Is Poland Still Catholic? Glimpses of the Changing Cultural and Religious Environment

Poland has for years been regarded as a religious country, with religion being closely linked to Polish national identity and the vast majority of the population following Roman Catholicism, distinguished from its neighbors by the high level of religiosity. When addressing religion in the region, Poland is often contrasted, for example, with the neighboring Czech Republic—one of the most secular countries in Europe, with the majority of adult citizens not identifying with any religion.
However, it is not the case that the picture of Polish religiosity is stable. A lot has been happening recently in the religious space, and these dynamics are worth a closer look to understand modern Poland. The interest of Poles in the practices of the Roman Catholic Church has decreased, especially among the youngest generation, which is leaving the dominant Church much more rapidly than in other countries in the region. The churches emptied during the COVID-19 pandemic have not been filled up again to pre-pandemic levels, and the differing attitudes toward the Church are significant in deepening the polarization of views in Polish society in recent years. In this article I want to shed light on this issue, discuss changes, and present some alternatives to the dominant religion that has recently been appearing in Poland.

Catholicism of modern Poles

To see the changing landscape, it is worth examing the data collected within the last few years, including the latest national census conducted in 2021. It is not ideal, and the methodology was criticized, but it still provides an interesting picture. 71.3% of the Polish population of 38,036,118 people affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church. Next, in terms of number of followers, came the Orthodox Church (0.40%), Jehovah’s Witnesses (0.29%), the Evangelical Churchof the Augsburg Confession (0.17%), the Greek Catholic Church (0.09%), Pentecostalism (0.08%), and others. The striking feature of the set of answers to the question about religion was the fact that 20.53% of the population refused to reveal their religious affiliation. There was a separate category for people who did not belong to any religion (6.87%), so this means that one in five Poles did not want to declare with which religion they associate.

If we compare these answers with the data collected 10 years earlier in the 2011 National Census, we see a significant change. Those who asserted that they belonged to the Roman Catholic Church comprised 87.58 % of the population in 2011, so the level of 71.3% in 2021 represented a large decline within a decade. In addition, other categories had changed significantly, as the number of people who did not want to reveal their religious affiliation 10 years earlier was much smaller (7.10%), as was the number of people who did not belong to any religion (2.41%).

Thus, three out of ten Poles do not claim to be Catholic. On the one hand, a new generation has entered the scene. On the other hand, we can assume that some of those who used to claim they were Catholics no longer wanted to answer this question, left the Church or did not want to admit they belonged to it. All of this indicates a change in the perception of the Roman Catholic Church in Polish society.

Generally, the decline seen in the level of religious faith and practice occurs more rapidly among educated people and in large cities. The most noticeable decline is in the younger generations: Global Religion 2023, a survey published by the multinational market research company Ipsos Group, showed that the generation gap related to religious commitment is relatively wide in Poland and young people are leaving Catholicism here very fast. Furthermore, internal research in Poland shows that there is still a geographical gap between the most Catholic areas in the south and east of the country and the least Catholic areas in the north and southwest of Poland. We can explore other statistical data, which illustrate the trends, such as the Mass attendance rates that significantly dropped over the post-socialist history of Poland and the declining numbers of priests ordained and of children baptized. According to a study conducted by the Institute for Catholic Church Statistics (‘Instytut Statystyki Kościoła Katolickiego SAC im. ks. Witolda Zdaniewicza’), in 2022, only 29.5% of Catholics in Poland attended Sunday Mass, while those receiving Holy Communion were 13.9%. There is also a dramatic decrease in the number of children and young people who attend religion classes in schools (religion was instituted in schools as a result of the 1989 political transformation in Poland; earlier it was held in churches). A leading example is Łódź, a city in central Poland and a former industrial center, where less than half of students wanted to attend religious classes in 2023; the largest group still attends them in elementary schools, while nearly 80% of the high school students have opted out of school catechesis. Nation-wide statistics show that, while such a decreasing trend was present in high schools all over the country for some time, it has recently emerged in elementary schools.

The emergence of Polish-Catholic identity

To understand the change, we have to understand the background. If we move back to history, we will discover the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795), which was a multireligious and multiethnic bi-confederal state of Poland and Lithuania. The state retained religious freedom laws, so being Catholic was not mandatory. The strength of the Roman Catholic Church came later, when it became a source of resistance against invaders in the 19th century. It was the result of the state being partitioned by stronger neighbors, that is, the Habsburg Monarchy, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the Russian Empire, which eliminated the existence of sovereign Poland for 123 years. This lack of independence, strengthened by Romantic nationalism and messianism that saw Poland as destined to return to glory as Christ did, contributed to the formation of a specific Polish modern national identity. What a Canadian-born scholar Geneviève Zubrzycki calls the Polish ‘national sensorium’—the visual representation and embodiment of historical narratives and national myths experienced by individuals in various settings and practices—has been saturated with Catholicism and strengthened the combination of Polish national and Catholic identity.

After Poland regained independence in 1918 after World War I, the interwar policy favoring Poles as the core of the nation contributed to what we would call an ethnic (Polish) and religious (Catholic) narrowing of the national identity. The next opportunity to strengthen its position was given to the Roma Catholic Church after World War II, from which Poland emerged as the People’s Republic of Poland­ (1947–1989)—a socialist state under the influence of the Soviet Union. The post-war order placed Poland behind the Iron Curtain and transformed it into a unified religious society, almost entirely Catholic. Several factors contributed to this, including the shift of Poland’s borders westward in exchange for multinational eastern regions—inhabited by Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, and others—which had been taken by the Soviet Union in 1939 as a result of its armed aggression on Polish territory. After the war, Poland was given the so-called Recovered Territories (‘Ziemie Odzyskane’), that is, the former eastern territories of Germany and the Free City of Danzig. After the deportation of most of their German inhabitants, the land was inhabited by Polish citizens from other regions. Resettlements in other directions also occurred that contributed to the limitation of multiculturalism, and the state policy aimed at building Polish socialist identity was not welcoming to others (as the result, for example, many of those local Jews who had survived the Holocaust left Poland).

As in other countries behind the Iron Curtain, the authorities’ goal was to secularize the state, but they never succeeded. The Roman Catholic Church resisted, seen as a defender of the Polish nation and its rights, and historians stress the important role of Karol Wojtyła, designated as Pope John Paul II, and his visit in 1979 in the mobilization of the resistance. In his first homily on Victory Square in Warsaw, he uttered the famous words based on Psalm 104: ‘Let your Spirit come down! And renew the face of the land! Of this land!’ Meaningful were also other figures of the Church, such as priest Jerzy Popiełuszko, involved in the support of the opposition and murdered in 1984 by agents of the Security Service (‘Służba Bezpieczeństwa’); repression of clergy in the eyes of the public made them martyrs and national heroes. In general, the Roman Catholic Church played a role in the formation of anti-state movements, including the famous Solidarity movement (‘Solidarność’), which emerged as a trade union in August 1980 at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk and was crucial for the changes that later resulted in a peaceful transformation of Poland into a democratic state in 1989.

Post-Transformation Roman Catholic Church

After the collapse of the socialist regime in 1989, the Roman Catholic Church aimed to preserve its public position. Despite the constitutional separation of the church and state, it was deeply involved in politics, convinced to have the duty to prevent Poles from reproducing the Western secularization, consumerism, and departure from religious values. Due to the strength of Catholicism in Poland, even leftist authorities have not avoided deals with the Church, symbolized by the Concordat of 1993: an international agreement between the Holy See of the Roman Catholic Church and Poland. In 1998, it was ratified by the lower house of the bicameral parliament of Poland (‘Sejm’), signed by the center-leftist Polish president Aleksander Kwaśniewski (in office 23 December 1995 – 23 December 2005) and Pope John Paul II, and enacted. Among other things, the Concordat guarantees that the Church is not subordinate to the state and has the unfettered right to carry out its mission in public life as well, and the state recognizes the legal personality of all Catholic Church structures established under its canon law.

It seems that one of the causes for the recent evolution of the perception of religion and Roman Catholic Church in public space by Poles was the tragedy that happened on April 10, 2010, when a Polish Air Force aircraft crashed near the Russian city of Smolensk, as the crew did not make the approach safely in the fog. Among the 96 victims were the president of Poland Lech Kaczyński, his wife Maria Kaczyńska, the former president of Poland in exile Ryszard Kaczorowski, the Chief of the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces Franciszek Gągor, other senior Polish military officers, government officials, members of parliament, clergy, and others. They were arriving from Warsaw to attend an event commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Katyń massacre, which was a series of executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intellectual elites (intelligentsia) conducted by the Soviets in the spring of 1940.

At that moment religion went public. It started from a brief moment of genuine mourning across social divides but turned into a media-political spectacle and finally conflict. Zbigniew Mikołejko, a recently deceased Polish philosopher of religion, coined the term ‘Smoleńsk religion’ (‘religia smoleńska’) to describe the phenomenon that emerged at the time: It drew on the Christian liturgy, but also referred to pagan elements, and brought together different people and social circles. The deeply politicized Smolensk religion had a purely ritualistic character, taken to the extreme through conventionalized language, gestures, behavior, and space organization; it referred to the ritualistic folk religion, also embodied in a variety of literary reactions to the catastrophe in the form of poems and books, as well as in films and paintings.

The strong polarization over relations between the state and religion appeared when a wooden cross was placed by scouts a few days after the catastrophe in front of the Presidential Palace in Warsaw. After a few months, the cross, also known as the Smolensk Cross (‘krzyż smoleński’) was still not moved from the street due to the resistance of a group of people, who called themselves defenders of the cross (‘obrońcy krzyża’). Both opponents and supporters of the cross organized demonstrations; the latter kept a 24-hour guard in front of the cross. Finally, the cross was moved to the chapel of the Presidential Palace, but the conflict over the cross had a symbolic character in the ritualization of national mourning. Some Poles saw an analogy to the placing of the Katyń crosses in the 1980s to commemorate the 1940 Soviet massacre of Poles, which was illegal under the pro-Soviet regime in socialist Poland.

The placement of the cross in a public space long after the end of the official national mourning period and the issues surrounding its relocation led to a public discussion about the way and form of commemorating the victims of the catastrophe, the presence of the cross in the public space, relations between the state and the Roman Catholic Church, and the efficiency of the authorities. The polarization has been deepened by the controversy surrounding the burial of President Lech Kaczyński, who became the main holy martyr of the Smolensk religion, fitting into the martyrological thread of Polish identity. The post-catastrophe activity of his twin brother, Jarosław Kaczyński, contributed to the apotheosis of the President’s figure. Why did this contribute to the polarization of the society? The burial of Lech Kaczyński occurred in a crypt at the royal castle on Wawel Hill in Kraków and was supposed to resemble the most famous funerals of national heroes, so some people protested, convinced that Kaczyński was not such a hero. Later, the polarization was deepened by the issue of monuments to commemorate those who died in a plane crash (for example, the controversy surrounding the approval of the Monument to the Victims of the Smolensk Tragedy in Warsaw).

The right-wing party of the president’s brother Jarosław Kaczyński, the Right and Justice Party (‘Prawo i Sprawiedliwość’, or PiS), built its popularity on the rituals of the Smoleńsk Monthly Commemorations (‘miesięcznice smoleńskie’). They turned into political practices, held every 10th day of each month in front of the Presidential Palace from 2010 to 2018. Important was the construction of events in urban spaces, the activation of community discourse, and the coverage of live media that contributed to its ritualization. The catastrophe was presented as the second Katyń and the Smoleńsk murder with Russia’s interference in the catastrophe as the heir to the Soviet Union, which was the executor of the 1940 crime. In this way, the catastrophe became another element of Polishness as a culture constantly attacked, the same as under the Partitions and World War II, which cannot survive without religion. Therefore, the ‘myth of Smoleńsk’ fits the tradition of Polish martyrdom.

The Right and Justice Party won the elections in 2015 and 2019. The Smoleńsk religion fueled the explosion of martyrological national symbolism, present in the actions of ruling politicians, new curricula for history and Polish language classes, renaming of streets, and incorporation of religious language into political discourse (for example, the way of talking about abortion). The Smoleńsk catastrophe mythology contributed to an upsurge in social emotions in all political circles. Liberal and leftist circles and anti-government opposition had to respond in a similar way, including emotional protests against tightening of the already harsh abortion policy, known as the All-Poland Women’s Strike (‘Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet’), which emerged in 2016.

Today, the Smoleńsk myth seems to have been burned out, but has contributed to the increase in emotions in politics and deep divisions in society, influencing a shift in society’s expectations of the Church. Already in 2017, a Pew Research Center report indicated that the majority of Poles perceived religious institutions as too focused on money and power, too focused on rule, or too involved with politics, and higher shares of Poles agreed with the negative views of religious institutions than with positive views. In fact, Poles were about as likely as or morelikely than Czechs to take negative views of religious institutions, even though, as I mentioned at the beginning of this article, the majority of Poles are Catholic, while most Czechs are religiously unaffiliated.

Despite alarming data, the Roman Catholic Church in Poland did not step back. To understand this attitude, we can refer to the analysis of a famous sociologist of religion, Jose Casanova, who compared historical variations in the Spanish, Brazilian, and Polish Catholic Churches. The Spanish church was the state church of a multinational empire that had been elevated to the status of the official church of the state; the Brazilian church was a colonial church that had been transformed into a state church and allied with its national development; the Catholic Church in Poland has been considered by Casanova to have unfulfilled ambitions of being a state church, protecting the nation from disintegration and foreign occupation, and opposing the introduction of a secular state. In his book Public Religions in the Modern World, for the first time published in 1994, Casanova emphasized the key role of the Church in Poland in the process of the emergence of Polish civil society and posed the question whether in the future it would consent to be separated from the nation.

This has not happened yet. However, some more recent issues than the Smoleńsk catastrophe contributed to the further polarization of Poles with regard to the Roman Catholic Church and its involvement in politics in Poland. First was an almost complete prohibition of pregnancy termination in 2020, when the Constitutional Court ruled that abortions are illegal even if there is a high probability of severe and irreversible fetal impairment or an incurable disease threatening the life of the fetus; It was followed by the publicized cases of women who died because they were denied proper medical attention due to their pregnancy and the fear of doctors to harm the fetus. The ruling has been widely questioned in legal circles due to previous right-wing government manipulation of the composition of the Constitutional Court. Massive protests swept through Poland and in a survey conducted by Ipsos, 66% of the respondents answered in the affirmative to the question whether a woman has the right to terminate a pregnancy up to the 12th week. This number was much higher than in previous years. Moreover, polls show that the youngest generation, challenging the activities of the state authorities influenced by the religious, rather than medical, view of abortion, was moving away from the Church at a rapid rate.

Second was discrimination against LGBTQ communities, according to a 2022 report by ILGA, which studied the situation of LGBT+ people around the world, Poland ranked last in the European Union in terms of protecting the rights of LGBT+ people. In Europe, lower guarantees for protecting the rights of LGBT+ people were found only in Russia and Belarus. There were also high-profile cases of public insulting of people from the LGBT+ community, in which both the Church and members of the right-wing government were involved. This included the President of Poland, Andrzej Duda (in charge since 2015), who stated that LGBT+ ‘are not people, they are ideology.’ It seems that Church and state officials underestimated changes in worldview in Polish society and the growing understanding that gender and sexual identities cannot be narrowed to a binary division of society to heterosexual men and women acting according to traditionally framed gender roles.

Third were scandals, including revealed acts of pedophilia committed by clergy. In recent years, stories of child molestation and their cover-up by Church institutions in Poland have begun to become widely known. In 2019, journalist Tomasz Sekielski posted a high-profile documentary on YouTube entitled Only Don't Tell Anyone, featuring accounts from victims of pedophile priests and their confrontations with their abusers. Furthermore, journalists revealed that Pope John Paul II was involved in hiding such crimes within church structures. The documentary Franciszkańska street 3 (‘Franciszkańska 3’—the address of the Bishop’s Palace in Kraków, the traditional residence of bishops since the late 14th century, known for being the residence of Pope John Paul II during his visits to the city), aired in the spring of 2023, brought one of the best viewing figures of the TVN24 channel. It presented the findings of journalist Marcin Gutowski's investigation of Karol Wojtyła’s support of priests who had committed crimes and his omission in tracking down the crimes. In the last year, Poles watched movies and read books and articles that revealed the negative side of the Church in Poland (including Maxima Culpa: John Paul II Would Have Known by Ekke Overbeek, published in 2023).

In the fall of 2023, the turnout for the elections was 74.38%, setting a record for the highest voter turnout in all of Poland’s post-transformation history. The right-wing PiS government lost its power due to an unexpected mobilization to participate in elections among the youngest generation and women in general, very different from the elections held four years earlier. It can be linked to the society being exhausted by the polarization the last decade brought, violations of democratic standards by the right-wing government, and the excessive involvement of the Roman Catholic Church in state affairs and private life of citizens.

Changing Religious Landscape in Poland

For some, this disappointment with the Roman Catholic Church leaves a vacuum that needs to be filled because statistics show that Poles are still interested in fulfilling their spiritual and religious needs. The Ipsos Global Religion 2023 showed that with 76% of the population associating themselves with any religion, Poland is still relatively high in global interstate comparisons. Poles claim to pray outside places of worship, for example at home (52%, many more than those who visit places of worship), and believe in God or a higher power (64%), heaven (52%), and a variety of supernatural spirits (47%). There is also a vacuum when we think about the national identity that for many used to be so closely linked to a particular religious affiliation.

Many members of Polish society are searching for alternatives to Catholicism to meet their religious and identity needs. For example, I met a tiny group reviving Unitarianism, stressing its historical roots in Polish culture through the Polish Brethren (‘Bracia Polscy’), also known as Arians, which was a nontrinitarian Protestant church that existed from the mid-16th to the mid-17th century, in times of religious freedom under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, later erased from history by the Roman Catholic Church. (Heirs to Arian ideas are active, for example, in the US.) I also met people who converted to Zoroastrianism, which is a religious minority originating from ancient Iran, seen as the oldest monotheistic religion, which greatly influenced Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but which almost completely disappeared with the spread of Islam beginning in the 7th century.

While these movements are still more curiosities than wider phenomena, too tiny to be officially registered, what must be discussed here as being more significant in numbers is a growing interest in the Slavic native faith, commonly known as Rodnovery (‘rodzimowierstwo’). Slavs (or Slavic people) are those who speak Slavic languages, which is a branch of the Indo-European language family, geographically distributed throughout the northern parts of Eurasia, predominantly in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. Poles, along with Czechs, Slovaks, and Kashubians, are classified as West Slavs.

In the sociology of religion Rodnovery is classified as a new religious movement, sometimes also the term ‘Slavic neopaganism’ is used. In a European context, neopaganism means movements that refer to local pre-Christian beliefs from the ancient and medieval periods, which critically evaluate civilization based on Christianity and reject the great monotheistic religions. Their origins can be traced back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when the earliest revival of druidic traditions emerged in England. Today, the interest in so-called ethnic religions, seen as tied to a particular ethnicity, culture, and/or geographic location, is also spreading in other countries, since 1998 organized under the European Congress of Ethnic Religions.

Rodnovery has many different branches, and in Poland it is also not homogeneous. Modern interest in the Slavic roots of Poles was activated during Romanticism (roughly 1774-1848) and fueled by the need to understand the spirit of the nation and its uniqueness, especially in the face of the Partitions that threatened its existence (1795-1918). One of the people to be mentioned is a Slavophile Zorian Dołęga-Chodakowski (1784–1825), who in 1818 published his famous pamphlet On Slavdom Before Christianity (O Sławiańszczyźnie przed chrześcijaństwem). Chodakowski traveled across rural lands and collected folk songs and other folklore data to reveal what the native Polish faith was before Christianization. His theories about ancient Slavs were not convincing for academics, but influential in Polish cultural life and literature of Romanticism.

In the interwar period, after Poland regained independence in 1918, a few different movements emerged, recognizing the importance of bringing back the pre-Christian religion of Poles or, more generally, of Slavs. Among them was Movement of Polish Nationalists Zadruga, which was a nationalist and neo-pagan movement founded in 1937, and the movement inspired by Władysław Kołodziej (1897–1978), who claimed to have founded the first ever Polish neopagan community already in 1921. Kołodziej has been known as a pioneer of Slavic neopaganism in Poland and an editor of publications focused on Slavic religion and spirituality. He was also active after World War II, but Poland under the socialist regime was not a place that encouraged the development of such activities. His movement tried to be registered as The Lechite Association of Worshippers of Światowid (‘Lechickie Stowarzyszenie Czcicieli Światowida’), but the authorities never agreed, claiming that such a movement is anachronistic and not in line with ‘the progressive nature’ of the socialist state and society, and cannot count on support from larger groups of citizens.

The situation changed after the collapse of the regime in 1989 and gradually the Internet has provided new ways of maintaining and developing religious movements. A variety of native religious movements emerged and a few of them registered with the Ministry of Internal Affairs; there are now five on the list, with three active. The milestone for modern Polish Rodnovery activities was the first annual gathering of Polish communities connected to Slavic ethnic religions in 2013 (‘Ogólnopolski Zjazd Rodzimowierczy’), with the aim of integrating their followers and unifying around common future plans. In 2015, a confederation emerged to gather different communities (‘Zrzeszenie Polskich Wspólnot Rodzimowierczych Konfederacja Rodzimowiercza’).

What we see in Poland is not a unified movement. Some are linked to current attempts to create a legitimate continuation of the ancient Slavic culture and to the belief (inconsistent with historical and archeological knowledge) in the existence of a great ancient empire of the ancestors of the present Poles, the so-called Great Lechia (‘Wielka Lechia’), later erased from memory by hostile neighbors. As in the interwar period, neopaganism sometimes connects with an extreme right-wing ideology that includes racist and fascist attitudes, popular among some Poles, especially males. However, this movement is more about politics than religion, and its negative connotations raise controversy among Poles interested in the religious and cultural aspects of the Slavic heritage. The latter has been growing rapidly during the last few years, joined by people with different views, including leftists and feminists.

One of the official organizations is the Native Polish Church (Rodzimy Kościół Polski), registered in 1995. The Native Church is an organization based on democratic rule and emphasizes values such as opposition to racism and Nazism and the spread of intolerance against people of different religions, ethnicities, or nationalities. The main aim is to gather people interested in the continuation of the ethnic faith of their Slavic ancestors. The main premise is that the fate of the world is determined by a cosmic force called the Supreme God (by many identified as the Meta-universe), whose individual manifestations are lesser gods. The names of the deities are derived from the Slavic pantheon, such as Światowid, Świętowid, and Perun. Important in this religion is contact with nature and the recognition of people as its part. The main celebrations and festivals are usually held in public to induce a sense of community among the participants. They are related to cyclic changes in nature, such as welcoming spring (‘Jare Gody’) and the summer solstice (‘Noc Kupały’).

You may have noticed that the name has been similar to that of the Native American Church in the US. However, the main difference is that in Poland it goes back to a more unknown history, so beliefs and rituals are often based on pure speculation. For example, for many interested in Slavic faith, an important religious symbol is the so-called Zbruch idol, which is a 4-sided limestone pillar discovered in the mid-19th century, now on display at the Archaeological Museum of Kraków. It has been associated with the Slavic God Światowid, but in fact there is controversy around the figure, not only including the depiction itself, but also its origin and age.

Other organizations registered with the Polish Interior Ministry include the Polish Slavic Church (‘Polski Kościół Słowiański’), the Native Faith (‘Rodzima Wiara’), and the Western Slavic Religious Union ‘Slavic Faith’ (‘Zachodniosłowiański Związek Wyznaniowy „Słowiańska Wiara”’). The fifth one was registered very recently, in January 2024: The Religious Organization of Polish Rodnovers ‘Kin’ (Związek Wyznaniowy Rodzimowierców Polskich ‘Ród’). Its leader explained that they had been trying to register it for several years, but the process was prolonged by the previous government. Interestingly, Slavic movements are also present among Poles in the diaspora, including Polish Americans in Chicago. Beliefs of various Slavic groups vary, and some uphold clearly polytheistic views.

What is particularly attractive about these religions and sets them apart from the dominant Church in Poland is an appreciation of women and a reverence for nature. Women can find roles here as spiritual guides and priestesses, which is prohibited by the Roman Catholic Church. Women’s circles or communal activities that emphasize the importance and essence of femininity, such as Slavic gymnastics, which is believed to be a practice that has survived from pre-Christian times, serving not only to care for the female body, but also for inner development, are becoming increasingly popular. Regarding nature, Slavic faith promotes attitudes very different from the Christian approach, in which the earth is subordinate to humans. Slavic movements often draw a distinction between their so-called ‘natural’ religions and ‘revealed’ religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They claim that divine beings such as the Sun or Earth are plainly visible to human beings, so there is no need for them to ‘reveal’ themselves; the ethics and lifestyles are also self-evident in Nature, so special commandments do not need to be handed down to explain them.

Ritual performances are often centered on natural forms, such as bonfires or water, and traditions are not considered closed canons. The main idea is to draw on folk traditions, rural beliefs, and customs, but it must be admitted that it is difficult for the most active young generation, especially because many (but not all) live in an urban environment, so this reconnection with the folk traditions of prior generations often must be made with some degree of conscious effort. Many communities spend a great deal of their time, energy, and resources on sacred art of many types, including graphic art, sculpture, poetry, and music.

These movements often stress that their beliefs and practices are linked to Polish identity more closely than Catholicism, which they view as a foreign institution. In the last National Census, only 2,039 (0.01%) affiliated with the Rodnovery, but this goes back to the methodological criticism of the survey: In fact, the only specified choice was the Native Faith (‘Rodzima Wiara’). Moreover, Scott Simpson, a religious scholar at Jagiellonian University, estimates that the native-born community has been growing more mature and rapidly expanding in recent years, in early 2024 reaching about 3,500 committed followers who regularly attend religious ceremonies, and many more loosely affiliated with the movement and not necessarily regularly participating in ceremonies. Many are active in informal groups outside registered associations. To what degree this phenomenon becomes accepted as part of the tapestry of Polish society, may also create new challenges for religious practice. At this time, its followers have no military chaplains or official pastoral care in universities, hospitals, or prisons, but in 2023 the media covered the funeral of the well-known Polish actor Kazimierz Mazur, which occurred at a cemetery in Wołomin near Warsaw in a form of a Slavic ceremony.

Future Directions of Change

We cannot forget that the religious landscape in Poland is changing under the influence not only of internal factors but also of the geopolitical situation. Among the factors that have definitely changed and will continue to change the religious composition of Poland is the large-scale immigration of Ukrainians. Already in 2021, the National Census indicated 33,209 members of the Greek Catholic Church, while the Church itself declared 50,000 members. These numbers have definitely increased due to the Russian attack on Ukraine, which resulted in a movement of refugees affiliated with the Greek Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church to Poland.

As we can see, the religious landscape in Poland is facing a process of change, especially among the youngest generation, which did not observe the involvement of the Roman Catholic Church in the fight against communism and whose members do not have personal memories of the figure of Polish Pope John Paul II. As Professor Irena Borowik, a Polish sociologist of religion, indicated, young people in Poland feel they are citizens of the world, not of some ‘medieval backwater,’ and do not identify with the narrative of Poland as the ‘bulwark of Christianity’ (‘przedmurze chrześcijaństwa’) that protects the world from the onslaught of secularization and a Western culture referred to by the right-wing media as a ‘civilization of death’ (‘cywilizacja śmierci’).

The number of Roman Catholics is still relatively high, but the support for the socio-political domination of the Roman Catholic Church is low, and this new reality paves the way for other religions to enter the scene. Neo-pagan movements appeal most to the need to merge religion with ethnic-national identity, and so they are experiencing growth. Social change will increasingly affect the way younger generations shape their religious life and engage in politics.

Dr. Paulina Niechciał, Assistant Professor at the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilizations, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, was Skalny Visiting Professor in Spring 2024 and taught International Relations 242W, “Identity in Poland, Tajikistan, and Iran.”