Wednesday, December 20, 2017

Church and state in Poland

The Tablet of Decemebr 16 carries an interesting and informative piece on the current relationship between government and Catholic Church in Poland.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of the governing conservative Law and Justice Pary, though neither prime minister nor president, but the de facto leader in Poland, is making the leaders of the church in Poland an offer similar to the one President Vladimir Putin put to the Russian Orthodox Church; power and money.

The writer of the piece, broadcaster and politicial commentator, Cezary Michalski argues that the alliance of the church with the far-right party will only accelerate the crisis of Polish Catholicism in the not so distant future.

In 1986 I travelled to Poland with a small group of German students form the university in Berlin.

The students stayed in a Dominican priory and I stayed with a family near the priory.

On leaving I asked  a Dominican how much I should pay the family. He asked me was I paying in US dollars or German marks. I paid in Polish zloty.

Over many years leading up to the fall of Communism the German churches donated large sums of money to Poland.

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