Who is Grzegorz Ryś, Archbishop of Lodz, Poland?

On September 30th, Pope Francis will create twenty-one new cardinals, eighteen of whom are under eighty and will therefore have the right to vote in a future conclave. They include Grzegorz Ryś, Archbishop of Lodz, Poland.

A bishop of the John Paul II generation

A native of Krakow, Archbishop Grzegorz Ryś was born in 1964 and entered the seminary in 1982. Thus, he is part of the John Paul II generation of Polish priests: in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, an unprecedented number of young Polish men, inspired by the election of their nation’s greatest son to the papacy and his history-making travels to his shackled homeland, entered the seminary.

Archbishop Ryś makes frequent reference to the life and teaching of St. John Paul II. During John Paul’s cause for canonization, Ryś was a member of the Historical Commission, an experience that he discussed recently as Poland’s left-liberal media launched a libelous campaign against the Polish pope, accusing him of negligence in dealing with sexual abuse as Archbishop of Krakow (something I wrote about extensively here).

In a video that went viral in Poland, Ryś mentioned that as a member of the commission he saw much evidence of the sanctity of the late pope and discussed the shortcomings of using, as John Paul II’s accusers did, the files of the former communist secret police, which fabricated evidence to discredit saintly priests who were a threat to the dictatorship, as reliable sources.

A luminary of the new evangelization

A former rector of the Archdiocesan Seminary in Krakow and a professor of history at the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow, Archbishop Ryś is the author of many books on Church history. However, he is no out-of-touch academic complacent in the comfort zone of the ivory tower.

Archbishop Ryś has emerged as a major promoter of the new evangelization in Poland. In 2017, he became the Archbishop of Lodz (pronounced “woodge”) in central Poland, one of the nation’s least religious sees. According to pre-pandemic data from 2019, on a given Sunday about 24 percent of baptized Catholics in Lodz attended Mass, compared to 36.9 percent for the country as a whole.

Over the past six years, Archbishop Ryś has focused on the youth. Each year during Lent, he holds a major evangelization retreat titled “The Arena of the Young,” attended by thousands of high school students. The archbishop accompanies the faithful on pilgrimages to the Taize community and World Youth Day; each year, he also walks to Jasna Góra, Poland’s most important Marian shrine, along with two thousand believers. He has also proved to be quite savvy in using social media: recently, the Archdiocese of Lodz became the first Polish see whose YouTube channel’s subscriber count surpassed 100,000.

Since Ryś’s coming to Lodz, perhaps the statistics do not speak of a major revival, but Ryś has arguably bolstered the faith of many of the see’s Catholics. While the number of new priestly vocations has fallen by about half in Poland over the past decade, it has remained stable during this time in Lodz, with an average of about ten men entering the archdiocesan seminary each year. Under Ryś, in fact, two new seminaries have been opened in the city: one for seminarians older than thirty-five and a Redemptoris Mater missionary seminary.

Tough on sexual abuse, concerned for the poor

2019 was to Poland what 2002 was to the United States regarding media coverage of the sexual abuse of minors in the Catholic Church, That year, a YouTube documentary depicting sexually abusive priests and their transfer to other parishes by negligent bishops became a major news topic, which caused many allegations of abuse to surface.

Amidst those challenging times, Ryś emerged as a tough leader in preventing sexual abuse. In 2019, he issued a document titled The Rule Regarding the Protection of Minors and People with Disabilities and demanded that all priests and laypeople working with the young in his see send a signed declaration that they had become familiar with it as well as Pope Francis’ motu proprio Vos estis lux mundi to the archdiocesan curia within a week. Ryś’s strict regulations banned not only behaviors of a sexual nature but also, for instance, holding children over the age of three, kissing children, and even sitting next to them.

In 2020, it was alleged that Edward Janiak, then-Bishop of Kalisz, had shuffled a sexually abusive priest between parishes despite being informed of the latter’s misdeeds by the victims’ parents. The Vatican suspended Janiak and appointed Ryś as apostolic administrator of the see until the completion of the investigation against Janiak (ultimately, the bishop was found guilty, dismissed, and sanctioned by Rome; since 2021, Kalisz has a new bishop).

Archbishop Ryś’s sensitivity towards the victims of sexual violence is consistent with his greater concern for the poor in the broad meaning of the word. Recently, he said that “it would be a tragedy if there existed a seminary that does not teach of the poor Jesus.” Meanwhile, early in the COVID-19 pandemic the archbishop financed the purchase of two ventilators for a local Lodz hospital and started a successful crowdfunding campaign to buy another ventilator.

This year, Archbishop Ryś touched many hearts when he visited a recently widowed 89-year-old man after a local priest had declined to visit him as part of the Polish tradition of priests visiting their parishioners after Christmas, claiming that he had not been properly received. Although the heartbroken elderly man said that he would never let a priest into his house again, Archbishop Ryś learned of this and appalled, made plans to visit this bereft widower’s apartment.

A leader of Catholic-Jewish dialogue

Following in the footsteps of St. John Paul II, Ryś has proved to be a major promoter of Catholic-Jewish dialogue. During the German occupation of Poland under World War II, Lodz was forcibly Germanized, renamed Litzmannstadt, and directly incorporated into the Third Reich. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Poles in the Lodz region were forcibly resettled or killed, while the city’s 200,000 Jews were enclosed in a ghetto; just 877 survived the war.

While tiny compared to the past, today’s Jewish community in Lodz is experiencing a revival amidst growing numbers of Poles discovering and embracing their Jewish roots and increasing immigration from the former USSR to Poland. In 2015, Dawid Szychowski of Lodz became the first Polish rabbi to be ordained in decades.

Archbishop Ryś frequently organizes common Catholic-Jewish prayer meetings. In his dialogue with Jews, Ryś has been painfully frank about previous Christian misdeeds against God’s Chosen People. In 2018, during celebrations of the 74^th anniversary of the liberation of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, he said the following, which led to some criticism among conservatives:

[The Holocaust] occurred in the middle of Europe, amidst a civilization we proudly refer to as Christian. It must be remembered that this can be repeated. If something has happened once, it can happen again. The Holocaust was created by people who, to a large degree – unfortunately, I must say this with a heavy heart – had been brought up in by the Christian churches and attended religious services.

Archbishop Ryś’s most recent book is titled Chrześcijanie wobec Żydów: Od Jezusa po inkwizycję – XV wieków trudnych relacji (“Christians and Jews, from Jesus to the Inquisition: Fifteen Centuries of Difficult Relations”). The tone of the book is exactly what one might infer from the title. Ryś presents ample examples of Christian intolerance against Jews without a hint of apologetics. The archbishop writes that even Church Fathers who advocated tolerance towards the Jews, such as Saints Augustine and Gregory the Great, did so less out of respect for the, but more because they feared that persecution would make proselytism among them more difficult.

Solidly orthodox

If doctrinal issues will be prominent at the next papal conclave, I am confident that on such matters Ryś will be closer to the camp of his fellow cardinals Müller, Sarah, and Burke than Hollerich, Marx, and McElroy.

In his 2019 book Celibat (“Celibacy”), Ryś outlines a history of celibacy. He concedes that in the early Church there were married priests; after all, according to Scripture St. Peter, the first pope, had a mother-in-law. Yet Ryś makes it clear that celibacy is an essential part of the priestly vocation and its nature in the Roman rite, approvingly citing many synods and papal pronouncements.

The book concludes with an interview by Father Paweł Kłys, who asks Ryś various questions about celibacy, sometimes donning the role of devil’s advocate. When asked if making celibacy optional would improve the Church’s vocations situation, Ryś replies in the negative, noting that the Orthodox and Protestant churches likewise face shortages of clergy. After Father Kłys asks the archbishop for his thoughts about Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller’s observation that there is no connection between mandatory celibacy and the crisis of Christianity in the West, Ryś responds that the German prelate is correct.

After the archbishop’s nomination to the College of Cardinals was met with much enthusiasm in Poland, Gazeta Wyborcza, the anti-clerical, left-wing daily that was one of the primary forces in the recent campaign of part of the Polish media to blacken the name of St. John Paul II, published an editorial titled: “He Defends Jędraszewski [the current Archbishop of Krakow hated by the left for speaking about a ‘rainbow plague’ threatening Poland], Says ‘No’ to Same-Sex Marriages and Abortion. Cardinal Ryś Will Not Necessarily Change the Church.”

Rarely do I agree with Wyborcza, but on this count it is absolutely correct. Cardinal Ryś will not “change the Church” in the way the left would like, and that is a good thing. In October 2020, when Poland’s Constitutional Court decreed that eugenic abortion was unconstitutional and a wave of hateful pro-abortion protests swept the country, Archbishop Ryś said during a retreat for university students that the Church’s teaching on abortion was infallible, not because the Church was arrogant, but because she has carefully read what Scripture says about the sanctity of human life. He quoted St. John Paul II as saying that “the killing of a human being is always morally disordered.”

With regards to homosexuality, Archbishop Ryś has said that “homosexual acts are always considered sinful” and was one of the chief authors of the Polish bishops’ document on the matter, which reaffirms the Church’s teaching that while those with homosexual inclinations must be respected, active homosexuality is morally wrong.

Cardinal-Elect Grzegorz Ryś cannot be pigeonholed into simple “liberal” and “conservative” categories. In Poland, he has proved to be a great Church leader effective in communicating the faith and building bridges. His elevation to the cardinalate will prove a major boon to the universal Church.