This is what I have experienced in my Catholic life in America. We have a huge number of people who were "raised Catholic" or attended Catholic schools but have no real interest in the faith. If you were to ask them their religion, they would say "Catholic", but they essentially live the secular life of a normal American.
I see that with many protestants, they vaguely identify with Jesus, and take the protestant pre-destination doctrine as a 'free to sin whenever' card, because grace is enough.
Most protestants I know see no problem with fornication, swearing, masturbation etc.
I certainly agree with you about Catholic America …… I am 81 years old….when I was in grade school, 4th grade to be exact, we had 2 fourth grades with 40 children in each class, with only one nun in each room, no “aides” and children who behaved.
Today, most of my “Catholic “ friends, no longer attend Mass or have changed to other religions ….. it’s a sad state of affairs and I blame it on Modernism, among other things, the synthesis of all errors, that was certainly made manifest with the Second Vatican Council.
God’s ways are mysterious and for our part we just must trust and pray, pray, pray as Our Lady of Fatima requested.
Yes, to sum it up in a single word, "apathy". I've heard similar stories from those who were around before the council. But as you say, we can't despair.
Thank you Mr. Leusink for your essay. It reflects very well the state of Catholicism in Poland. Lack of catechization, of reverence, Holy Communion standing.. Thank God the FSSPX apostolate is growing. There are around 40 chapels spread across the country. FSSPX lacks priests to answer the demands of the laity.Some NO priests are switching to FSSPX. There is hope.
Unfortunately - apart from peculiar sources ( e.g. “lavender” pseudo-Catholic D. Gospodarek) I see in the article a misunderstanding of Catholicism in Poland. Some example (as the articles is quite long):
1) “The Roman Catholic Church was the only national institution the communists never managed to fully absorb, and its head standing in front of a million Poles that morning was proof Poland could produce a figure the whole world had to take seriously” - what matters in Catholicism is whether a country can produce a figure that takes God seriously and is able to attract other people to such an attitude. Poland many times in its over 1000-year history produced such figures, called traditionally: saints. In the 20th century Fr. Maximilian Maria Kolbe was such a person - attracting not only Poland to the Catholic Faith but also Japan and other countries.
2) “Forty-two years later, Poland ran a census that answered how effective his prayer has been”
No, it did not answer. Although JPII words can be interpreted in many ways (political renewal is one of them) no answer to them is given by 2021/2022 NO opinion polls or Polish state census. To give just one of many reasons: some Catholics in Poland just ignored the census arranged by soft-totalitarian state during the scandal of false pandemics, tending by its far-reaching questions to invigilate Polish families, the other Poles just gave false answers, and - as the article itself notices (but derives a wrong, non-sequitur conclusion) - 20.5 % declined to provide an answer here. No it does not mean (as the article claims) that “That means that one in five Poles, when asked directly, chose not to say no, but to not chose anything at all” - it just means that they refused to answer the state here.
As for NO Mass attendance/communion figure it is also no measure of Catholicism at all - as, for example, today attendants of Sunday services/communion takers do not necessarily believe in Catholic dogmas. At the same time amidst non-attendants there can be people believing in them but disappointed with NO scandals .
3) “In Poland the arguing stopped, like in many Eastern European countries. People became indifferent, the way they did in every other formerly Catholic country in Europe, like the Netherlands.”
Here, the diagnosis is utterly false, considering, that the shock of the false pandemics and NO bishops stance during it (i.e obedience to the totalitarianism of the state/WHO) caused an unprecedented influx of people from NO churches to traditional Catholic chapels/churches, including but not limited to SSPX, earlier haunted with the myth/ghost of JPII in Poland. Consequently, it caused an unprecedented expansion of SSPX chapels (e.g. seven new chapels in 2022, in 2021-2023 13 priests of NO joined SSPX in Poland) and even some church building projects - fruits of the above are in progress.
4) “For 123 years, so from 1795 to 1918, Poland did not even exist. It was carved somewhere between the Habsburg Monarchy, Prussia, and the Russian Empire.”
In fact, it was not '“carved” but partitioned by the deal of three above superpowers: Tsaropapist (Moscow), Protestant (Prussia) and the third one that sold the Catholic past and the concept of Christendom for new freemasonic “enlightment” ideology. The consequences were tremendous, including the rise of revolutionary sentiments in Poles who, looking for allies to help them to restore their country, fancied the French Republic and then its successor - Empire of Bonaparte. Which, in the long distance, led to the “spirit of JPII” pontificate and embrace of the “post-conciliar” revolution. The subject is very broad and interesting.
5) “After 1945, Poland’s borders shifted west, and its prewar religious plurality was largely deported or absorbed elsewhere. So the postwar state found itself governing one of the world’s most homogeneously Catholic countries, almost by accident.”
“Pre-WWII religious plurality” was a product of 123 years of Austria/Prussia[Germany of Bismarck] &Russia rule over these lands. In the 1780’s Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth was essentially Catholic (Roman or Eastern) and Catholicism was the officially ruling religion (with small Protestant, Eastern Schismatic and Jewish minorities). However, partitions caused e.g. an influx of Protestant settlers (mainly from Prussia), “schismatisation” of Brest union, Eastern Catholics persecuted methodically by Tsars and expansion of the Jews, in particular in large cities and towns. To give an example - the native town of JPII Wadowice had no Jews in the 1850’s and at the end of the century the Jewish community was large enough to build a synagogue which laid the basis for the popular JPII myth that his town was traditionally multicultural.
No religious plurality was deported from Poland: many Jews were killed by Germans, some of them left later e.g. for the newly created Zionist State and eastern lands with Eastern Schismatics were just taken away.
Another problem is the massacre of Polish Catholics, including also martyrdom of Catholic priests, monks, friars and nuns in the 1940’s which caused “one of the world’s most homogeneously Catholic countries” to be in a large part deprived of its Catholic substance (and the most valuable, heroic part of it). If you do not notice the above fact (and there is no mention of it in the article) you will not understand what happened later in Poland.
6) “The sociologist José Casanova, compared Poland’s Church to Spain’s and Brazil’s, and described it as ‘a church carrying the unfulfilled ambition of a state church, protecting a nation the state itself was not permitted to protect”
This remark seems to come from the false revolutionary freemasonic concept of religious liberty / separation of the Church and State. In Catholicism the Church always plays an important role in the state. It has nothing to do with the “state church” (in the caesaropapist meaning) or “ambitions” fulfilled or not - this is how Catholicism has been working for centuries (not to be mistaken with modern flaws of post-conciliar revolution).
Similarly, a thesis that “an episcopate had made itself a political actor instead of a moral one” smells with the false opposition of politics and morals (when in fact politics should be a tool/way to the morals)
7) “The date when the Catholic Church became obsolete arrived around 1989.”
Objectively, around 1989 there came a time when the Catholic Church was even more needed than in years of People’s Republic of Poland. However, the post-conciliar revolution disabled it - it lost capacity to act at the above breakthrough moment.
8) “The Catholic Church’s own reporting around a 2021 census named them as a main factor in the declining attachment of the Polish people.”
Actually, Catholics (used to be called by revolutionaries: traditional) in Poland were laughing and weeping at the same time looking at tragifarcial communications from post-conciliar hierarchy. The same hierarchy that earlier had dispensed the NO faithful from going to Masses/sacraments and limited or even blocked access to sacrament - which, considering the NO education to disposition for sloth and lukewarmness, was sure to produce consequences.
In particular quoting an opinion of His Excellency W. Polak - one of chief hirelings and destroyers in Poland is quite funny.
9) “The second test was on the 22nd of October in 2020, when Poland’s Constitutional Court ruled that permitting abortion on grounds of foetal impairment was itself discrimination against the disabled, and struck the exception from the law. Legal scholars had already questioned the court’s composition, citing government influence over recent appointments. This court ruling produced the largest protests Poland had seen in decades.”
Again, the above is taken out of context. The context is: the political clique ruling in Poland in 2015-2022 had since 2015 up to 2020: the majority in both houses of Parliament and their President which enabled them to do anything with the abortion legislation.
However, they decide to run it through the Constitutional Tribunal (indeed - with ongoing disputes regarding validity ) just together with another wave of decreted Covid paranoia closing schools, cemeteries (just before All Saints and All Souls Days - very important in Polish culture) and limiting access to other places (churches included). Then, protests created by the Left was utilised as a kind of “safety valve” to lower the tension. Then, after them the same false-Right ruling party introduced into practice so-called “physical health” as one of legal grounds for abortion.
10) “A 2023 Ipsos study found the generational gap in religious commitment in Poland to be the widest recorded anywhere in their survey: Young Poles were leaving Catholicism faster than their peers almost everywhere else on the planet”
Yes, young Poles were and are leaving Novus Ordo church - but the process has begun a long time ago. Even in the 1990’s in Polish schools post-conciliar Confirmation was nicknamed “sacrament of farewell to the church”. So the fact that: “: In 1992, 94 percent of Poles called themselves ‘religious believers.’” actually means nothing - in the West some percent of women call themselves men or vice versa but it has nothing to do with reality.
As for seminaries: (“The numbers are painful. Poland will ordain 196 new priests in 2026, which is higher than most European countries, but its lowest total this century, down from 208 last year and 235 the year before (according to diocesan announcements compiled by The Pillar.)”)
(1) 2026 ordinations figures are in part a result of 2020-2021 pandemic lunacy - for example in 2023 301 young men went to NO seminaries in Poland which would be visible in ordination figures in 2028-2029
(2) we are talking about NO seminaries i.e. with heterodox formation involving lectures by rabbis, pastors, ecumenical&dialogue, etc.a
Yes, yes, thank you again for the reporting and interpretation that got Poland to this point in time. Everybody seems to do that, but few put forth recommendations. What is the solution, what is YOUR prescription to achieve what you define as the optimal outcome, or a set of good outcomes based on different scenarios? What barriers exist, and to what degree can they be destroyed and how is that done to advance your optimal outcome?
p.s. My claim is not that nobody in Poland is Catholic. It is that the 71% Catholics on paper, and only 14% communicants are not the same country.
@Peter Kwasniewski
I can see this note, but if I click on the link, I get the same message as always: “This site can’t be reached
Check if there is a typo in http://heritagestandard.eu.
If spelling is correct, try running Windows Network Diagnostics.
DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN”
There is, it should be HTTPS, https://heritagestandard.eu/
This is what I have experienced in my Catholic life in America. We have a huge number of people who were "raised Catholic" or attended Catholic schools but have no real interest in the faith. If you were to ask them their religion, they would say "Catholic", but they essentially live the secular life of a normal American.
I see that with many protestants, they vaguely identify with Jesus, and take the protestant pre-destination doctrine as a 'free to sin whenever' card, because grace is enough.
Most protestants I know see no problem with fornication, swearing, masturbation etc.
Yes, it's the sola fide doctrine run amok.
I certainly agree with you about Catholic America …… I am 81 years old….when I was in grade school, 4th grade to be exact, we had 2 fourth grades with 40 children in each class, with only one nun in each room, no “aides” and children who behaved.
Today, most of my “Catholic “ friends, no longer attend Mass or have changed to other religions ….. it’s a sad state of affairs and I blame it on Modernism, among other things, the synthesis of all errors, that was certainly made manifest with the Second Vatican Council.
God’s ways are mysterious and for our part we just must trust and pray, pray, pray as Our Lady of Fatima requested.
Yes, to sum it up in a single word, "apathy". I've heard similar stories from those who were around before the council. But as you say, we can't despair.
Thank you Mr. Leusink for your essay. It reflects very well the state of Catholicism in Poland. Lack of catechization, of reverence, Holy Communion standing.. Thank God the FSSPX apostolate is growing. There are around 40 chapels spread across the country. FSSPX lacks priests to answer the demands of the laity.Some NO priests are switching to FSSPX. There is hope.
Interesting question: did Poland have more sovereignty under the Soviets or the Americans? I truly don't know the answer.
Secularism did in 20 years what state atheism could not achieve in 50 years
Nothing an Inquisition couldn’t solve. Maybe with a pogrom or two for good measure.
There aren’t many Jews left in Poland thankfully. Moczar made sure to get rid of them.
Unfortunately - apart from peculiar sources ( e.g. “lavender” pseudo-Catholic D. Gospodarek) I see in the article a misunderstanding of Catholicism in Poland. Some example (as the articles is quite long):
1) “The Roman Catholic Church was the only national institution the communists never managed to fully absorb, and its head standing in front of a million Poles that morning was proof Poland could produce a figure the whole world had to take seriously” - what matters in Catholicism is whether a country can produce a figure that takes God seriously and is able to attract other people to such an attitude. Poland many times in its over 1000-year history produced such figures, called traditionally: saints. In the 20th century Fr. Maximilian Maria Kolbe was such a person - attracting not only Poland to the Catholic Faith but also Japan and other countries.
2) “Forty-two years later, Poland ran a census that answered how effective his prayer has been”
No, it did not answer. Although JPII words can be interpreted in many ways (political renewal is one of them) no answer to them is given by 2021/2022 NO opinion polls or Polish state census. To give just one of many reasons: some Catholics in Poland just ignored the census arranged by soft-totalitarian state during the scandal of false pandemics, tending by its far-reaching questions to invigilate Polish families, the other Poles just gave false answers, and - as the article itself notices (but derives a wrong, non-sequitur conclusion) - 20.5 % declined to provide an answer here. No it does not mean (as the article claims) that “That means that one in five Poles, when asked directly, chose not to say no, but to not chose anything at all” - it just means that they refused to answer the state here.
As for NO Mass attendance/communion figure it is also no measure of Catholicism at all - as, for example, today attendants of Sunday services/communion takers do not necessarily believe in Catholic dogmas. At the same time amidst non-attendants there can be people believing in them but disappointed with NO scandals .
3) “In Poland the arguing stopped, like in many Eastern European countries. People became indifferent, the way they did in every other formerly Catholic country in Europe, like the Netherlands.”
Here, the diagnosis is utterly false, considering, that the shock of the false pandemics and NO bishops stance during it (i.e obedience to the totalitarianism of the state/WHO) caused an unprecedented influx of people from NO churches to traditional Catholic chapels/churches, including but not limited to SSPX, earlier haunted with the myth/ghost of JPII in Poland. Consequently, it caused an unprecedented expansion of SSPX chapels (e.g. seven new chapels in 2022, in 2021-2023 13 priests of NO joined SSPX in Poland) and even some church building projects - fruits of the above are in progress.
4) “For 123 years, so from 1795 to 1918, Poland did not even exist. It was carved somewhere between the Habsburg Monarchy, Prussia, and the Russian Empire.”
In fact, it was not '“carved” but partitioned by the deal of three above superpowers: Tsaropapist (Moscow), Protestant (Prussia) and the third one that sold the Catholic past and the concept of Christendom for new freemasonic “enlightment” ideology. The consequences were tremendous, including the rise of revolutionary sentiments in Poles who, looking for allies to help them to restore their country, fancied the French Republic and then its successor - Empire of Bonaparte. Which, in the long distance, led to the “spirit of JPII” pontificate and embrace of the “post-conciliar” revolution. The subject is very broad and interesting.
5) “After 1945, Poland’s borders shifted west, and its prewar religious plurality was largely deported or absorbed elsewhere. So the postwar state found itself governing one of the world’s most homogeneously Catholic countries, almost by accident.”
“Pre-WWII religious plurality” was a product of 123 years of Austria/Prussia[Germany of Bismarck] &Russia rule over these lands. In the 1780’s Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth was essentially Catholic (Roman or Eastern) and Catholicism was the officially ruling religion (with small Protestant, Eastern Schismatic and Jewish minorities). However, partitions caused e.g. an influx of Protestant settlers (mainly from Prussia), “schismatisation” of Brest union, Eastern Catholics persecuted methodically by Tsars and expansion of the Jews, in particular in large cities and towns. To give an example - the native town of JPII Wadowice had no Jews in the 1850’s and at the end of the century the Jewish community was large enough to build a synagogue which laid the basis for the popular JPII myth that his town was traditionally multicultural.
No religious plurality was deported from Poland: many Jews were killed by Germans, some of them left later e.g. for the newly created Zionist State and eastern lands with Eastern Schismatics were just taken away.
Another problem is the massacre of Polish Catholics, including also martyrdom of Catholic priests, monks, friars and nuns in the 1940’s which caused “one of the world’s most homogeneously Catholic countries” to be in a large part deprived of its Catholic substance (and the most valuable, heroic part of it). If you do not notice the above fact (and there is no mention of it in the article) you will not understand what happened later in Poland.
6) “The sociologist José Casanova, compared Poland’s Church to Spain’s and Brazil’s, and described it as ‘a church carrying the unfulfilled ambition of a state church, protecting a nation the state itself was not permitted to protect”
This remark seems to come from the false revolutionary freemasonic concept of religious liberty / separation of the Church and State. In Catholicism the Church always plays an important role in the state. It has nothing to do with the “state church” (in the caesaropapist meaning) or “ambitions” fulfilled or not - this is how Catholicism has been working for centuries (not to be mistaken with modern flaws of post-conciliar revolution).
Similarly, a thesis that “an episcopate had made itself a political actor instead of a moral one” smells with the false opposition of politics and morals (when in fact politics should be a tool/way to the morals)
7) “The date when the Catholic Church became obsolete arrived around 1989.”
Objectively, around 1989 there came a time when the Catholic Church was even more needed than in years of People’s Republic of Poland. However, the post-conciliar revolution disabled it - it lost capacity to act at the above breakthrough moment.
8) “The Catholic Church’s own reporting around a 2021 census named them as a main factor in the declining attachment of the Polish people.”
Actually, Catholics (used to be called by revolutionaries: traditional) in Poland were laughing and weeping at the same time looking at tragifarcial communications from post-conciliar hierarchy. The same hierarchy that earlier had dispensed the NO faithful from going to Masses/sacraments and limited or even blocked access to sacrament - which, considering the NO education to disposition for sloth and lukewarmness, was sure to produce consequences.
In particular quoting an opinion of His Excellency W. Polak - one of chief hirelings and destroyers in Poland is quite funny.
9) “The second test was on the 22nd of October in 2020, when Poland’s Constitutional Court ruled that permitting abortion on grounds of foetal impairment was itself discrimination against the disabled, and struck the exception from the law. Legal scholars had already questioned the court’s composition, citing government influence over recent appointments. This court ruling produced the largest protests Poland had seen in decades.”
Again, the above is taken out of context. The context is: the political clique ruling in Poland in 2015-2022 had since 2015 up to 2020: the majority in both houses of Parliament and their President which enabled them to do anything with the abortion legislation.
However, they decide to run it through the Constitutional Tribunal (indeed - with ongoing disputes regarding validity ) just together with another wave of decreted Covid paranoia closing schools, cemeteries (just before All Saints and All Souls Days - very important in Polish culture) and limiting access to other places (churches included). Then, protests created by the Left was utilised as a kind of “safety valve” to lower the tension. Then, after them the same false-Right ruling party introduced into practice so-called “physical health” as one of legal grounds for abortion.
10) “A 2023 Ipsos study found the generational gap in religious commitment in Poland to be the widest recorded anywhere in their survey: Young Poles were leaving Catholicism faster than their peers almost everywhere else on the planet”
Yes, young Poles were and are leaving Novus Ordo church - but the process has begun a long time ago. Even in the 1990’s in Polish schools post-conciliar Confirmation was nicknamed “sacrament of farewell to the church”. So the fact that: “: In 1992, 94 percent of Poles called themselves ‘religious believers.’” actually means nothing - in the West some percent of women call themselves men or vice versa but it has nothing to do with reality.
As for seminaries: (“The numbers are painful. Poland will ordain 196 new priests in 2026, which is higher than most European countries, but its lowest total this century, down from 208 last year and 235 the year before (according to diocesan announcements compiled by The Pillar.)”)
(1) 2026 ordinations figures are in part a result of 2020-2021 pandemic lunacy - for example in 2023 301 young men went to NO seminaries in Poland which would be visible in ordination figures in 2028-2029
(2) we are talking about NO seminaries i.e. with heterodox formation involving lectures by rabbis, pastors, ecumenical&dialogue, etc.a
Don't forget sex. Who wants to be told to refrain from sex before marriage?
Yes, yes, thank you again for the reporting and interpretation that got Poland to this point in time. Everybody seems to do that, but few put forth recommendations. What is the solution, what is YOUR prescription to achieve what you define as the optimal outcome, or a set of good outcomes based on different scenarios? What barriers exist, and to what degree can they be destroyed and how is that done to advance your optimal outcome?
Also makes me wonder about the damaging effects of the “Divine Mercy” devotion on Poland - a Trojan horse?