“Vaccines are gift from God,” says Polish church as bishops encourage faithful to get Covid jabs

Two of Poland’s most senior bishops have encouraged people to vaccinate against COVID-19, calling vaccines a “gift from God”. Their intervention follows an appeal from the government for the country’s influential Catholic church to support the drive to increase vaccination registrations, which have been slowing.

“Vaccination against COVID-19 is an important tool in reducing the spread of infection and…returning to the normal functioning of societies,” said Stanisław Gądecki, the archbishop of Poznań and president of the Polish Episcopal Conference (KEP), the central organ of the Catholic church in Poland.

“The church has emphasised that the invention of vaccines can be considered as a special fruit of the gift given to man by God, who is not indifferent to human fate and the risks associated with diseases,” he continued, in a statement given to the Polish Press Agency (PAP).

“The church supports all those who decide to get vaccinated,” the archbishop concluded. However, he added that, while “a decision on vaccination should take into account the requirements of the common good, vaccination should be voluntary…Vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation”.

Gądecki’s remarks follow a letter sent earlier this week by Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz, the archbishop of Warsaw, to priests in his diocese calling on them to encourage vaccination. He noted that a vaccination point has been opened in the Temple of Divine Providence, a large church in the capital.

“I believe it is the duty of the church…to calls for vaccination campaigns for the benefit of the entire community”, wrote Nycz, “because it is related to the responsibility for social health in the spirit of the fifth commandment.”

Last Friday, Poland’s health minister, Adam Niedzielski, said that “the authority of the church would help a lot” in encouraging people to vaccinate, and revealed that he has been holding talks with the Catholic hierarchy.

“From my point of view, the church could be more helpful when it comes to vaccination issues,” he added, speaking to Polskie Radio

After the statements by Nycz and Gądecki this week, Niedzielski thanked them for lending the “very important voice of the church” to “supporting the vaccination campaign”.

Niedzielski’s predecessor, Łukasz Szumowski, who resigned as health minister last September but remains an MP for the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, recently criticised the church’s messaging regarding vaccines,

In particular, he was unhappy at a statement earlier this year in which the episcopate expressed “serious moral objection” to the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, due to the fact that they were produced using material derived from aborted foetuses. The bishops called on the faithful to avoid them if possible.

“I was appalled [by that announcement] because I felt it would confuse people,” Szumowski told Interia last month. “A clear and simple message is needed: vaccination is not a sin, vaccination saves human life, the lives of the weak and the sick. And this is what the Gospel teaches us.”

Poland has so far administered over 30.7 million doses of coronavirus vaccines. Its vaccination rate – of 81 doses per 100 people – is close to the EU-wide average of 88 per 100.

However, the government has recently warned of a “very disturbing” decline in the number of unvaccinated people registering to receive jabs. So far, over 54% of Poles have not received a single dose of vaccine, compared to a figure of 47% across the EU as a whole.

The government has taken a number of steps to encourage people to sign up, including launching a lottery in which fully vaccinated people can win prizes of up to one million zloty (€222,000).

Main image credit: EpiskopatNews/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.