What's a Catholic country to do?

What role ought the Roman Catholic church play in a democratic Poland? Of all the perplexing questions facing Poles, perhaps none resonates more deeply in Polish history and culture than this one. After decades, indeed centuries, of opposition to a variety of external forces, the church is asserting a powerful role in setting not only the moral tone of an independent Poland but its social policy as well. The church has sought the reintroduction of religious education in public schools; it has tried to eliminate access to legal abortion; and it has maintained that Polish popular culture (particularly TV and radio) should reflect the "Christian values" of the vast majority of the Polish population.

Not surprisingly, each of these initiatives has generated controversy. Substantial elements of Polish society, particularly among the intelligentsia and professional classes, have resisted what they perceive to be the powerful political role of Cardinal Josef Glemp, the primate, and the rest of the Polish episcopate. Taken together these controversies have raised critical questions about church-state relations in Poland, questions that the church hoped would disappear with the Communist past.

On the surface, much of this seems familiar to an American observer. The issues, the rhetoric, and the political divisions correspond roughly to our own "politics of religion" in the United States. In the United States, as in Poland, religious leaders strive to "return God to the public schools," to restrict access to abortion, and to infuse popular culture (TV sitcoms, movies, magazine racks) with Christian values. And yet, to state the obvious, circumstances in Poland are vastly different from what they are in the United States. For one thing, Polish religious life is the opposite of America's religious Tower of Babel. Well over 90 percent of Poles are at least nominally members of the Roman Catholic church, and no one could fail to be impressed with the huge crowds that flock to Mass each and every Sunday. Many Poles, for cultural and political reasons, resist the description of their country--"catholic nation"--but in purely demographic terms that is not far from the truth.

More important than the demographics is the role that the Catholic church has played throughout Polish history. From the birth of the Polish nation, marked by the baptism of Mieszko I in 966, to the long decades of Communist rule, the church has often symbolized both Polish nationalism and opposition to the ruling regime. Mass attendance and personal identification with the Catholic faith have been political as well as religious acts during these periods.

In recent decades the church came nearly to embody national aspirations, and now that those aspirations have forged a truly sovereign Poland, the church is not content with symbolic gestures and mere cultural leadership. It wants a real say in the political, social, and moral life of the country. Indeed, it seeks the concrete application of Catholic moral doctrine to Polish law. Some elements in the church have gone so far as to argue that opponents of the church's moral/political initiatives are insidiously "un-Polish." Defenders of legal abortion, for example, are dismissed as secularists, nostalgic for Communist policies that were designed to destroy the country's moral fiber. Opponents of state-mandated "Christian values" are accused of carrying on outdated policies that banned the church from the mass media.

With divisions on these questions growing ever wider, politicians, scholars, and members of the media have been focusing a great deal of attention on the crafting of the new Polish constitution. This arduous task might well take years to complete, but regardless of the timetable, the constitutional treatment of church-state relations will not resolve the current problems or bridge the political and social chasms that have appeared. For one thing, the current constitutional proposal is a model of ambiguity. While declaring that the Republic of Poland is "a lay state," the proposed constitution also makes clear that this state will "cooperate" with the Roman Catholic church in order to "meet the needs" of its citizens. But even were this ambiguity to be resolved, the constitution would not settle the matter of religion and politics in Poland.

As the American experience shows, constitutions do not, by themselves, determine specific political realities. The U.S. Constitution provides that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, and the last fifty years of Supreme Court decisions have erected the so-called wall of separation between church and state. Despite this wall, indeed perhaps because of it, religion and politics (as distinct from church and state) in the United States continue to interact in both benign and aggressive ways. Religious leaders speak out on a wide range of public policy issues; religious interest groups compete for access to politicians, policy makers, and regulators; and public officials ritually display their reverence for America's Christian (or Judeo-Christian) values and traditions.

In Poland, as in the United States, the relationship between religion and politics will be forged in political battle rather than constitutional convention. And, for the moment at least, the church in Poland is asserting itself with substantial success. Religious education has returned to the public schools; abortion has been sharply restricted; divorce has become more difficult to obtain; and pursuant to a church-sponsored law, a commission has been empowered to monitor TV and radio to ensure their conformity to Poland's Christian values. Having emerged from the defeat of communism as the most organized and coherent institution in the country, the church has wasted no time translating its strengths into tangible influence in the parliament, the president's palace, and perhaps the voting booth.

Of course, this does not mean that the church's political position is assured over the long run. In fact, viewed in dynamic political terms, rather than static constitutional ones, the church's position may be more tenuous than it appears. Church-supported policies, for example, may prove, in the long run, to be unpopular. Take the issue of abortion as an example.

For nearly forty years abortion was the leading form of birth control in a country where sex education was nearly nonexistent and where reliable contraceptives were not always available. Today, with no educational preparation and no assurance that effective contraceptives will become more widely available, the Polish parliament passed a law last year banning abortion except in cases of rape or incest or where the life or health of the mother was at risk. Given the strict manner in which these exceptions are being enforced, legal abortion has been very sharply curtailed in Poland. This development portends a major change in the lives of millions of Polish families, a change that is widely (and accurately) attributed to the church's political clout. Given that opinion polls indicate that two-thirds of Poles favor continued access to abortion, and that hospital emergency rooms report rising rates of "botched abortions," the church's influence on abortion policy and its resolute opposition to artificial birth control could lead to a political backlash. That backlash would not be directed so much at the church itself, but rather at the public officials who voted the church's views into law. A state-supported imposition of Catholic censorship of the mass media could produce a similar reaction. In short, Catholicism and Catholic moral teachings may prove to be more popular as rallying points for dissent than as guides to the foundations of a democratic state.

One of the most interesting aspects of the current situation in Poland is the degree to which the matter of the church's political power will be determined not through private negotiation between prelate and party (as it was under the Communists), but through democratic processes--campaigning, voting, and forming parliamentary coalitions. In the wake of communism's fall, the church has clearly and vigorously asserted its vision of the proper relationship between the "Polish national heritage" (Catholicism) and Polish law. That vision has, to a considerable degree, passed into the statute books. But this month, the citizens of Poland will have a chance, in the voting booth, to express their views regarding these developments. If the voters endorse the church's vision, if they support parties and candidates who have done the church's bidding in the political arena, then their decision must command respect.

If, on the other hand, voters express a desire to move in a more pluralist or secular direction, then the church will face a new and very formidable challenge. It would be placed in the awkward position of opposing the democratically expressed will of the people it claims to represent. At the moment, given the general lack of institutionalized opposition to the church's influence, this scenario seems unlikely. The election is being fought over economic rather than moral issues, and few of the church initiatives are in danger of being overturned in the short run. But Poland is undergoing tremendous change at virtually all levels of society and all predictions must be cautious ones. No one can be sure where these changes will lead, but they may lead West, in the direction of consumerism, secularization, and pluralism. In that case, sovereignty and democracy may turn out to be more durable and more deeply rooted obstacles to the church's influence than either nazism or communism were.

We need to be careful, however, not to slip away from a discussion of religion and politics and back to one of church and state. The church in Poland may not carve out a privileged constitutional status for itself. And it may not succeed in electing parliaments and governments that are anxious or even willing to legislate Catholic teachings. But that does not mean that the church could not continue to play a central role in Polish society and indeed in Polish politics. The Catholic hierarchies of Spain and Ireland, to name two examples, have suffered (if that is the right word) the loss of privileged status and have also been challenged to define their political roles in new ways, in terms of their access to individual Catholics rather than their influence on the state. Indeed, the American hierarchy has been arguing in Rome for over two centuries that the separation of church and state is actually a good thing because it frees the church from potentially crippling alliances with narrow and essentially ephemeral political forces. The American church asserts itself in a myriad of ways, of course, but it focuses much of its energy on persuading Catholics and non-Catholics through education, preaching, and various forms of lobbying.

This is a lesson that the Polish episcopate may have to learn in the coming years. Influence can be defined in many ways in a democratic system, and often the hardest dilemma for any religious institution to resolve is balancing accommodation to pluralism with faithfulness to a moral and religious tradition. The response that the Polish church gives to this dilemma may define its role for decades. For Cardinal Glemp and the rest of the Polish episcopate, this dilemma may be the unavoidable price of establishing a truly sovereign and free Poland.