“In the Polish education system, religious education is provided by Catholic teachers” approved by the ecclesiastical authority, explains Notes From Poland (NFP). These hours of lessons – financed by the State and therefore the Polish taxpayer – are optional, “but the majority of students attend them, a trend that is experiencing a slow down,” adds NFP.
Victorious in the December 2023 elections, the Civic Coalition (KO) – a progressive party led by Donald Tusk – “wants to halve the hours allocated to Catholic education,” continues NFP. The KO also decided “to no longer include the marks obtained in catechism classes” in the overall assessment of students at the end of the school year.
It is a decision that is strongly opposed by the head of state Andrzej Duda - a member of the national-conservative Law and Justice party (PiS) - who warns that the drastic reduction in catechism hours aims to “remove from us an essential part of what makes us Polish and which we cannot renounce.”
In remarks made during a pilgrimage to Czestochowa and reported by the NFP news site, Andrzej Duda recalled that it is indeed “thanks to [religion], among other things, that we have managed to endure the darkest hours of our history, and it is only in this that we have been able to find the necessary support,” NFP also cites.
For its part, the Polish Bishops' Conference has appealed to the country's Supreme Court, which has just issued an order asking the government to suspend its project, to give the magistrates time to study the issue.
However, as Die Tagespost points out in its September 3, 2024 edition, the Donald Tusk government refuses to comply with the Supreme Court's ruling “on the grounds that it does not recognize the legitimacy of several judges who compose it.”
It is an attitude strongly criticized by Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz, Archbishop of Warsaw, one of the most heard voices on the banks of the Vistula: “In any other self-respecting state where the normal functioning of established institutions is followed, the matter would have been settled as soon as the Supreme Court's decision was made, but for us in Poland,” deplored the high prelate and quoted by NFP.
According to a latest official census conducted in 2021, and mentioned by Notes From Poland, 71% of Poles identify as Roman Catholics, compared to 88% a decade earlier. The second largest religious denomination, Orthodox Christianity, represents only 0.4% of the population.
As secularism increasingly takes over Poland, the standoff between Church and State continues to intensify and the recent ordinance on religious education, promulgated without consultation with the Church as the law requires, shows that the notion of the rule of law is of variable scope for the government led by Donald Tusk.