The opposition wants to “de-Christianise Poland”, warns the education minister. His remarks came amid a wave of responses to an opposition politician’s suggestion that Catholics in Poland should have their privileges “sawn off”. One archbishop likened the words to Nazi rhetoric.
Speaking at “Campus Polska”, an event that the opposition has used to engage with young Poles, Sławomir Nitras, an MP from the centrist Civic Platform (PO), Poland’s largest opposition party, was asked about the division of church and state.
He admitted that he was not sure if a “friendly division” is still possible given how “in the last six or seven years the church has renounced its allegiance to the state and violated certain standards”.
“Catholics will become a minority in Poland, maybe even within this generation, and they have to learn to live with it,” he continued. “It would be good if this happened…on the basis that this is a fair punishment for what has happened, [that] we have to strip [odpiłować – literally meaning “saw off”] some of your privileges.”
Nitras: Kościół wypowiedział Polsce posłuszeństwo, katolicy będą mniejszością #CampusPolska pic.twitter.com/S5TotMDqio
— WTV.pl (@WTVPL) August 29, 2021
His words prompted outrage from figures in the ruling national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, as well as from the Catholic church. Around 90% of Poles are officially classified as Catholics, though the number who say they hold religious beliefs and who attend services is much lower.
“The masks are off,” tweeted Przemysław Czarnek, the education minister. “One of the main goals of PO is obvious: to de-Christianise Poland following the example of what is happening in the West.” Czarnek likened Nitras to officials from Poland’s former communist regime, which persecuted the church.
Speaking later to Radio Lublin, Czarnek suggested that PO was “executing a plan on someone’s orders to draw people away from the church”. Because Catholicism is “the religion of the majority of Poles”, Nitras’s words “mean he is going against Poland and Poles”, added the minister.
Meanwhile, a deputy prime minister, Piotr Gliński, told state broadcaster TVP that Nitras’s “foolish words” would offend “all people who are tolerant, who are for democracy and pluralism”.
PiS has enjoyed a close relationship with the Catholic church, which it argues should play a prominent role in public life. The party’s chairman, Jarosław Kaczyński, has declared that the church is the “repository of the only moral system commonly known in Poland” and that “rejection of it is nihilism”.
In response to Nitras’s remarks, the archbishop of Kraków, Marek Jędraszewski, likened his words to Nazi rhetoric in 1930s Germany. “Back then they also tried to ‘saw’ Jews of their so-called privileges,” said the archbishop in an interview with TVP.
Even within Nitras’s own PO party, there was criticism of his remarks. One fellow MP, Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, called them “unacceptable and unwise”. He added that “you can’t ‘saw’ the believers of any religion”. PO’s deputy leader, Borys Budka, called for “tolerance, dignity and respect for others”.
However, speaking to Polsat News, Nitras argued that he “did not say anything wrong” and that he was clearly not calling for “sawing people’s heads off”.
He said that it was important for people to ask whether it was right that “Polish law is shaped from the point of view of the church, from the point of view of a group that is not in the majority. Is this a privilege that only Catholics should have?”
Main image credit: Jakub Porzycki / Agencja Gazeta
Agnieszka Wądołowska is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She has previously worked for Gazeta.pl and Tokfm.pl and contributed to Gazeta Wyborcza, Wysokie Obcasy, Duży Format, Midrasz and Kultura Liberalna
