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The Polish Church Faces New Challenges
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18433 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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9 / 1990 |
2,959 Words |
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Maya Latynski
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“Life in freedom is more difficult. One of the illusions from which we are waking up now promised that everything would be fine. No, everything will be more difficult because it will be for real and before it was just make-believe.”
- Interview with Jan Andrej Kloczowski, “Bedzie trudniej” (Things will be more difficult).
With communism out of power in Poland, the decades-long war between church and state is over. The Roman Catholic Church is reshaping its mission for the postcommunist era from a political one to a more traditional social and spiritual one. After decades of gaining extraordinary influence as the only institution able to articulate and defend civil and human rights in opposition to a repressive government, the Catholic Church is turning its energies to keeping the faith alive, as well as helping the Poles build a democratic society. This change in its mission will provide a challenge equal to the struggles with past communist regimes.
On the face of it, the church has not been very noticeable in the whirlwind of activity that throughout 1989 and 1990 has accompanied the emergence of democratic era. While strange for Poland, this is actually perfectly normal. In a democratic country, after all, a church should play only a minimal political role. Now it needs to do much - socially by coming to the aid of a population suffering materially from the abrupt transition to a market economy, and spiritually by helping people overcome the psychological scars and habits of 45 years of near-totalitarian rule.
And yet, the church does continue to play an indispensable political role in difficult times, as it did on July 7 when, at the peak of the first political crisis within Solidarity, it played host to talks between Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, who attempted to resolve their differences. The need for such mediation will inevitably grow as the honeymoon of unity of the first half-year of the Solidarity government dissipates, and the church will be the natural authority to turn to.
The church's shift to primarily social and spiritual concerns can be seen most clearly in the published proceedings of the March 1990 conference of Polish bishops, one of the first since the overthrow of communism. The proceedings included statements on youth, AIDS, and ministering to Catholics in the Soviet Union.
The church's implicit support for the budding democracy is evident. Knowing that many people have reason to be apathetic or skeptical about the recent political changes, priests have quite actively encouraged people to vote in both the June 1989 parliamentary elections and in the May 1990 local government elections. In some cases, they urged their parishioners to vote for particular candidates, in others simply to go to the polls and choose for themselves. Another example of the church's continuing interest in political issues was a statement made at the March bishops' conference stressing that German reunification must take place within the broader context of European integration. This particular issue is of special importance to the church, which was instrumental in working with the West German bishops to bring about Polish-German reconciliation already in 1965, to the great ire of the Polish government of that period. The difference between the church's political statements now and in
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