Folk Religion and the Idea of the Catholic Nation in Poland as an Intellectual and Pastoral Heritage of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński

Abstract

In the article, we present Polish Catholicism as an example of folk religion. As a result of a complicated political history, the Catholic Church became not only the depositary of Christian faith and morality, but also the mainstay of Polish national identity, shaped during the partitions in opposition to Russian Orthodoxy and Prussian Protestantism. It was then that Polishness became a stereotypical synonym of Catholicism. The stereotype of a Pole—a Catholic was consolidated. In Poland, as a predominantly agricultural country, folk religiosity was shaped, appealing to the sphere of ideas and emotions of the rural population or of those of rural origin settled in urban centres. This form of piety was reinforced by Polish Romanticism with its folk preferences. Romanticism, although often inconsistent with Catholic dogmatics, took root in Catholic circles. Its legacy is the messianism present in the Polish collective consciousness, which is also dear to many Catholic thinkers and clergymen. Poland, tormented under partitions, plagued by numerous wars, national disasters, betrayals, and harm caused by neighbouring nations, became an allegory of Christ suffering on the cross. This suggestive image appealed to the mass imagination of Poles, and the Catholic Church became its transmitter. The contemporary face of the Catholic Church in Poland was formed in the times of so-called real socialism, when the Church and its hierarchy once again became defenders of traditional Polishness and Polish national identity, opposing atheisation and the construction of a new identity based on Soviet models. For over three decades, the leader of Polish Catholicism was Stefan Wyszyński, the Primate of Poland, who became a promoter of folk piety, including, in particular, the Marian cult. Through the massive mobilisation of Polish Catholics united by common religious practices, he successfully prevented the secularisation of Polish society that affected other communist states. That is why, forty years after his death, Wyszyński can be considered the architect of contemporary Polish Catholicism with its dominant ritual form of piety and a nationalist trait.