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Comment by legutierr | Hacker News Reader

> Oh, and the Catholic Church is helping them, because they also get a cut.

With the acquiescence of the Pope, or is he turning a blind eye to this?

My perception from outside is that large swaths of Polish Catholics refuse to recognize this Pope's legitimacy, because they disagree with his politics.

Does this change based on who is Pope?

And most importantly, does this include the Polish Catholics *employed by the Vatican-led Church"?

Lay people aren't relevant to this.

I've already met a fanatic priest who called Pope a heretic, so... you know

This could be a unit for the strength of an ideology’s reality distortion field.

Popes don't tend to be sharp sighted individuals as various church scandals indicate.

Isn’t it more likely that the popes are plenty sharp and part of the versions scandals?

Probably not. Ignorance (including willful) is usualy more probable explanation.

I'm afraid I'm not familiar enough with the institution to give a proper response. To me, many of their (Polish Episcopate's) actions are illogical and a net loss to the community they're supposed to foster.

I don't think that the Vatican necessarily has that much power over the Polish Episcopate. It seems like they operate as an association of non-profits all across the world and every single organization operates independently, within a rough framework.

I live in one of the largest cities, haven't ever really been a church-goer. Going through all the sacraments was just a traditional thing you'd do. A decade ago, I don't remember hearing anything political in my local church. Sure, I heard some pretty obnoxious homophobic stuff, saw "exorcisms", but it was always somewhat neutral. However over the past few years, I've heard a lot of stories about rabid priests demonizing "the other side" (be it the other parties, "the LGBT plague" etc.), saying that the only way towards salvation is voting for PiS. Maybe it was a very vocal minority that was amplified by the media (look, priest X is doing this stuff! how terrible!). Eventually it seemed like that behaviour was normalized and the attitude of the people towards the Church became even more radicalized.

Right now, the percentage of people who claim they're religious is plummeting. People who disagree with PiS (and the behaviour of the Church) are pulling their kids from "Religion" / Catechesis lessons, mostly in large cities. In my community, the schools have to group up multiple classes to even have groups of 10. How do you fight it? Well, you give a ton of funding to "patriotic causes", which are primarily promoting Catholicism, militarism / far-right, nationalistic narratives (the government is contributing to this now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB2XRK_Xb6g).

The trade-off seems to be replacing your average church-goes / people who only go to the church for baptisms / First Communion / marriages, with Polish "patriots" - nationalists full of hatred towards anyone who's not white, religious and preferably voting for the Populist-Nationalists or Conservative-Liberals (who banded up with actual neonazis???). Arguably, I think that financially it could be a net positive for the Episcopate - they're getting public funding (for now) and possibly acquiring new, radicalized, loyal followers.

Disclaimer: It probably _is_ a very loud minority. Unfortunately it's also the minority that appears to control the Church leadership. I feel sorry for the legitimately honest and good people I met through the Church, who are now getting grouped up with xenophobes.

Oof sounds like such a weird thing to happen in Poland of all places... I mean you guys saw first hand what xenophobia and fascism do in WW2. Poland should be the bastion of western liberalism, not whatever it is becoming now...

And then they had to endure another few decades of occupation, putting them behind the rest of western Europe and creating a feeling of abandonment by the rest of Europe. It's common to forget that for some countries WW2 lasted in the form of occupation all the way up to 1989.

Maybe decades of occupation made them realize they value their own culture and identity more than some woke Twitter user's western "liberalism". Maybe close experience with totalitarianism makes them skeptical of current western "liberalism".

So... they want to go back to totalitarianism? That doesn't make a lot of sense. I get wanting to keep your culture and identity... but not at this price for people who were paying that price 3 decades ago.

It's just the crap that's peddled by the government to get the votes. Scare them! First year your enemy is the current government, third year it's the gays, sixth year it's the muslims (who don't want to stay in the country at all), you sprinkle in some antisemitism (the evil jewish claims!!11) and suddenly you radicalize a fifth of the population. Oops!

Right now is probably the toughest moment for them. We have a really nice Omicron wave and their tax reform that went into effect on Jan 1st (primarily shifting money from local government, where opposition controls the largest cities, to healthcare) has failed extremely spectacularly. They ignored the whole process and the laws are overcomplicated (yet broken) crap, increasing the tax burden on most people. Oops!

> To me, many of their (Polish Episcopate's) actions are illogical and a net loss to the community they're supposed to foster.

Every bureaucracy's primary allegiance is to itself, not its constituents.

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