Donald Tusk and his allies want to speed things up, particularly regarding relations with the Church.
The government wants the financing of the Church to come through the goodwill of taxpayers.
The center-left Polish government is planning a comprehensive reform of church financing, as reported by katholisch.de.
After a cabinet meeting on December 27, the prime minister said funding for religious communities would be done on a voluntary basis.
According to KNA, the state should no longer pay pensions and social insurance for members of the clergy.
Five ministers are responsible for preparing the modification of the financing system or Church funds.
The reform assumes that members are responsible for their churches. The decision to pay religious communities must come “to the believers and not to the State.”
In 2023, the Polish state paid a record sum of almost 50 million euros to the Church fund. This fund was created in 1950 to compensate for the expropriation of religious communities at the time.
This fund is used to pay retirement contributions and other social insurance for a large part of the clergy of all denominations as well as the maintenance costs of churches.
There is no church tax in Poland.
For the rest, the various denominations finance themselves mainly through collections and donations.
Donald Tusk's liberal party, the Civic Platform, had promised during the electoral campaign to abolish the ecclesiastical fund, just like its current partners in government, the Left Alliance and the Poland 2050 party.
Until now, the PSL has wanted to maintain Church funds.
In 2013, the former Tusk government agreed with the Catholic Church to replace the fund with a voluntary ecclesiastical contribution from taxpayers of 0.5% of the tax burden, according to the Italian model.
But it did not carry out the project following strong criticism.