The first ever female Polish Protestant bishop has been ordained at a ceremony in the United Kingdom.
Paulina Hlawiczka-Trotman, who comes from the town of Ustroń in southern Poland, became the sole bishop of the Lutheran Church in Great Britain (LCiGB) on Saturday.
After the ceremony, which took place at Saint Mary’s Church in Nottingham, the new bishop presided over the Eucharistic liturgy, during which she sang in Polish. The words of the final blessing were also sung in Polish by Walter Jagucki, a former bishop of the LCiGB who also comes from Poland.
Historyczna, podniosła i wspaniała uroczystość w Nottigham. Biskup Paulina Hławiczka-Trotman jest pierwszą Polką w historii, która została biskupką luterańską. Wielka radość również dla @luteranie pic.twitter.com/edkDqwId4U
— bp Jerzy Samiec (@BpJerzySamiec) January 20, 2024
Hlawiczka-Trotman studied theology and ethics at the Christian Academy of Theology in Warsaw. She was ordained as a Lutheran clergywoman in England in 2014 because at that time the Lutheran church in Poland did not ordain women.
Only in 2021 did the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Poland approved the ordination of women. Its first female pastors were ordained the following year.
“Paulina is illustrating the very history of our church,” said her predecessor as bishop of LCiGB, Tor Jørgensen. “She is coming from an East-European Lutheran minority tradition. She has shown individual courage and integrity by following her call to be an ordained minister while that still was not possible in her own church.”
The first nine women have been ordained as pastors in Poland’s largest and oldest Protestant church denomination.
“The church has concluded that God’s calling pays no heed to gender,” said the bishop of the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confessionhttps://t.co/4egfAmRb3G
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) May 9, 2022
The head of the Evangelical Church in Poland, Jerzy Samiec, who attended the ceremony, also welcomed Hlawiczka-Trotman’s ordination as bishop, saying it was “a great joy” for Polish Lutherans.
Hlawiczka-Trotman herself pledged to “listen to the needs of the people in times of economic difficulties and engage with ecumenical and interfaith partners in our joint work”.
The Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Poland, which has its roots in the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, today has around 60,000 members in 133 parishes with almost 200 clergy.
It was once much larger, with around half a million faithful in interwar Poland, before the upheaval, destruction and border changes caused by the Second World War.
After graffiti likening PM @donaldtusk to Hitler appeared around a historic Protestant church in Poland, a man has been charged with insulting a constitutional body – a crime that carries a prison sentence of up to two years – and damaging a monument https://t.co/Bf79dGchKN
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) January 22, 2024
The majority of Poles today belong to the Roman Catholic Church, whose priests are exclusively male. Data released last year from the 2021 national census showed that 71% of people in Poland identify as Catholics while only 0.2% (65,407 people) said they belong to the Evangelical Church.
The first ever female Polish bishop was Maria Izabela Wiłucka-Kowalska, who was ordained as a bishop of the Old Catholic Mariavite Church in 1929.
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Main image credit: Diecezja Cieszyńska Kościoła Ewangelicko-Augsburskiego w RP/Facebook
Agata Pyka is an assistant editor at Notes from Poland. She is a journalist and a political communication student at the University of Amsterdam. She specialises in Polish and European politics as well as investigative journalism and has previously written for Euractiv and The European Correspondent.
