If I were a Polish Catholic, I might feel as if the world were crumbling around me.
First, in parliamentary elections last year, Palikot's Movement – an openly anti-clerical, left-wing, populist party – became the third strongest in the Polish Sejm.
Second, the liberal government of Donald Tusk last week proposed to close the fund that is used to pay priests’ pensions and provides the Catholic Church and other religious bodies a sense of financial stability.
And third, in the forthcoming digitalization of Polish television, space couldn’t be found for a license for Trwam, the ultra-conservative, Catholic television station.
Thousands of people in Gdansk, Lublin, and Bialystok protested the decision on 18 March.
From that short summary, it seems that the bond between the nation and the church – which helped the Poles to survive two centuries without their own state while retaining their language and culture – has been frayed.
At the same time, that bond had created one of the strongest bastions of Catholicism on a continent where over the last two centuries the trend has been rather toward secularism and believers leaving the church’s womb.
The reality is probably that the Catholic Church in Poland has been modernizing more slowly than the state as Poles catch up on what they “missed,” mainly because of external circumstances, in the 19th and 20 centuries.
The liberal Catholic intellectual Jaroslaw Makowski has explained the unexpected electoral success of the political clown Janusz Palikot, built mainly on the votes of young voters, as the younger generation, which grew up after 1989, loving above all its freedom, including the freedom to choose its faith.
So these young people find repugnant the automatic assumption that they must attend mandatory religion classes or go to church. And as the time passes from his death, the magic of the Polish Pope John Paul II has been fading.
“Instead of the John Paul II generation, we have the generation of Janusz Palikot,” Makowski said at a recent event at the Polish Institute in Prague.
We Czechs know well the debate on the financing of the church and the restitution of its assets. In Poland – where the church also lost property under the communists but still created a counterweight to the communist regime – the situation is similar.
Last week, in the course of a wider discussion about pension reform, Tusk’s government proposed to abolish the “church fund,” created by the communists and now forming part of the state budget. That fund covers the normal operations of religious institutions, not only the Catholic Church, including paying for pensions.
According to the ideas tossed around in the early 1990s, the fund’s coffers should be filled with money from the operation of church property that had been confiscated under the old regime. But a list of such property doesn’t exist, so normally the fund has received a contribution from the state budget.
But now Tusk’s government is proposing that the fund cease to exist. Instead, from 2013, taxpayers would be given the opportunity to direct .3 percent of their taxes to a chosen religion.
If we believe the Polish Catholic press, then this plan was presented as a done deal last week to church representatives in the office of the prime minister, but later both sides began to speak of it as a basis for negotiations.
Within the broader framework of the expected and long overdue pension reform, Tusk thus planted the seeds of a debate about the financing of religious organizations when he uttered a sentence last week in the Sejm that heated the blood of Catholic journalists.
“I just want to have fulfilled the basic requirements of social justice at a time when we are trying to improve the pension system,” Tusk said, “so that there aren’t groups to which the state behaves more generously or omits from the obligation to save for their own retirement.”
To that, it’s possible to add, rhetorically, the reaction of the Polish primate, Archbishop Jozef Kowalczyk: “Will we punish the church for what good it has done and is doing for the country?” Maybe he was taken aback by the proposal’s new requirement that the church make an inventory of its property and run its accounting according to a single standard.
That Tusk would do battle on pensions with railroad workers, soldiers, and trade unionists was somehow expected. Viewed in that way, the church is just another interest group extending its hand to a state that simply can’t afford to pay so much.
Nominally 90 percent of Poles are Catholics, but only 40 percent of those attend church regularly.
The Catholic Church receives 90 million zlotys ($29 million) a year.
According to the conservative Rzeczpospolita newspaper, the government has estimated that the new system could bring in 100 million zlotys per year for all religions combined.
The subtext of the dispute is not only the future of the Polish pension system, but the interconnectedness between the more conservative part of the church and the political opposition, i.e. the Law and Justice Party led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
Those relationships materialized in the recent protests against the refusal of a digital television license to the Trwam station.
Someone who is rooting strongly for Tusk could say that if his maneuvers with pensions and religious organizations are successful, then the relationship of Poles to the church would change about as radically as the historically backward Polish infrastructure has been transformed with billions of euros from the common treasury of the European Union.