The proportion of Catholics in Poland who attended Sunday mass stood at 29.5% in 2022, according to new figures released by the church’s statistics institute.
That marked a rise from the 28.3% recorded amid the pandemic in 2021 but remains well below the 36.9% figure from 2019. It continues a long-term decline in church attendance among Polish Catholics, whose number as a proportion of the population is itself falling.
Since 1980, the Catholic church in Poland has conducted an annual study of how many people attend mass and take communion. On one Sunday each year, every parish in the country records figures and submits them to the Institute for Catholic Church Statistics (ISKK).
The ISKK then calculates nationally what proportion of Catholics required to attend mass – meaning people aged over seven and excluding the bedridden and elderly with limited mobility – actually did so on that day.
The latest figures show that in 2022, 13.9% of Catholics took communion, reports the Nasz Dziennik newspaper. That was also a rise from 2021 (when the figure stood at 12.9%) but was well below the pre-pandemic figure of 16.7% in 2019.
The ISKK did not collect data in 2020 at the height of pandemic-induced restrictions on church attendance.
The proportion of people in Poland identifying as Roman Catholics has fallen to 71% in the latest national census, down from 88% a decade earlier https://t.co/Li5vSX5IIO
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) September 29, 2023
As well the proportion of Catholics attending mass being in long-term decline, the proportion of Poles who identify as Catholic has also been falling, though they remain a majority of the population.
Data released this year from the latest national census showed that 71% of people in Poland identified as Roman Catholics in 2021, down from 88% a decade earlier.
Those figures have come as the church in Poland has faced criticism over its response to cases of child sex abuse by priests and for its perceived interference in politics, including support for an unpopular near-total ban on abortion introduced in 2021.
Poles' most trusted institutions:
1. NATO🪖
2. Military🧑✈️
3. EU🇪🇺Most distrusted institutions:
1. Public media📺
2. Government💼
3. Constitutional court⚖️Biggest declines in trust:
1. Police👮♀️
2. Church⛪️For the full poll results, see our report ⬇️ https://t.co/AynrhFWwod
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) November 7, 2023
Last year, the Primate of Poland, Archbishop Wojciech Polak, warned that there had been a “devastating” decline in religious practice among young Poles.
When the 2021 church attendance figures were released, the ISKK’s deputy director, Marcin Jewdokimow, said that it was clear they had been “influenced by the pandemic situation” and they expected a “rebound” in 2022.
But he also admitted that the figures reflect “long-term socio-cultural changes” that have seen a “reconfiguration of Catholicism and the place of religion in public space”.
A growing number of Poles are turning away from the Catholic church, but not from religious belief itself.
This creates challenges for the church, but also for Polish identity, which has historically been linked to Catholicism, writes Katarzyna Skiba https://t.co/udWGzd0X7F
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) April 18, 2023
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Main image credit: Mirek Krajewski / FNS (under CC BY 2.0)
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.
