In Poland, the Catholic faith still endures

My husband went to Poland as a teenager and bought a rosary from an old woman at the side of a road. He lost it recently and asked me to buy him a new one. So I found myself on a recent Friday evening in a crowded Warsaw church on Marszałkowska Street, in its tiny religious articles shop. Mass and Benediction had just ended, and people were in no rush to leave.

When I am in Toronto, I go to Mass at St. Vincent de Paul on Roncesvalles Avenue. Roncesvalles is at the heart of the Toronto Polish community, and Toronto Poles have dubbed it “Marszałkowska” after Warsaw’s main street. Thus, I was delighted to be on the original Marszałkowska, for paradoxically it reminded me of home. 

I was in Poland to promote the Polish edition of my book Seraphic Singles (Anielskie Single), and my whirlwind tour included Krakow and Warsaw.  I’m dating myself here, but when I was a child, Poland was so far behind the Iron Curtain, I never imagined I could ever travel there, let alone sit behind a microphone at Radio Warszawa. Thus, I found everything fascinating, from the twin towers of the steel mill on the outskirts of Krakow to the students drifting around the statue of Copernicus on Warsaw’s Krakowskie Przedmieście Street. 

As I drank in all the details, one thought occurred to me again and again. It was that Catholicism in Poland is mainstream. It is not “just for Sundays”; it is not a “lifestyle choice”; it is not part of a “colourful multicultural mosaic”; it is not the faith of a “creative minority”; Catholicism permeates the everyday lives of the majority of Poles in Poland.

Now, to be sure, I was a guest of the Redemptorists in Krakow, so it was only to be expected that I would find prayer cards in my desk and be woken at 6:30 a.m. by the tolling of their church bells. And Krakow is a very old city, whose buildings survived the Second World War more or less intact, so it is not remarkable that it has so many beautiful churches.

However, the visitors to these churches tended not to be foreign tourists, but Polish faithful. As my Krakow guides showed me around, they carefully calculated when Masses would be so that we could visit the churches of the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Augustinians, the Redemptorists without disturbing the mid-week worshippers. By the end of that day, my head was awhirl with the memories of Gothic, neo-Gothic, Baroque and Moda Polska, but what had made the greatest impression on me was how many people, of all ages, went to Mass or simply visited a church to pray. 

It wasn’t the art that attracted them. In a Warsaw friend’s battered neighbourhood, we visited a recent church building. It had the spaceship-meets-concrete look of many contemporary Western churches, and inside spidery-looking seraphim climbed up a front wall innocent of high altar or any memory of one. But people of all ages prayed there, either before or after Mass, as young men in cassocks busied themselves in the sanctuary.

The religious articles shops of Warsaw were also busy. My friend and I did a quick tour to see which ones were carrying Anielskie Single, and I was struck once again by the mix of ages: by the counter a middle-aged priest in a 33-button soutane chatted with the cashier, here a young woman in her 20s browsed the books, there an elderly woman held a small child by the hand. The book covers were original and bold. My book, bright blue, was available for 29 złoty.   

Meanwhile, election signs dotted both Warsaw and Krakow. The national elections were on the Sunday, and the newspapers and television were full of coverage until Saturday’s enforced blackout. As I tried to make sense of the Polish headlines, I was informed by Poles of which parties, slavishly courting the Catholic vote, were most likely to be faithful to Catholicism. 

Catholic media is a major player in Polish elections. The conservative daily Nasz Dziennik (“Our Daily”) has a circulation of hundreds of thousands. Such mainstream Catholic magazines and newspapers were available in the shops of railway stations.

“But Poland is changing,” said my Polish friends. And, yes, after seeing so many at prayer, and so many nuns and priests — of all ages — in habits and soutanes on the street, in trams, in shops, it was a shock to see Playboy and worse beside the Catholic papers in the railway station. However, Poland’s Catholic identity is still so strong that my hosts were rather confused when I told them how edified I was by the packed church that evening in Marszałkowska Street.

“But it was a first Friday,” they said. 

Ah, yes. Of course.