Robert E. Alvis
One of the hallmarks of modernity is statesponsored universal education for children and young adults. Factors driving this development have included the demands of industrial economies and education’s potential to strengthen social cohesion and the legitimacy of the state. As the modern education paradigm took root many Catholics fought hard to defend the Church’s traditional vision of education, which has emphasized the cultivation of knowledge and faith, forming people who can contribute to the common good with a Christian moral framework.
Poland under Communism
In the post-World War II era, the Soviet Union was determined to keep Poland in its sphere of influence. Toward that end, it shepherded the rise of the Communist Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR). As it consolidated its authority, the PZPR proceeded cautiously with the Catholic Church. Communist leaders allowed religious instruction in public schools and for priests and religious to serve as instructors. At the same time, it began shaping the curriculum according to its own priorities.1
In 1948, Stalinist hardliner Boleslaw Bierut displaced the more moderate Wladyslaw Gomulka as head of the PZPR, and he initiated a more aggressive stance toward the Church. The regime sought to undermine the Church’s influence in many ways, including its role in education. It shuttered private Catholic schools and banned priests and religious leaders from teaching religion in public schools.
The PZPR’s campaign inspired some daring acts of resistance by clergy and laity alike. In 1952 in the Diocese of Katowice Bishop Stanislaw Adamski organized a petition which demanded that religious education be restored to schools and that clergy not be prohibited from teaching in such schools. Over 72,000 Catholics signed the document, despite the potential dangers of doing so. The state arrested Bishop Adamski and appointed a more pliable priest to lead the diocese in his stead. Like other attempts to beat the Church into submission, though, this one only boosted its moral authority and embarrassed the regime.
Gomulka returned to power in 1956 and sought to lead the country once again down a gentler, “Polish path to socialism.” So began the “thaw,” a brief period of enhanced freedom. One of its features was a return of religious education, with clergy and religious as the primary instructors. However, the political climate once again grew colder by the early 1960s. In 1961, the state banned religious instruction from public school curricula. This policy remained in effect until the collapse of Communism in 1989.
As it happens, the elimination of religious education in public schools did not mean that Polish Catholic children were not instructed in the faith. It simply required clergy and lay people to create new ways for this instruction to take place, which they did with alacrity. The most notable expression was the creation of a comprehensive system of catechesis based in parishes across the country.2
After 1989
With the transition to democracy in 1989, Church leaders sought once again to shape the country according to Catholic values. In 1990 the Ministry of Education reintroduced religious education to elementary and high schools. The policy, which is still in effect, requires all schools to provide religious education to their students. Religious organizations oversee the curriculum, and instructor salaries are funded from state coffers. Students and their parents have the right to receive the instruction provided by their particular religious organization, to participate in a non-denominational ethics curriculum, or to opt out altogether. In practice well over 90 percent of religion classes at every level of schooling are explicitly Catholic.3
The successful reestablishment of religious education in schools was part of a larger pattern of political engagement by Church leaders, and the substantial gains they achieved generated considerable backlash. Even though a large majority of Poles have identified as Catholic, many have come to regard the Church as overstepping its bounds in a democratic society. In a 1993 article in Tygodnik Powszechy, priest and intellectual Józef Tischner suggested that the Church’s recent course raised doubts about its commitment to democracy (8-9). Polling data reveal that the Church’s endeavor to bring Poland’s legal and political order into greater alignment with Catholic values has not been very popular. A 1993 survey revealed that less than 40 percent supported without reservation the law reinstating religious education in schools.
It is difficult to measure how effective religious education has been in promoting Catholic identity and understanding in the post-Communist era. It has been one element in an array of factors that has shaped values and worldviews. What is clear, though, is that Polish Catholics have grown less religiously observant in recent years, and their grasp of Catholic teaching is by some measures surprisingly weak. Recent surveys of Polish Catholic knowledge of core doctrines have yielded discouraging results, leading sociologist and priest Wladyslaw Piwowarski to lament that two thirds of Poles were in fact “unwitting heretics.”4
Conclusion
Polish society has participated in the educational revolution that has transformed much of the modern world: the requirement that all children and young adults pass through many years of general education designed to forge them into loyal citizens capable of flourishing in dynamic modern economies. The state has exercised a leading role in managing this education, in part because it has had the capacity to do so, and in part because such management has been politically expedient.
The Catholic Church in Poland has not been indifferent to the growing educational brief of the state, and it has defended its traditional prerogatives. This defense has been rooted in the Catholic understanding of education’s function in the cultivation, not just of patriotism and productivity, but also piety, a vibrant religious belief and discipline conducive to salvation. In Poland, the Church’s track record in preserving its claims has been decidedly mixed.
The irony is that the Polish Catholic Church often was more successful in forming faithful Catholics when it faced concerted opposition from the state. In the Communist era, when the government reduced or eliminated the Church’s role in education, Catholics tended to rally to the Church’s defense, giving rise to creative educational initiatives that fostered vibrant connections with the faith. However, as the Church has managed to reassert its vision, such as in the post-Communist period, it has generated resentment among Catholics and non-Catholics alike, rooted in the conviction that the Church was overstepping its proper limits in a democratic society. Behind this dynamic is another signal feature of modernity: the high esteem for human autonomy, especially in matters of conscience. The Polish Catholic Church has violated this principle at its own risk.
Notes:
- Andrzej Janowski, “Polish Education: Changes and Prospects” in Education and Economic Change in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, ed. by David Phillips and Michael Kaser (Wallingford, UK: Triangle, 1993), 41-46.
- Marian Zajac and Pawel Makosa, “Poland: Faithfulness to God and to People” in How Teachers in Europe Teach Religion: An International Empirical Study in 16 Countries, ed. by Hans-Georg Ziebertz and Ulrich Riegel (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2009), 170.
- Katarzyna Zielińska and Marcin K. Zwierżdżyński, “Religious Deucation in Poland” in The Routledge International Handbook of Religious Education, ed. by Derek H. Davis and Elena Miroshnikova (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), 266-68.
- Edmund Lewandowski, “Oto Polak,” Polityka 16 (19 April 2007), 36-39.
Robert E. Alvis is academic dean and associate professor of church history, Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology, St. Meinrad, Indiana.
Edited excerpts reprinted with permission from Robert E. Alvis and Ryan LaMothe, eds., Prisms of Faith: Perspectives on Religious Education and the Cultivation of Catholic Identity (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, forthcoming in 2016). Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.