This weekend, I went to Warsaw to speak at a conference. After the panel, I had a beer with some Polish Catholics who are all faithfully Orthodox. Another time, I was horrified to hear that Poland’s Catholicism is on the decline. Young Polish Catholics predicted that Poland would soon be like Ireland.
This is something that I have difficulty understanding, especially since I grew up in the John Paul II era and have come to love and admire Polish people. This is a claim I have heard many times from young Catholics, who claim the signs are everywhere but don’t believe it. ( The pace of the apostasy has increased in recent years due to stricter abortion laws.
Anti-Christian acts are more frequent. One young woman said that she is part of a group of young Catholics involved in the arts. One of their group was an actress who was asked by her theatrical director to take part in an exercise where the director projected a naked Christ onto her screen. She was then instructed to improvise like she were sexually enamored by Jesus’s body. This kind of thing is more common in this area, according to the young woman who told me the story.
Most people I spoke with said that they no longer have an interest in Christianity. I asked them why. We didn’t have the time to discuss as much as we would have liked. A few of them were hurrying off to the late mass. But there was consensus at the table that the institutional church was in decline. I shared with them something that a prominent Benedictine monk from Krakow had said to me in 2019, that the “vainglory” of the bishops was the main reason for the decline. There were many nodding heads at the table.
One woman complained that clergy were just doing the bare minimum. She said, “The priests tells us what to do, but there’s no more to it.”
He said that priests behave like managers of the Sacrament Factory, which I had called him before. He stated, “It is not more important than the Eucharist. But there must be more to the Christian life.”
Although I was not taking notes, I do recall the general feeling at the table that Christianity is boring and dull, and that young people don’t see the point. One of the women at the table stated, “We are so desperate to have leadership in the Polish Church, but it’s just isn’t there.” On the way back to my hotel, I was struck by what Father WlodzimierzZatorski, a Benedictine (who later died of Covid), had said to me in 2019. I understood “vainglory among the bishops” to refer to the fact that the Catholic bishops did not adapt to the new environment after Communism fell. They were proud and complacent.
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My book The Benedict Option can be found here in Polish. It has inspired several communities. This was the one Father Zatorski founded. This one appears to have been started by lay Catholics. They are blessed and may God bless them. This is what it takes to keep the faith alive. Yesterday, a young Catholic woman, who didn’t know anything about my book, said to me, “You know, Pope Benedict stated it would be like that.” Yes, I did tell her. I quoted him in the Benedict Option warning me to prepare.
Let me once again remind religious readers (not only Christians!) Refusing to accept complacency is crucial. A reader from America, an Evangelical, told me recently about how his conservative denomination was relatively wealthy but is starting to crumble because its leadership doesn’t know how to reach young people. They are spending their money on things that worked in the 1980s and 90s because that was when the leadership class was young. They know it all, and they don’t think they should change. The reader wasn’t suggesting any theological changes, but only that the world that young people live in today is very different than that of their leaders. The reader believes that the leadership class thinks everything will be fine if they keep doing the same thing they have always done. It seems that vainglory isn’t just a problem for the Polish Catholic bishops.
