An Interim Report
Even though Christianity is perhaps the most persecuted religion in the world, and the severity of the living conditions of oppressed Christians is getting worse by the year, the topic hardly ever gets substantive coverage in the global news media. For those of us well-acquainted with the facts regarding the plight of Christians living in countries where they are discriminated against, it is hard to comprehend why this burning issue gets so little attention in the press. However, it is not just the mainstream media that fails to focus on this topic as much as it merits, but the academic world as well. Recognizing the lack of serious studies in this field, a group of researchers, including myself, at the Hungarian think-thank the Danube Institute has launched a research programme this year titled ‘Attacks on Christian Communities and Institutions’. Our team, led by programme director Professor Jeffrey Kaplan, will conduct fieldwork in six countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, where, in various forms, discrimination against Christians is perceptibly on the rise. The project will investigate three categories of anti-Christian violence: 1) religious persecution, which is the product of active governmental policy; 2) intercommunal violence perpetrated by sub-state actors targeting Christian communities and institutions, and 3) internecine violence in which different factions of the same religious tradition are in conflict.
At the end of April, we completed our first fieldwork trip to examine the unique situation in Poland, which has been included in our research as a case of internecine violence. Over the past few years, Catholic churches and prelates in Poland have been subject to attacks by mainly feminist and LGBTQ activists who claim to be Catholics. The first wave of such attacks started in 2020 with feminist groups protesting against the ruling of the Constitutional Court that tightened the abortion law in Poland. The second wave of attacks has been ongoing since 2021. These cases are concurrent with a new wave of attacks by LGBTQ groups protesting both against the abortion legislation and the street violence aimed at their community. During our seven-day fieldwork trip, we conducted eleven interviews with people on all sides of the conflict: members of conservative Catholic organizations, pro-life NGOs, feminists, LGBTQ activists, and the so-called ‘Church Defenders’. This followed a number of Zoom interviews conducted during the COVID lockdowns in 2020.
The question may arise: how is it possible that there are violations against Christians in a country where, according to statistical data, around 87 per cent of the population is Roman Catholic? 1Phil Forbes, ‘Poland: Religion Demographics, Data of a Very Catholic Country’, Expacts Poland
(9 March 2022), https://eacea.ec.europa.eu/national-policies/eurydice/content/population-demographic-situation-languages-and-religions-56_en. The conflict that led to the attacks on Catholic churches in fact started in 2016, when a draft bill to ban abortion was submitted to Parliament. The conservative organization Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture was the key advocate for the proposed draft bill; in the same year, it created a social movement called Civic Legislation Initiative to demand ‘equal rights for children before and after birth’. According to our interview with the president of the Ordo Iuris Institute, Jerzy Kwaśniewski, the initiative was signed by hundreds of thousands of Poles. Despite the large number of supporters of the draft bill in 2016, the proposed bill was overwhelmingly voted down in the Polish legislature as, at that time, the vocal opposition of the feminist groups was successful. 2‘Poland Abortion: Parliament Rejects Near-total Ban’, BBC News (6 October 2016), www.bbc.
com/news/world-europe-37573938, accessed 26 May 2022. In 2016, the bill was only partially supported by the Catholic Church, as our interviewee from the conservative institute Ordo Iuris noted.
Four years later, however, in 2020, the Polish Parliament did pass a strict abortion law that allows abortion only if the woman’s life or health is at risk, or if the pregnancy results from a criminal act. In 2020, after the passing of the abortion law, feminist activists outraged by the law organized the National Women’s Strike in Warsaw, which started a new wave of attacks on Catholic churches. According to a 2020 report by the Polish think-tank Laboratory of Religious Freedom, after passing the abortion law, there were 280 cases of violations of the right to religious freedom throughout Poland. 3Laboratory of Religious Freedom: ‘Report on Violations of the Right to Religious Freedom in
Poland in 2020’, Laboratorium Wolnosci Religijnej (2020), https://laboratoriumwolnosci.pl/en/
reports/, accessed 26 May 2022. Attacks varied from verbal harassment to vandalizing of churches, religious symbols, and objects, and also included physical attacks not just on clergy and laity, but also on conservative government officials and pro-life activists. Let us add that several severe attacks had already occurred before 2020. According to a report made by Ordo Iuris in 2019, besides vandalizing religious sites, violent activists regularly disturbed masses, sometimes with the intention of harming or killing priests and believers. One of the most violent attacks took place in Warsaw on 11 April 2019, when an unknown perpetrator walked into the rectory of the Masovian Voivodeship church with a knife, killed a believer, and injured the priest who tried to stop him. 4Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture, Submission of Data Collection to the Office for Democratic
Institutions and Human Rights’ (ODIHR) 2019 Annual Report on Hate Crimes, Ordo Iuris Institute
for Legal Culture (March 2020), https://ordoiuris.pl/sites/default/files/inline-files/Report_2019_
Ordo_Iuris_Institute.pdf, accessed 19 November 2022. In 2020, after the Women’s Strike, physical attacks also became more common.
Besides the controversial abortion law, there were several other drivers of the strike. The COVID-19 pandemic greatly affected the dynamic of the protests. Many young people joined the demonstrations not necessarily because they opposed the abortion law but because they were frustrated by the restrictions and the way the government handled the pandemic. Another reason why so many people attended the protests was that they felt it was a great opportunity to express their dissatisfaction with the Catholic Church, and the fact that the state and church are not fully separated in Poland.
Moreover, the protests were also motivated by the powerful documentary about the sexual abuse of children within the Polish Catholic Church, titled: Hide and Seek. 5Paulina Guzik, ‘New Documentary Highlights Abuse Cover-up in Poland’, Crux (17 May 2020),
https://cruxnow.com/church-in-europe/2020/05/new-documentary-highlights-abuse-cover-up-in-poland. This documentary, released in 2020, was watched by 2.5 million people in less than 24 hours, and today, more than 8 million people have seen it on YouTube alone. 6Zabawa w Chowanego, [online video], Sekielski (2020), www.youtube.com/
watch?v=T0ym5kPf3Vc&feature=emb_title, accessed 26 May 2022. Data suggests that in recent years many young Poles have turned away from the Church. According to a 2021 CBOS survey (Poland’s state research agency), less than 25 per cent of young people practise religion. One of Poland’s highest Church figures, Wojciech Polak, the Archbishop of Gniezno and Primate of Poland, pointed out that the result of the survey was ‘devastating’. He also admitted that the reason was that the Catholic Church failed to deal with the sexual abuses committed by some priests and archbishops, and insisted that ‘the Church has to continue to purify itself’. 7‘Polish Church in Devastating Decline, Says Catholic Primate’, La Croix Internationale (4 January
2022), https://international.la-croix.com/news/religion/polish-church-in-devastating-decline-says-catholic-primate/15430. When we asked about this phenomenon, our respondents answered in the same way, and named the increasing influence of liberal movements on the younger generations and the paedophilia scandals within the Catholic Church as an explanation for why a large number of formerly church-going youth are alienated from the Church.
When we asked our interviewees about the lack of secularization in Poland, representatives of conservative think tanks and NGOs were of the opinion that while it is true that the Catholic Church in Poland has more power than in other countries, it does not, as a rule, interfere in politics. They usually added that the Catholic Church and its teachings had always played an integral part in Polish history, and the reason why most Poles do not have a problem with the close relationship between the Church and the government is that almost 90 per cent of the Polish population is Catholic. The fact that Catholicism has a major influence in Poland is evidenced by the fact that even many feminists and LGBTQ activists who criticize the current leadership and participate in the protests identify as Catholics. In one of our interviews with an LGBTQ activist, we were told that the most prominent LGBTQ organization is the Faith and Rainbow association, which is led by an LGBTQ activist who is also an independent Catholic priest, Szymon Niemiec. 8Madeline Roache, ‘The Unorthodox Priest Leading Poland’s Fight for LGBTQ Rights’, Time (19
June 2021), https://time.com/6074339/poland-lgbtq-parade-equality-priest/.
Another interesting aspect of the attacks was the role of the so-called ‘Church Defenders’. One of the most common ways in which activists protested against the Catholic Church, as mentioned earlier, was by disrupting Sunday masses. As the police were apparently unable or, in some cases, unwilling to protect the churches from these kinds of protests, members of far-right nationalist movements organized a group known as ‘Church Defenders’, which took the matter of safeguarding churches into their own hands. Church Defenders mainly came from two far-right Catholic nationalist Polish organizations, the All-Polish Youth and the March of Independence Association. According to the spokespersons of the Defenders we interviewed, they always tried to proceed as safely and non-violently as possible. By contrast, some feminist activists we interviewed told us that some protesters whom the Defenders deemed to be too aggressive were beaten up. On the other hand, ‘Church Defenders’ belonging to the All-Polish Youth movement noted that they had been greatly outnumbered and were often physically attacked by the protesters.
According to the mainstream media, the influence of the LGBTQ movement and feminist activists has grown immensely in Poland in recent years. But members of a conservative Polish organization told us in an interview that the opposition movement has actually lost much of its popularity and impetus since 2020. In their opinion, the reason why protests no longer attract as many people as before is that after the 2020 riots, attacks on churches became even more radical; therefore, many Poles decided not to participate in these actions anymore because, as our interviewee added, ‘It’s important to understand that Polish people don’t like radicalization’. On the other hand, pro-life marches still attract masses of people in the country. According to the organizers of the pro-life Polish March for Life and Family, since the first march in 2006, the number of Poles who have joined it has increased every year. In 2022, approximately ten thousand people joined the National March for Life and Family in Warsaw. 9Justyna Galant, ‘Poland’s March for Life and Family Draws 10,000 People’, Catholic News Agency
(19 September 2022), www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/252328/polands-march-for-life-and-family-draws-10000-people.
Even though the popularity of the pro-choice riots has decreased, the attacks and violent acts against Christians by radical activists have not ceased. As a continuation of our research, we conducted an interview for the Danube Institute’s podcast called ‘Reflections from Budapest’ with the leaders of the Polish Laboratory of Religious Freedom, where we asked whether the number of the attacks and the hostility towards Christians and Catholic Churches has decreased in the last two years. 10Prof. Jeffrey Kaplan and Sáron Sugár, ‘Reflections from Budapest—Podcast with Laboratory
of Religious Freedom—Religious conflict in Poland’, Danube Institute (8 June 2022), https://
danubeinstitute.hu/hu/podcast/reflections-from-budapest-podcast-with-laboratory-of-religious-freedom-religious-conflict-in-poland, accessed 20 Nov 2022. They answered that according to their reports, the phenomenon still exists in the country. They claim that in 2021 there were 150, and in 2022, around 66 cases of aggression, which is still quite a high number. 11Laboratorium Wolnosci Religijne, Interactive Map, https://laboratoriumwolnosci.pl/en/
interaktywna-mapa-en/ , accessed 20 November 2022. However, in the last two years, attacks have mainly taken the form of vandalization of churches and religious sites, and only a few physical attacks were reported.
As mentioned at the beginning, since last year a new wave of hostility emerged due to LGBTQ activists who—in their own view—are largely discriminated against and are even physically attacked in Poland. When we asked whether this phenomenon is real or not, we were not surprised to get different answers from the conservative groups and the LGBTQ community. The LGBTQ activists emphasized that they are discriminated against and endure homophobic hate speech from the Polish government and the Roman Catholic Church, and that there are even cases of them being physically attacked. The leader of the Ordo Iuris—which, according to the LGBTQ movement, is one of the most homophobic organizations— responded that these claims present the situation of LGBTQ people in Poland in a false light. He affirms that reports show that their situation is much worse in Germany and France, underlining that in those two countries pupils are discriminated against and bullied in schools. If they were part of the LGBTQ group in Poland, nothing like this would be likely to happen. He also mentioned the controversial ‘Charter of Family Rights’ created by Ordo Iuris. While LGBTQ activists claim that the Charter is about ‘protecting children and the families from LGBTQ ‘“ideology”, preventing same-sex couples from marrying or adopting children, and banning teaching about LGBTQ issues in schools’, the leader of the Ordo Iuris declared that these accusations were false. He emphasized that the Charter does not even mention the LGBTQ movement and is non-discriminatory. 12‘The Local Government Charter of Family Rights Does Not Block Financial Support from the
European Union’, Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture (27 June 2022), https://en.ordoiuris.pl/family-and-marriage/local-government-charter-family-rights-does-not-block-financial-support, accessed
20 November 2022.In his opinion their goal is not to discriminate against LGBTQ people or to cause them harm, though he admitted that they intend to protect families from the ‘rainbow ideology’, and to prevent the ideas of the LGBTQ movement being promoted amongst the pupils in primary and secondary schools against the wishes of their parents.
Criticism of the Polish government, however, comes not only from Polish left-wing activists, but the European Union, which has supported this rhetoric for years. Since our fieldwork trip, the European Commission has released the Rule of Law Report in which, besides Hungary, Poland was singled out for not addressing ‘serious concerns’ in their juridical and media systems. The report’s main case against Poland was that the country’s legal system seemed too favourable to the right-wing government. Even though for a short period it seemed like Warsaw’s strong pro-Ukraine stance in the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine had modified the European Union’s view of the country, the Commission’s report reveals that it was not enough to make Brussels withdraw the sanctions against Poland. The present situation is that if Poland does not accept the recommendations set by the European Commission, it will not have access to the 35 billion euros from the EU’s Covid Recovery Fund. Like the Hungarian government, the Polish governement claims as well that these rulings of the European Union’s institutions are based on a ‘double standard’, and the way of reporting and how sanctions are decided depends on whether the given member state’s government is conservative or progressive. A Polish Member of the European Parliament, Ryszard Legutko from the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) Party reacted in an interview he gave to the Catholic News Agency about the Commission’s report and claimed that ‘while for countries like France or Germany, the rule of law report relied on official documents from state institutions, when it came to Poland, it was based on opinions from political opponents and hostile NGOs’. He concluded the interview with the following thought: ‘Christian democracy, in fact, has disappeared from European politics. It is, therefore, quite understandable that countries like Poland, which still has a strong Catholic culture and community and resists the current moral revolution, endures aggressive reactions from the EU, and this aggression will increase until or unless Poland capitulates. I hope it won’t.’ 13Solène Tadié, ‘Hostility toward Christian Values Is Growing in European Institutions, Polish
Politician and Philosopher Says’, Catholic News Agency (5 Aug 2022), https://www.catholicnewsagency.
com/news/251968/hostility-towards-christian-values-is-growing-in-european-institutions-polish-mep-claims, accessed 20 November 2022
- 1Phil Forbes, ‘Poland: Religion Demographics, Data of a Very Catholic Country’, Expacts Poland
(9 March 2022), https://eacea.ec.europa.eu/national-policies/eurydice/content/population-demographic-situation-languages-and-religions-56_en. - 2‘Poland Abortion: Parliament Rejects Near-total Ban’, BBC News (6 October 2016), www.bbc.
com/news/world-europe-37573938, accessed 26 May 2022. - 3Laboratory of Religious Freedom: ‘Report on Violations of the Right to Religious Freedom in
Poland in 2020’, Laboratorium Wolnosci Religijnej (2020), https://laboratoriumwolnosci.pl/en/
reports/, accessed 26 May 2022. - 4Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture, Submission of Data Collection to the Office for Democratic
Institutions and Human Rights’ (ODIHR) 2019 Annual Report on Hate Crimes, Ordo Iuris Institute
for Legal Culture (March 2020), https://ordoiuris.pl/sites/default/files/inline-files/Report_2019_
Ordo_Iuris_Institute.pdf, accessed 19 November 2022. - 5Paulina Guzik, ‘New Documentary Highlights Abuse Cover-up in Poland’, Crux (17 May 2020),
https://cruxnow.com/church-in-europe/2020/05/new-documentary-highlights-abuse-cover-up-in-poland. - 6Zabawa w Chowanego, [online video], Sekielski (2020), www.youtube.com/
watch?v=T0ym5kPf3Vc&feature=emb_title, accessed 26 May 2022. - 7‘Polish Church in Devastating Decline, Says Catholic Primate’, La Croix Internationale (4 January
2022), https://international.la-croix.com/news/religion/polish-church-in-devastating-decline-says-catholic-primate/15430. - 8Madeline Roache, ‘The Unorthodox Priest Leading Poland’s Fight for LGBTQ Rights’, Time (19
June 2021), https://time.com/6074339/poland-lgbtq-parade-equality-priest/. - 9Justyna Galant, ‘Poland’s March for Life and Family Draws 10,000 People’, Catholic News Agency
(19 September 2022), www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/252328/polands-march-for-life-and-family-draws-10000-people. - 10Prof. Jeffrey Kaplan and Sáron Sugár, ‘Reflections from Budapest—Podcast with Laboratory
of Religious Freedom—Religious conflict in Poland’, Danube Institute (8 June 2022), https://
danubeinstitute.hu/hu/podcast/reflections-from-budapest-podcast-with-laboratory-of-religious-freedom-religious-conflict-in-poland, accessed 20 Nov 2022. - 11Laboratorium Wolnosci Religijne, Interactive Map, https://laboratoriumwolnosci.pl/en/
interaktywna-mapa-en/ , accessed 20 November 2022. - 12‘The Local Government Charter of Family Rights Does Not Block Financial Support from the
European Union’, Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture (27 June 2022), https://en.ordoiuris.pl/family-and-marriage/local-government-charter-family-rights-does-not-block-financial-support, accessed
20 November 2022. - 13Solène Tadié, ‘Hostility toward Christian Values Is Growing in European Institutions, Polish
Politician and Philosopher Says’, Catholic News Agency (5 Aug 2022), https://www.catholicnewsagency.
com/news/251968/hostility-towards-christian-values-is-growing-in-european-institutions-polish-mep-claims, accessed 20 November 2022