Abortion protests result from cultural Marxists using Netflix to influence youth, warns bishop

The head of Poland’s Catholic episcopate, Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki, believes that the current mass abortion protests are the result of young people being led astray by streaming services and social media, which “cultural Marxists” use to “promote homosexuality, hedonism and promiscuity”.

Gądecki also expressed his opposition to a “compromise” proposed by President Andrzej Duda to end the stand-off over an anti-abortion ruling by the Constitutional Tribunal.

The archbishop says the church can only accept full implementation of the court’s decision that abortions due to diagnosis of birth defects are unconstitutional. These comprise around 98% of all legal terminations in Poland, so the ruling would in effect introduce a near-total ban on abortion.

Poland has now entered its 14th consecutive day of demonstrations against that ruling. The protests are believed to be the biggest since the fall of communism in 1989, and young people have been particularly prominent at them.

Most of their anger has been directed against not the tribunal itself, but rather the ruling national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party and the Catholic church, which are seen as being behind the court’s decision.

On the first Sunday of the protests, some demonstrators disrupted masses and vandalised churches. Among the demands issued by the main organisers of the protests are ending state subsidies for the church and creating a true secular state.

What we are witnessing is “hatred of Christianity”, said Gądecki, in an interview with the episcopate’s own press agency, KAI. He said that, in the prewar period, Jews, through no fault of their own, often got caught up in political disputes. “Today Catholics seem to occupy their place.”

Addressing the issue of abortion, the archbishop said that the fact protesters claim “killing innocent life as a human right is testament to cultural confusion…[and] the removal of God from human life”. He ascribed this to modern media that “impose a cultural code” on society, especially the young.

“Today, almost every Netflix series for young people promotes homosexuality, hedonism and promiscuity,” he explained. “Young generations are shaped by tools like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Netflix and other streaming platforms and social media.”

This manipulation is deliberate, claimed the archbishop, carried out “by cultural Marxists who are consistently implementing a programme for the formation of people obedient to new ideas”.

Gądecki claimed that there are “at least two groups” promoting abortion for “financial and ideological” reasons. For one of them, “killing the unborn is a source of profit”; for the other, “it is a tool to implement ideological plans”.

Speaking about the Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling, Gądecki hailed it as a “great, positive civilisational step”. He noted that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that “everyone has the right to life”, and that this shows “the unlawfulness of all forms of abortion and euthanasia”.

Those protesting against the judgement want to allow “the killing of unborn children on demand, which is inhumane” and results from “legal positivism aimed at codifying…human life without any reference to morality”, the archbishop told KAI.

Although the Constitutional Tribunal made its decision on 22 October, the government has still not published the ruling, which is required for it to enter into force.

The deadline for it to do so was on Monday this week, but a government spokesman said they are taking “some time for dialogue and working out a new position”. Polls have shown a large majority opposed to the ruling, and some in the ruling camp are seeking a way to avoid the strictest implementation of it.

“The failure to publish the ruling leads to many question marks”, says Gądecki. He also rejected a “compromise” proposed by President Duda, which would tighten the abortion law by banning terminations for conditions such as Down syndrome but continuing to allow them for foetuses with fatal defects.

“The church cannot compromise on this matter,” the archbishop told KAI. Asked if a Catholic politician could support Duda’s proposal, Gądecki replied: “Unfortunately not…The defence of human life is one of the priorities of Catholic politicians.”

“The presidential proposal would be a new form of euthanasia that selects individuals based on [their] chances of survival,” he continued. “Eugenic abortions” would continue and “everything will remain the same”.

The head of the episcopate, however, denied that the church’s support for politicians and policies that favour protection of unborn life is a case of “religion meddling in temporal affairs”. It is “about the justified voice of the church in purely ethical matters”, he explained.

“The church in Poland is not on the right or left, or even on the side of the centre, but on the side of the gospel,” said Gądecki, saying that they do not “support any party as a church”.

Last week, following vandalism of churches by the protesters, Jarosław Kaczyński, the chairman of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party and Poland’s de facto leader, called on his followers to “defend Polish churches at any cost”.

He called the Catholic church the “repository of the only moral system commonly known in Poland”, and said that attacks on it by the demonstrators were part of a plan “intended to destroy Poland”.

The education minister, Przemysław Czarnek, claimed last week that support for the protests by some universities showed that there is a left-liberal “dictatorship in academia” that shows “no tolerance for us Christians”.

However, another senior figure in the Catholic hierarchy, Archbishop Wojciech Polak, the Primate of Poland, has presented a more conciliatory tone. He called for the two sides to show “mutual respect” for one another and try to find “reconciliation and unity”, reports Rzeczpospolita.

“The moral duty of a Christian is to de-escalate conflict, not intensify it,” wrote Polak, who called on the faithful to “reject any kind of violence”. Some far-right groups have formed defence forces to protect churches, and in some cases have attacked the abortion protests.

Main image credit: episkopat.pl/Flickr (under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.