The battle over religious education in Poland

Karol Nawrocki of the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party assumed the presidency of Poland on August 6. His inauguration provides two sharp contrasts: between himself and the assorted leftists in Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s ruling coalition, as well as how American conservatives—versus European liberals—think about the relationship of religion and education.

Consider the cases of Montana and Poland.

In May, Montana guaranteed children access to religious instruction by enacting a state policy that ensures weekly release time. In June, Poland’s Education Minister Barbara Nowacka, under leftist Prime Minister Donald Tusk, continued her campaign against religious education in schools.

The Polish Government in 1990, just one year after the fall of Communism, restored religious education to public schools. All children were guaranteed access to religious education provided on-site by qualified representatives of their denomination. (In Poland, that meant the largest catechetical task was undertaken by the Catholic Church). Students who did not want to take religious education enrolled in a course in ethics. Other European countries make similar accommodations for religious/ethical instruction.

One must remember that in 1990, Poland had no parochial schools. Education had been a jealously guarded monopoly of the communist state. The fact that the Catholic University of Lublin (KUL) was the only independent university behind the entire Iron Curtain, from Berlin to Vladivostok, indicated the prevailing attitude. Since the government also allocated construction material and was chary in providing it to build even churches, there were few parish-level facilities capable of providing teaching space for children in a country at least 90% nominally Catholic. There’s also no denying that, after communism built a death strip around the public square for believers seeking access to it, Polish Catholics enjoyed a certain Schadenfreude at reclaiming their public civic presence.

But the residual socialist/communist mentality in the country, coupled with “lay leftist” Catholics buying into the rigid educational separation of Church and State then still popular in America and other parts of the West as well as subsequent movements pushing for legalized abortion (Minister Nowacka was very active in those circles) and homosexual “rights” all saw the Church as the enemy and wanted to circumscribe its influence. This usually took the form of claims that breaching what Americans might call “strict separationism” entailed the “creation of a confessional state (państwo wyznaniowe)” in Poland. Assaults on the public presence of religion ranged from ongoing sniping at the presence of a crucifix in the chamber of the Polish parliament to attacks on the country’s stricter abortion regime. Religious education, however, remains the main target.

The latest installment of the attack on religious education came in the form of Education Minister Barbara Nowacka’s June 11, 2025, decree that grades for religious education or ethics would be excluded from calculating a student’s grade point index. Her decree came ten days after her political camp’s candidate lost in the presidential elections and after the Constitutional Court struck down her earlier decree, which unilaterally reduced religious education to one hour per week. The Court found that arbitrary reduction illegal as violating the Concordat: given the size of the Catholic Church’s share of religious education, religious education also came to be regulated in the Polish-Holy See Concordat (another area of sharp attack when ratified) and the Court said the government could not simply revise rules for religious education at will because it involved other parties’ rights.

Polish parents are already identifying plaintiffs for a suit against Nowacka over her “don’t count religion into the grade point average” rule. The Polish equivalent of upper high school is the liceum. Student progress through the levels of education is directed by qualifying exams: academic licea (as compared to technical high schools), which prepare students for university studies, are more competitive. Plaintiffs would be junior high school (gymnasium) students whose highest grade is in religion or ethics, the exclusion of which reduces their overall grade point average and thus disadvantages their chances at admission to more selective licea.

Nowacka has already been at loggerheads with parents over her effort to introduce sex education programs that mirror Western gender ideology content. Since Poland is in Europe, however, parental rights are weaker than in the United States, although Polish parents might be deemed more similar to Americans in their assertiveness.

The daughter of a former leftist deputy prime minister, Minister Nowacka made her name for herself in the 2016 “Black Monday” protests against the Constitutional Court’s striking down eugenic provisions in the national abortion law. The invalidated provisions permitted abortion if there was a “probability” that the unborn child suffered from some genetic defect. With that invalidation, Poland had one of the strongest life-protective abortion laws in Europe. Its opponents, however, characterized it as a “total ban” on the procedure.

Given contemporary sharp political polarization in Poland and the narrow margin of President-Elect Karol Nawrocki’s victory, one might think Prime Minister Tusk would consider it at least politically ill-advised to pick a fight with the Catholic Church, given the latter’s influence. But, as elsewhere in the West, Tusk’s approach seems to be not letting his left hand stop what his left-er hand is doing. And that hand is busy trying to use the leverage of the Education Ministry to overturn 35 years of practice and make schools into Poland’s naked educational public square.