ROMAN CATHOLIC bishops in Poland have accused their liberal government of violating the law in pushing ahead with new restrictions on voluntary school religion.
“The National Education Ministry has not taken into account the agreement with Churches and religious associations which is required by law,” the Bishops’ Conference said in a communiqué. “We thank everyone who, through various social and civic initiatives, is supporting efforts to defend the religious upbringing of young people.”
The Conference was reacting to a new directive from the government, under the Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, in which the time allotted to religious lessons is to be halved to one hour a week from September, the start of the next academic year.
The Conference said that it would “take all possible legal actions” to block the “harmful and unjust” measure, which will also combine age-groups and place religious classes outside regular school time.
Religious classes were reintroduced to Polish state schools after the 1989 collapse of Communist rule, and are currently taught by 30,000 full-time catechists, nationwide.
Planned restrictions were announced in early 2024 by the new coalition government, alongside a liberalisation of abortion, same-sex partnerships, and other reforms.
Defending her directive as an “electoral commitment”, the Education Minister, Barbara Nowacka, said that the restrictions would help schoolchildren “for future life”.
The claim was dismissed as “a joke”, however, by the Polish Association of Lay Catechists, who vowed to appeal against it “in the international forum”, referring to religious discrimination.
In a statement, the Association said that catechism teachers were often barred from leading other classes “because they teach religion”. It said that at least 10,000 teachers would lose their jobs, despite promises of retraining and redeployment.
“Hatred and peer violence towards students attending religious classes are already a real problem,” it said. “The atmosphere of mockery towards Catholics and Christians across the country is fuelled by the media and politicians focused on ruthless political capital.”
Attendance at religious classes currently averages 78 per cent across traditionally Catholic Poland, according to a December report by the Church’s Statistics Institute. This reported that 86 per cent of parents had asked for them to continue unchanged.
The President of the Bishops’ Conference’s Commission for Catholic Education, the Bishop of Łowicz, Bishop Wojciech Osial, said last week that he had written to other European Bishops’ Conferences, explaining the “unfairness” of the Tusk government’s actions, and denying “untruthful media claims” that his Church had ever demanded compulsory religious classes.
A draft law to ban participation in the sacrament of reconciliation for under-18s is also nearing debate in the Polish parliament, having gained 13,000 support signatures.
The draft law denounces the sacrament as a “traumatic event” that “prematurely confronts minors with concepts of good and evil”, and says that RC priests lack “psychological training” to administer it appropriately.
