The state of the Catholic Faith in post-COVID Poland

In December, the Institute for Catholic Church Statistics published its annual report on the Catholic Church in Poland, the first such yearbook with data obtained after pandemic-era restrictions had been lifted.

While the report does have some optimistic data, such as that almost all Polish babies born in 2022 were baptized, the publication nevertheless indicates a decline in religious practice in line with other Euro-Atlantic countries. Rather than a cause for despair, the global post-pandemic flagging of faith should inspire Catholics, clergy and laity alike, to increase their missionary fervor.

The pandemic blow

Since 1980, Poland’s Institute for Catholic Church Statistics publishes an annual statistical report that offers a comprehensive quantitative overview of Polish Catholicism. The major findings are summarized in English in this article, while the full report is available in Polish here.

Naturally, the most publicized statistic from the report is of Mass attendance, based on a head count conducted on a Sunday in October in all of Poland’s approximately 10,000 parishes. While arbitrary factors such as the weather or altar boys (who typically do the counting) can influence the results, this is a more reliable method of measuring religious practice than polling. In 2022, 29.5% of Polish Catholics attended Mass, while 13.9% received Holy Communion. This is slightly up from the previous year, when COVID-related limitations were placed on the number of persons who could attend Mass in Poland; in 2022, 28.3% were present at Mass, while 12.9% received the Eucharist.

In the 1980s, when the Church in Poland was at the forefront of the Polish people’s struggle against communist oppression, about 50% of Polish Catholics attended Mass. In the 1990s and early 2000s, that figure declined slightly, remaining stable in the high forties. In the 2010s, the proportion of baptized Poles attending Mass had been in the upper thirties, reaching 36.9% with 16.7% receiving Holy Communion in 2019. Compared to 2018, that was a decrease of 1.3% and 0.6%, respectively. Given that 2019—which was to Poland what 2002 was to the United States—saw an enormous public debate on sexual abuse in the Polish Catholic Church (that year, there were headlines on the topic almost daily), it is remarkable that the level of decline was not sharper.

In general, given the enormous changes that have taken place in Polish society since the 1980s—the demise of the communist regime and its replacement with consumerism; the passing of favorite son Pope St. John Paul II, who to the younger generations is increasingly becoming a distant historical figure; and the growth of Polish prosperity (between 1990 and 2018, Polish GDP exploded by a dizzying 381%)—the rate of decline was surprisingly slow, with Polish Mass attendance slipping by approximately 3-5% per decade.

Between 2019, the last pre-pandemic counting of the faithful, and 2022, however, the proportion of Polish Catholics attending Mass fell by 7.4%. In absolute numbers, that amounts to one-fifth of Poles who participated in the Sunday Eucharist before COVID. The report also indicates a continued fall in the number of both priests and seminarians.

Some positive trends

The report isn’t wholly gloomy, however. In 2022, 302,165 of the approximately 305,000 Polish babies that were born—about 99%—were baptized.

Meanwhile, in some southern and eastern Polish dioceses, Mass attendance remains at levels not seen in Western Europe since probably the early 1960s. In the Diocese of Tarnow, 61.5% of Catholics attended Mass in 2022, while 25.6% received the Eucharist (nevertheless, this is a fall of 9.5% and 0.6%, respectively, compared to 2019). This is a stark contrast to the Archdiocese of Szczecin-Kamień, where just 17.5% of Catholics attended Mass, while just 8.3% communicated.

While the Western media often reports about the drop-off in Polish pupils attending optional religious education classes in schools, this trend is limited mostly to big cities, as in many sees more than nine in ten young Poles do partake in catechesis. For example, in the Dioceses of Tarnow and Przemysl in southeastern Poland, 96.3% and 96.5%, respectively, did so in 2022.

There are some other hopeful statistics not contained in the report. In June 2022, the Polish Church estimated that just 4,000 Polish pilgrims would attend World Youth Day 2023 in Lisbon; in fact, more than six times as many did. According to Bishop Grzegorz Suchodolski, responsible for youth ministry in the Polish Episcopate, comparable numbers of Poles attended WYD only in Paris (1997) and Rome (2000) (not counting, of course, the two editions held in Poland itself). Meanwhile, at the recently concluded Taizé European Meeting in Ljubljana, Slovenia, an annual international, ecumenical prayer event held on New Year’s in a different city, one-third of the participants were Polish.

And although candidates to the priesthood and religious orders have been steadily declining in Poland, the number of Poles becoming consecrated virgins and widows, as well as hermits, has been growing impressively; in 2022, 61 such consecrations were held in the country, bringing the total to about 800, which means in that year alone the number of Poles participating in individual forms of consecrated life grew by nearly one-tenth.

Benedict XVI’s vision

The presentation of the above statistics does not result from yours truly’s Candide-like naivete. To put it bluntly, the report indicates that the pandemic was more effective at denting Polish piety than membership in the European Union, dramatically improved material well-being, and scathing media coverage of Church abuse scandals.

And Poland, where one in five Catholics stopped practicing following COVID restrictions, is no outlier. In the United States, a similar level of decline has been reported: according to Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research on the Apostolate, the proportion of American Catholics attending Mass has shrunk from 23.4% in 2015 to just 17.3% in 2022, a fall of about one-quarter.

In many Western European nations, the post-COVID tumble is even sharper than in Poland and the United States: according to a 2023 survey, 41% of Irish Catholics who participated in the Eucharist before the pandemic no longer do so, a similar rate of decline as in Belgium. In Italy, weekly Mass attendance has nearly halved in twenty years, falling from 36.4% to 18.8%, the bulk of this fall occurring between 2019 and 2022, when one-quarter of Italian Catholics stopped practicing.

By mentioning the large swathes of Polish society still in love with their faith, I am instead positing that there are those who can help rebuild religious life after the devastating pandemic. Pope Benedict XVI was fond of quoting the English historian Arnold Toynbee’s view of history as driven by creative minorities; the late pontiff saw Catholics in Western societies as playing such a role.

Rekindling the Catholic faith will not be easy; however, acknowledging the sobering reality can be an impulse to new missionary initiatives. We need not wait for the bishops to take the initiative; there is no obstacle for priests and laity alike to launch grassroots new evangelization projects.

A student of Catholic history could argue that the Church is perpetually in crisis. In times of crisis, however, the vocation of great saints who led to renewal was born: Sts. Francis, Ignatius Loyola, and Don Bosco all come to mind. In Poland, the rest of Europe, and the United States, there are certainly many who have the potential to be the missionaries today’s Church needs.