Pope.
“God loves them. God accompanies them… condemning a person like this is a sin.”
But some conservative Catholics have criticised him for making comments they say are ambiguous about sexual morality.
In 2013, soon after becoming Pope, he reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s position that homosexual acts were sinful, but added that homosexual orientation was not.
Five years later, during a visit to Ireland, Pope Francis stressed that parents could not disown their LGBT children and had to keep them in a loving family.
— The Child Abuse Reporting Expansion Act, a bill making its way through the New York legislature, would make clergy mandated reporters
New York state lawmakers at work in the Assembly Chamber in the Capitol in Albany on Wednesday.
By Kathryn Post
If a member of the clergy suspects that a child in the congregation has been abused, is the clergyperson legally required to report it?
In New York state, the answer is no. But some advocates, clergy members and lawmakers think that should change.
The issue is at the heart of the Child Abuse Reporting Expansion Act, a bill making its way through the state legislature that, if passed, would make clergy mandated reporters.
Anti-abuse advocate Abbi Nye, part of the advocacy group CFCtoo, said her group “is calling for CARE Act to be passed because we see it as a necessary first step toward making our communities and children safer.”
CFCtoo is a collective of former Christian Fellowship Center members. The CFC has five locations in New York’s North Country and has been described by some former members as insular. CFCtoo formed in June 2022 after congregation member Sean Ferguson was charged with having sexually abused his two young daughters in 2015. Church members later learned that leaders knew about the abuse years prior but did not report it to authorities or to the broader church community.
In October, CFCtoo held a news conference outside the St. Lawrence County Courthouse to advocate for the CARE Act.
“We are aware of a number of cases, most recently with Sean Ferguson, where CFC pastors knew about abuse and did not report it. Because pastors do not report abuse, it allows abusers to keep on preying on vulnerable individuals,” Nye told Religion News Service. “Most sexual abusers have multiple victims, which is why it’s so important to report.”
New York state law currently requires doctors, dentists, teachers, day-care workers, police officers and several other types of professionals to report it if they suspect a child is abused. Mandated reporters who fail in their duty are guilty of a misdemeanor and are “civilly liable for the damages proximately caused by such failure,” state law says. Twenty-eight other states already include clergy on their list of mandated reporters, according to 2019 data from the U.S. Children’s Bureau. Most of these states also include exemptions for clergy who learn about suspected abuse via “pastoral communications,” such as in the context of confession.
Assembly member Monica P. Wallace, who authored the bill and is sponsoring it in the Assembly, told Religion News Service that the CARE Act was designed to prevent leaders from shirking their responsibility to act when they encounter evidence of child abuse.
In 2019, New York passed the Child Victims Act, which carved out a limited-time window allowing adult survivors of child abuse to bring civil lawsuits against their abusers. Months later, a Roman Catholic diocese in Buffalo filed for bankruptcy as it was inundated with hundreds of lawsuits.
Wallace said the lawsuits highlight the need for greater protections against child abuse, particularly in religious settings. But while the Child Victims Act was retroactive, she said, the CARE Act would be forward-looking.
“What this legislation seeks to do is to fill the void for future situations so something like that would never happen again,” said Wallace, who called the absence of clergy on New York’s list of mandatory reporters a “glaring omission.”
The bill was originally introduced in 2019 and then amended in 2020 to include an exception for any “confession or confidence” made to clergy in their “professional character as spiritual advisor.” The bill clarifies that clergy who learn about potential abuse in any other context would be subject to the mandatory reporting requirements, even if they also learned about the abuse in a confessional setting.
The amended bill passed in the Assembly in 2020, on a vote of 141-0. The bill hasn’t yet been brought to a vote in the Senate.
“I don’t think there’s been outright opposition. It’s just more of, there hasn’t been a sort of groundswell of advocacy,” explained Wallace. “Once the Child Victims Act passed, the concerns that drove that issue died down a little bit. But from my perspective, it’s really important to move something like this through.”
On Jan. 30, the CARE Act was reintroduced in both the state Senate and the Assembly. Both houses committed the bill to the Committee on Children and Families. Wallace says the bill may have to be approved by other committees before it comes to the floor again, but she hopes the it will be voted on before the session concludes this summer.
The Rev. Judith VanKennen, pastor of Emmanuel Congregational United Church of Christ in Massena, N.Y., told Religion News Service that she fully endorses the bill.
“I serve as a pastor in the United Church of Christ, and we have a robust process for processing claims of clergy sexual abuse and other misconduct. We hold it sacred, the responsibility of providing a place of safety and accountability.”
The Rev. James Galasinski, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Canton, N.Y., was surprised when he learned that clergy members weren’t mandated reporters already. “I just assumed I was, and I didn’t check,” he said. “My ministry is run with that assumption.”
Galasinski said he sees the benefit of having clergy as mandated reporters, especially when churches lack other mechanisms of accountability. However, he expressed concerns that expanding the list of mandated reporters could have unintended consequences.<
In October, an investigation by NBC News and ProPublica questioned whether mandatory reporting actually limits child abuse. It examined the impact of sweeping mandatory-reporting laws passed in Pennsylvania in 2014 and found that the reforms led to an influx of unfounded reports that clogged child protection agencies.
“The vast expansion of the child protection dragnet ensnared tens of thousands of innocent parents, disproportionately affecting families of color living in poverty,” NBC News and ProPublica reported.
“You read about families being broken up and the trauma of these investigations,” said Galasinski. “I think an average clergyperson who wants to do what’s right might overreport. … Then what happened in Pennsylvania could happen — the system is overflooded. What if the system can’t respond to the ones that are really important, that they should respond to?”
Victims of clergy sexual abuse, or their family members, react as Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro speaks at a news conference at the Capitol in Harrisburg, Pa., in August 2018.
Wallace said she believes the CARE Act wouldn’t have the same effect as the Pennsylvania legislation, which increased penalties for failing to report and broadened the definition of abuse. Pennsylvania also expanded its list of mandated reporters in 2014, but clergy were already included.
“Obviously, we never want to change the law to exacerbate systemic racism that already exists. But I don’t think that this bill would do that,” said Wallace. “I’m just seeking to add clergy to a list that already exists.”
Nye noted that the Pennsylvania laws’ expanded definition of neglect can in some cases “be used to target families for their poverty rather than for actual child abuse.”
While CFCtoo doesn’t view the CARE Act as a cure-all, the group still sees it as necessary. Nye added that at the Christian Fellowship Center, which has a significant home-schooled population, many children don’t have regular contact with other types of mandated reporters.
“I would rather see a state government devote resources to training mandated reporters than to abolish mandated reporting altogether,” said Nye. “We should not need a law like this. Clergy have a moral responsibility to do this anyway. And it’s their moral failure that even requires us to have a bill like this.”
Two prominent American priests recently made important statements that indicate an attempt to shift the Catholic discussion about homosexuality.
Taking their lead from former Justice Anthony Kennedy, the father of constitutional rights for same-sex couples, Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego and Fr. James Martin, S.J., have both spoken recently of “hatred”—even the “demonic”—animating those who uphold traditional Christian teaching on human sexuality and chastity in regard to homosexuality. They chose a fitting model; Kennedy’s technique was massively effective.
Over several years, Kennedy wrote the majority opinions that established the Supreme Court’s same-sex jurisprudence. The first was Romer v. Evans in 1996, in which the majority overturned a Colorado ballot initiative prohibiting antidiscrimination laws on the basis of sexual orientation. Kennedy there first played the animus card: “the amendment seems inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class that it affects; it lacks a rational relationship to legitimate state interests.”
Colorado’s voters were, lacking reason, motivated by “animus.” That’s a neat maneuver, discrediting motives before getting around to the legal arguments. That would sustain Kennedy for nearly twenty years. In his final triumph, Kennedy adopted a gracious posture in Obergefell, which created a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. “Many who deem same-sex marriage to be wrong reach that conclusion based on decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises, and neither they nor their beliefs are disparaged here,” wrote Kennedy.
Yes and no, for Kennedy continued that when “sincere, personal opposition becomes enacted law and public policy, the necessary consequence is to put the imprimatur of the state itself on an exclusion that soon demeans or stigmatizes those whose own liberty is then denied.”
“Animus” returns again, this time rooted in a supposedly “decent and honorable” desire to “exclude,” “demean and stigmatize.” It is clear that Kennedy thinks decent and honorable people really think the way that he does. Those who don’t are motivated by something other than reason.
Fr. Martin writes at Outreach, “An LGBTQ Catholic Resource” run by the Jesuit America magazine, which is more or less an LGBTQ Catholic Resource itself. Fr. Martin recently employed one of his favorite techniques, which is to report in detail the nasty things that nasty people say about him on the internet. If you wish to find animus somewhere, the internet is a good place to go fishing.
In a commentary upon his own commentary—a good bit of self-referentiality here, to use the favored term of Pope Francis—about the same-sex marriage of Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Fr. Martin singles out opposition to his agenda as fueled by a special kind of hate:
The idea of two people of the same sex getting married repulses some people. . . . There is something about same-sex marriage, and same-sex relations, that unhinges some people, that infuriates them, that drives them to hysteria, enough to threaten death to people who say that it even exists.
. . . no amount of clarification will be enough for people whose rage is fueled by homophobia and hatred. No issue enrages some Catholics—not the Latin Mass, not the Synod, not Pope Francis, not women’s ordination—more than LGBTQ people. It is what sociologists call a “moral panic.” More basically, it is hatred.
These “some Catholics” do not have names, having been collected off the internet, but Fr. Martin’s point is clear. His gay-friendly Outreach is a kind of butterflies in the meadow operation over against the unhinged, hysterical rage of hate-filled homophobes. That he does not produce a credible author who is unhinged, hysterical, and hate-filled makes it easier to hurl the charge.
Meanwhile, Cardinal McElroy writes that the ongoing Catholic synodal process on synodality for a synodal Church is an excellent time to jettison various Catholic teachings, including the requirement that homosexual people strive to live chastely. I gave my view on that novelty here.
Writing in the dialogue-promoting pages of America magazine proper, Cardinal McElroy borrows a page from Fr. Martin in his estimation of those who might be attached to the Catholic tradition on chastity and other quaint virtues.
“It is a demonic mystery of the human soul why so many men and women have a profound and visceral animus toward members of the L.G.B.T. communities,” McElroy writes, deploying the same sensitive animus-detecting antennae that his fellow Californian Justice Kennedy has. “The church’s primary witness in the face of this bigotry must be one of embrace rather than distance or condemnation.”
“Demonic,” “visceral animus,” “bigotry,” “distance”—all this from McElroy in the same essay in which he includes a ritual lamentation of “polarization” in ecclesial life. It would be interesting to know whether McElroy considers the two California archbishops—Jose Gomez in Los Angeles and Salvatore Cordileone in San Francisco—to suffer from these deplorable afflictions.
There was a time when it was fashionable in self-consciously progressive Christian circles to incant the slogan that “the world sets the agenda for the Church.” In relation to homosexuality, for the likes of Martin and McElroy, it is the Court that sets the agenda for the Church—and not only the agenda, but the strategy and tactics as well.
For a long time, Fernando Garciá-Salmones found it hard to accept his own reflection in the mirror.
When he was a schoolboy, aged just 14, a priest named José María Pita da Veiga began to sexually abuse him. Fernando says, “the vulture made the little mouse feel guilty”.
“The priest came to me one rainy day and asked me to go upstairs to dry off in his room and that’s when it started,” he said.
The abuse lasted almost a year. Speaking with Euronews, Fernando explained that much of the after-effects of sexual abuse are indelible.
“There is a destruction of the capacity to love, a complete differentiation between sexuality and affection, mistrust, a permanent feeling of guilt, a devastating fear of loneliness,” he revealed.
Fernando García-Salmones, sexual abuse survivor
Groundbreaking media investigations
In October 2018 the Spanish newspaper El País launched the first investigation into sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. At the time, only 34 victims had been registered.
Three years later it opened a comprehensive database that counted more than 1700 survivors of abuse.
Julio Nuñes, a journalist with El País told Euronews “The main driver was the creation of the mailbox set up by the newspaper El País. It created an umbilical cord that linked the victims to someone who could articulate and corroborate their story.”
Julio Nuñez, journalist with El País
The Spanish Bishops’ Conference says it has no authority over the different Catholic orders where cases of abuse have occurred. It admits that the response has been “slow”, but insists they’re doing everything it can to help, including the creation of two hundred offices to help victims.
“Whatever society does, whatever the Church does, it is a pain that they carry in their hearts and that must be respected,” said José Gabriel Vera, Director of Communications for the Bishops’ Conference.
The Church is proposing to meet with each of the victims face to face to know their case and their story, to know their names, and to understand how they can be helped. Either from a pastoral point of view, which is the role of the Church, or from a legal point of view.”
José Gabriel Vera, Director of Communications for the Spanish Bishops’ Conference
Creating a ‘complete picture’ of pederasty in the Catholic Church
The Spanish Church has discovered a total of 506 cases. In March last year, the Spanish Congress of Deputies commissioned an independent Ombudsman to begin work on a report on cases of pederasty in the Catholic Church and the role of the public authorities. It is the first official investigation to be carried out in Spain.
He has set up a panel of independent experts to achieve this goal. The commitment goes beyond what has been agreed with the political representatives.
Angel Gabilondo, Ombudsman
“It’s also a report for the victims themselves so they can see their own situation and see that measures will be taken demanding responsibility and seeking reparation,” explained Ombudsman Angel Gabilondo.
The Ombudsman hopes that the Spanish Church will fulfil its promise to collaborate and help to create a complete picture of these crimes.
