Poland is one of the most Catholic countries in Europe. In the 2021 census, about 71 per cent of Poles identified as Roman Catholic, down from about 88 per cent in 2011. Roughly 7 per cent said they had no religion, around 2 per cent belonged to other faiths, chiefly Orthodox and Protestant churches and Jehovah's Witnesses, and about a fifth declined to answer the question. Belief is still widespread, but practice is falling fast: the share of Catholics attending Sunday Mass has fallen to around 28 to 29 per cent in recent counts, compared with more than half in the 1980s. Poland has one of the fastest rates of secularisation among young people anywhere in the world.
The Numbers Behind a Changing Church
Every October, the Catholic Church in Poland counts how many people attend Mass on a chosen Sunday. These figures, published by the church's Institute for Catholic Church Statistics, show the share of Catholics attending, known as dominicantes, falling from about 50 per cent in the late 1980s to about 37 per cent in 2019. After the pandemic, the count dropped to around 28 per cent in 2021 and has stayed near 29 per cent since. Attendance varies by region. It is highest in the south-east, in dioceses such as Tarnów and Rzeszów, where over 60 per cent of Catholics attended before the pandemic, and lowest in the north and west, around cities such as Szczecin and Koszalin, where it is closer to a quarter.
The change is sharpest among the young. Surveys by the research centre CBOS found that the share of Poles aged 18 to 24 who said they practised their religion at least once a week fell from about 69 per cent in 1992 to around 23 per cent in 2021. The number of young men entering seminaries has also fallen sharply, and a growing number of pupils have opted out of the religion classes that parishes teach in state schools.
A Nation Baptised in 966
Poland's history as a state and its history as a Christian country begin together. In 966, Duke Mieszko I, the first historically documented ruler of Poland, was baptised, probably on Holy Saturday. The decision linked his lands to Latin Christendom and the Holy Roman Empire, and Poles regard it as the birth of their nation. In 1000, the Congress of Gniezno established an archbishopric at Gniezno, still the seat of the Primate of Poland, giving the young country its own church province. Its capital in those years and its history are covered in our guide to Warsaw, which only replaced Kraków as the capital around 1596.
The Commonwealth of Many Faiths
For centuries, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was one of the most religiously diverse states in Europe. Alongside Catholics lived Orthodox Christians in the east, Lutherans in the towns of the north and west, Calvinists among the nobility, Armenian Christians, Muslim Tatars and Karaites. In 1573, when much of Europe was at war over religion, the nobles agreed the Warsaw Confederation, which guaranteed religious peace between Christian denominations. It is often described as the first legal act of its kind in Europe, and it made Poland a refuge for religious dissenters from other countries.
Poland also became the heart of the Jewish world. Invited by medieval kings who valued their skills in trade, Jews settled across the country, especially after expulsions from western Europe. By the eighteenth century, most of the world's Jews lived in the Commonwealth. Hasidism, the mystical movement founded by the Baal Shem Tov in the eighteenth century, was born in its south-eastern lands. On the eve of the Second World War, about 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland, around a tenth of the population. Some 90 per cent of them were murdered in the Holocaust, many in the death camps that Nazi Germany built on occupied Polish soil, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka.
Faith as Identity: Partitions and Occupation
The link between Catholicism and Polish national identity was forged when Poland lost its independence. From 1795 to 1918, the country was partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria. Orthodox Russia and Protestant Prussia both tried to suppress Polish culture, and during Bismarck's Kulturkampf in the 1870s, Prussia imprisoned Polish bishops. The church, which used the Polish language and kept national memory alive, became the main institution the partitioning powers could not abolish.
At its centre was the monastery of Jasna Góra in Częstochowa, home of the icon of the Black Madonna. When the monastery held out against a Swedish siege in 1655, during an invasion known as the Deluge, the victory was credited to the Virgin, and in 1656 King John II Casimir proclaimed her Queen of Poland. Millions of pilgrims still visit each year, many arriving on foot after walking for up to two weeks from towns across the country, especially for the feast of the Assumption on 15 August.
John Paul II and the Fall of Communism
After 1945, Poland's communist rulers tried to weaken the church but never managed to control it. The shrine of Częstochowa and the Primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, who was imprisoned from 1953 to 1956, became symbols of resistance. Then, on 16 October 1978, Karol Wojtyła, the Archbishop of Kraków, was elected pope as John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope in 455 years.
His first visit home, in June 1979, drew crowds estimated in the millions, and in a sermon in Warsaw's Victory Square he prayed for the Holy Spirit to renew the face of "this land". Many historians see the visit as a turning point. A year later, strikes at the Gdańsk shipyard led to the founding of Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc, whose members knelt for Mass at the shipyard gates. In 1984 the secret police murdered Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, a Warsaw priest who supported the union, and hundreds of thousands attended his funeral. The church helped to broker the Round Table talks of 1989, which led to Poland's first partly free elections and the end of communist rule.
Church and State Since 1989
In free Poland, the church gained a strong public role. Religion classes returned to state schools in 1990, and a concordat with the Vatican, signed in 1993, was ratified in 1998. The country's abortion law, among the strictest in Europe, was tightened further in October 2020, when the Constitutional Tribunal ruled out abortion for foetal abnormalities, prompting the largest street protests since 1989. Revelations about clerical sexual abuse, including a 2019 documentary, Tell No One, damaged trust in the church further, especially among the young.
The church's physical presence is still everywhere. Wayside shrines stand at crossroads across the countryside. The statue of Christ the King at Świebodzin, completed in 2010, is 36 m tall including its crown, taller than Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer statue, though not counting Rio's pedestal. The Sanctuary of Divine Mercy in Kraków, linked to the visions of Saint Faustina Kowalska, draws pilgrims from around the world.
Even Poles who rarely go to Mass keep the church calendar at home. On Christmas Eve, Wigilia, families wait for the first star to appear before sitting down to a meatless supper of twelve dishes, and they begin by breaking and sharing a thin wafer, the opłatek, while exchanging wishes. An extra place is traditionally laid for an unexpected guest. On Holy Saturday, people carry small baskets of eggs, bread, salt and sausage to church to be blessed, a custom called święconka. On All Saints' Day, 1 November, a public holiday, millions travel across the country to tend family graves, and at night cemeteries glow with hundreds of thousands of candles.
The Minority Churches
The largest religious minority is the Polish Orthodox Church, whose membership is put at about 150,000 by the 2021 census and closer to half a million by the church itself, concentrated in the Podlasie region near the Belarusian border, where the Holy Mountain of Grabarka, covered in thousands of wooden crosses left by pilgrims, is the most important Orthodox shrine. Lutherans, numbering around 60,000, live mainly in Cieszyn Silesia in the south. Their past is visible in the Churches of Peace at Jawor and Świdnica, huge timber-framed churches built in the 1650s under strict conditions: of wood and clay only, outside the town walls and within a year. Both are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Jehovah's Witnesses, with more than 100,000 members, form one of the largest non-Catholic groups.
Muslim Tatars have lived in Poland since the fourteenth century, when they came to serve Lithuanian grand dukes. The wooden mosques in the villages of Kruszyniany and Bohoniki, in Podlasie, date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Jewish community today numbers a few thousand, but Jewish culture is again visible, with the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and Kraków's annual Jewish Culture Festival.
Poland's Catholic identity sets it apart from most of its neighbours, including largely secular Czechia and Germany, whose split between Catholics and Protestants is explored in our article on religion in Germany. How the country sits among its neighbours is set out in our guide to the countries that border Poland.