The number of people formally leaving the Catholic church in the archdiocese of Poland’s second largest city, Kraków, in 2020 was over three times higher than the previous year. The 2019 figure was itself more than double the recent annual average.
The data, provided by the Archbishop of Kraków, Marek Jędraszewski, confirm reports in recent months that record numbers of Poles are leaving the church, amid scandals over sex-abuse cover ups and anger at a near-total ban on abortion.
The Catholic episcopate itself stopped collating national figures for apostasies a decade ago. But the Institute for Catholic Church Statistics (ISKK) recently announced that it would begin collecting data on how many people are leaving the church and why they are doing so, after admitting that “the number of apostasies is increasing”.
In 2020, 445 people submitted an official act of apostasy, necessary to formally defect from the Catholic church, in the Kraków archdiocese. This compared to 123 in 2019, and an annual average of 50 to 60 before that.
The figure is also close to the 459 people who left the Catholic church in the whole of Poland in 2010, the last year when official data on apostasies were collated, notes RMF24.
Jędraszewski cited the figures at a mass held at the sanctuary of Kalwaria Zebrzydowska on Saturday. He said it was evidence of the “many problems today in the modern world, also in our Catholic church”, reports Gazeta Wyborcza.
“Prayer is therefore needed for those who do not understand the church, are unable to love even through tears, all those who try to fight with the church and are moving away from it,” the archbishop said.
Jędraszewski urged the congregation to “do everything to make this dramatic act of departure at the same time the first day of return, because the church is a loving mother, and also the father waiting for the return of the prodigal son, ready to run out to meet him”.
“This is still a small percentage on the scale of the archdiocese, but every case is difficult and important for us,” Łukasz Michalczewski, the Kraków curia’s press spokesman, told Polsat News.
“We want to assure all the people who have left that they always have the opportunity to return,” he added. “The church is always open and will welcome them back with love.”
After announcing in December that it would resume studying apostasy, the ISKK conducted a pilot study early this year among 210 people who had chosen to leave the church.
They found that many were relatively young people from large cities, and that the main formal reason they gave was not a lack of faith, but a negative perception of the institution of the church, according to the ISKK’s director, Rev. Dr Wojciech Sadłoń, quoted by RMF24.
A separate poll carried out in November found that only 9% of young Poles have a positive view of the church, and almost half of them a negative one. Another survey from early 2020 found that the Catholic church had seen a larger decline in trust than any other major institution in Poland.
The church has been the focus of much of the anger in response to October’s Constitutional Tribunal ruling, which it supported, that introduced a near-total ban on abortion – a change opposed by a large majority of Poles. Google statistics show that web searches for apostasy in Poland reached an all-time high following the ruling.
The church’s reputation in Poland has also been hit by a series of revelations regarding child sex abuse by clergy and alleged cover-ups by bishops.
Archbishop Jędraszewski, who has made a number of statements attacking the “rainbow plague” of “LGBT ideology”, has also played down the extent of paedophilia among priests. In 2018, he said that abortion “is even more evil”.
Main image credit: Joanna Adamik/Archidiecezja Krakowska (public domain)
Ben Koschalka is a translator and senior editor at Notes from Poland. Originally from Britain, he has lived in Kraków since 2005.
