Less than a third of Catholics in Poland regularly attend Mass, according to the latest church census.
The count for 2024 published this month showed Sunday attendance of 29 per cent, down from more than 50 per cent in the 1980s.
The percentage of Catholics receiving communion was around 14 per cent, an increase on previous years.
“The biggest drop occurred during the pandemic. Various hypotheses could be formulated here, because even during the pandemic, the rate was below 40 per cent, and now it’s 29 per cent, so that’s a significant change,” Marcin Jewdokimow, director of the Institute of Statistics of the Catholic Church, told the RMF24 radio station.
The Polish Church census is conducted annually in mid-October and results from the more than 10,500 parishes are processed and published the following year. In the 2021 National Census, 27.1 million Poles, or 71.3 per cent of the population, declared membership in the Roman Catholic Church, but Mass attendance and trust in the institution have declined dramatically.
Last month just one third of Poles said they trust the Church, a record low, according to research by the Polish Institute for Market and Social Research Foundation (IBRiS) for the Polish Press Agency.
The poll conducted in mid-September found that the percentage of Poles “strongly” or “rather strongly” declaring trust in the Church fell by over 22 points, from 58 per cent in September 2016 to 35.1 per cent in 2025.
The level of distrust has almost doubled over the same period, leaping from 24.2 per cent to 47.1 per cent. Factors contributing to this trend include the Church’s sex abuse scandals and recent restrictive abortion laws, controversy over which has particularly affected younger generations’ religious practice.
“I beat my breast, even though I know that this is not enough,” said Bishop Artur Ważny of Sosnowiec in a response on social media.
“No more distorting reality. The Church is an authority only for a handful of Poles,” wrote Tomasz Krzyżak, editor of the journal Rzeczpospolita, noting that at the fall of communism in 1989, over 90 per cent of Poles said they trusted the Church.