Just one new priest was ordained in the diocese of Łódź in central Poland this year – the lowest figure ever recorded. One church figure admits there has been a “dramatic decline” in interest in the priesthood, while the head of a seminary that this year produced no new graduates has called it a “crisis”.
The ordination of Łódź’s single new priest – Krzysztof Kucharski, a graduate of the city’s Higher Theological Seminary – took place on Saturday in the Archcathedral Basilica of St Stanislaus Kostka.
This year’s single ordination was down from ten last year in Łódź, which is Poland’s fourth largest city, reports the Gazeta Wyborcza daily. The city’s seminary currently has only 31 students, down from 70 in 2006 and over 100 during the pontificate of Polish Pope John Paul II.
In another Polish diocese, Olsztyn, this year no new priests were ordained at all for the first time since 1950, reports local newspaper Gazeta Olsztyńska. In Kraków, Poland’s second-largest city, there were seven ordinations, half the figure recorded two decades ago.
In 2021, 828 candidates joined seminaries in Poland as a whole; by 2021, that figure had fallen to just 356. As a result, a number of seminaries have closed – most recently one in Łowicz, where the local bishop admitted there were no longer enough students to sustain it.
“The fact that in recent years we have observed a drastic decrease in appointments [to the priesthood] is undeniable,” Alfred Wierzbicki, a priest and professor at the Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), told Gazeta Wyborcza. “This trend seems to be unstoppable.”
Wierzbicki ascribed the change to “the secularisation of society, but also the lack of an attractive vision of the priesthood that could interest young people”.
There has been a “devastating” decline in religious practice among young Poles, says the Primate of Poland
He cites the church's failure to deal with sex abuse as a primary cause, but another archbishop blames the pandemic and children's use of technology https://t.co/ZzuUj5eOaQ
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) January 3, 2022
In Olsztyn, the rector of the city’s seminary, Hubert Tryk, when announcing that there would be no ordinations this year, admitted that there was a “crisis”, with young people “not responding to God’s call for various reasons”.
Poland remains one of Europe’s most religious countries, with over 90% of the population officially classified as Catholic, 87% declaring themselves to be believers in God, and 42% saying that they practise their faith at least once per week.
However, recent years have seen church attendance fall dramatically, while surveys and declining attendance at Catholic catechism classes show that young Poles in particular are turning away from the church.
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
Main image credit: Archidiecezja Łódźka
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.
