EVERY EVENING IN the days before Easter, Polish television news showed a group of angry parishioners in front of a closed church in Jasienica, near Warsaw. They were upset because Henryk Hoser, the archbishop of Warsaw-Praga, had decided to shut down their local church, less than a week before the most important feast in the liturgical calendar. It was his way of resolving his conflict with Jasienica’s popular parish priest, Wojciech Lemanski, who was suspended last year but continued to say Mass once a week in the church.The archbishop’s action was symptomatic of a church that seems to have lost its openness to dialogue and appears increasingly out of touch with Poland’s population, especially the young and urbanised. Poland remains the most Catholic country in Europe: some 95% of the country’s 38m people are baptised Catholics, and at least one-third of them say they attend Mass weekly. Father Lemanski had dared to criticise the church’s rigid opposition to in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), and had repeatedly condemned what he saw as the lenient treatment of clerics accused of sexual abuse. A long-standing advocate of Polish-Jewish reconciliation, he had also...
from The Economist: Special report http://ift.tt/VqUEQJ
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