IN OCTOBER LAST year, protesters stood silently in the streets of Kraków and Szczecin in Poland. This gathering was not criticizing the ruling political party. Instead, their banners bore the slogan “We Want the Church Back,” echoing “We Are the Church” movements directed at the Catholic hierarchy by laity around the world.
These Roman Catholics call to account sermons offered by conservative Polish clergy. The clerical leadership is “dividing people and spreading hostility toward others instead of teaching about our merciful God,” the group explained in a petition. Many Catholics in Poland feel homeless because they experience hostility, condemnation, and exclusion from the pulpit. They want to publicly demonstrate that the Catholic Church is larger than priests and bishops; that everyone, regardless of their sexual orientation or minority status, should be able to find a place in the church that calls itself catholic (which means “universal”). Finally, they demand that the priests and bishops not reject Pope Francis’ message and that Catholic social teaching, the church doctrines on human dignity and common good in society, be returned to the mainstream of Catholic life.
A month later in Gdańsk, 150 members of the archdiocese protested the bishops’ negligent handing of sexual abuse cases. They were responding to a study by the conference of bishops released in March that noted nearly 400 cases of Polish priests accused of abuse of minors between 1990 and 2018 and to the release of a documentary, Don’t Tell Anyone, in which priests are confronted by their victims. The hierarchy refused to investigate reported incidents and failed to openly support the victims. Lay Catholics also specifically criticized Gdańsk’s Archbishop Sławoj Leszek Głódź for his lavish lifestyle and confrontational communication style.
Widely publicized in the media, the “We Want the Church Back” demonstrations highlight the deep commitment the protesters have to their Catholic faith and emphasize the sense of responsibility they feel to combat the hijacking of their church.
In refusing to cede ownership of Catholicism to conservatives who have aligned with authoritarian politics, these activists amplify and mirror the critique of clericalism and far-right political alliances visible in the U.S. in the wake of sexual abuse scandals and white Catholic support for Donald Trump. The leadership in the U.S. Catholic Church has come under increasing criticism for overemphasizing the role of priests and bishops. In 2018, Pope Francis addressed all Catholics: “To say ‘no’ to abuse is to say an emphatic ‘no’ to all forms of clericalism.”
Catholics in Kraków, Gdańsk, and elsewhere join laity in other countries in demanding the return of basic Catholic social teaching in mainstream church discourse. These core doctrines are often replaced by an overemphasis on ritual from traditionalist groups or, in more extreme cases, with a right-wing political message, as exemplified by those from the U.S.-based Napa Institute or the Dignitatis Humanae Institute in Italy.
What is novel in the Polish protests is the subject of the critique. While the Polish church was historically known for its opposition to authoritarian regimes, the Catholic Church more globally was criticized for complicity with authoritarian regimes such as Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal. Now it is criticized for becoming a regime of its own. This has awakened in Polish Catholics a sense of individual responsibility to recover their church—and might bring seismic changes for the church around the world.
Ryszard Bobrowicz, a Polish Catholic, is a PhD fellow in practical theology at Lund University in Sweden.
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