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the Vatican's decision to regard the former German territories, for ecclesiastical purposes, as permanently Polish.
Despite the church's newly hopeful position in 1972, friction continues to exist between the authorities and the hierarchy, and particularly between the authorities and the parish clergy. Moreover, some of this friction is self-generating, and stems from the church's acknowledgement of Catholicism's weakening ideological position, especially among the increasingly skeptical younger generation. As a unique blend of nationalism and religion, Catholicism in Poland has long been strong as an institution and weak as a philosophy; it is virtually invincible to an open assault carried out in the name of an alien ideology, but relatively vulnerable to piecemeal encroachments under the cover of a nationalist philosophy. The lines of philosophical conflict were intensified over the years as a large segment of the Polish intelligentsia combined its formal adherence to Catholicism with growing anticlericalism and skepticism, while at the same time most priests, usually drawn from the peasantry, have maintained their attachment to the ritualistic rather than the intellectual side of Catholicism. The postwar Communist regimes have sought to exploit these weaknesses and to charge that Cardinal Wyszynski's concept of the "church militant" in Poland has been deliberately used to incite church-state clashes as a means of counteracting growing religious indifference.
The Polish hierarchy continues to be deeply stepped in traditionalism and conservatism and is wary of even accepted innovations within the Roman Catholic Church since the reign of Pope John XXIII, many apparently feel that change of any kind would weaken the church's ability to continue its major role within an antagonistic secular framework. At the same time, there is some evidence that younger elements within the Polish clergy are seeking ways to ocverome the weaknesses of the Polish church, and to imbue it more with the spirit of ecumenism emanating from Vatican II. By doing so, they hope to recapture the rational allegiance of the youth and the intellectuals, as well as the growing numbers of the uncommitted and indifferent.
Although Cardinal Wojtyla's loyalty to the concept of church unity in general and to Cardinal Wyszynski in particular is not questioned. There are signs that some younger prelates consider Wojtyla as embodying more than Wyszynski (the two prelates were 51 and 71 years old, respectively, in 1973) the ecumenism and intellectual content of Catholicism that they feel will be needed in coming decades. Because of the existence of the Communist regime as an external protagonist, notwithstanding the new attitudes of the Gierek leadership, the potential for future conflict between conservatism and liberalism within the Polish church is small. Nevertheless, the character of this potential conflict within the Polish church mirrors the situation of Roman Catholicism in some Western European countries—the dilemma of imbuing old forms with new content without compromising the catholic nature of the church as an institution. Figure 35, showing a 17th century church in rural Krakow province and a new church in industrial Silesia, symbolizes in some ways the old and the new forces at work within Polish Roman Catholicism.
The traditional dominance of Roman Catholicism in Poland was further heightened as a result of wartime population losses and territorial shifts. These changes reduced or eliminated the sizable prewar ethnic minorities who were generally identical with the religious minorities. The estimated 2% to 5% of the population that is not Roman Catholic belongs to some 18 other officially recognized religious denominations. The most sizable of these include approximately 100,000 adherents of the Uniate Church, which follows the Greek Catholic rite but acknowledges the authority of Rome. Protestants number about 300,000, the majority of whom are Lutherans. Followers of the Greek Orthodox Church have been variously estimated at between 100,000 to 350,000, most of whom reside in the former German territories and some in the extreme north and east. The Polish (National) Catholic Church, which was formed in 1870 by a Polish group in the United States in protest against the doctrine of papal infallibility and later spread to Poland, is estimated to have about 80,000 adherents. It has been unsuccessfully used by the Communist regime as a pawn in the struggle with the Roman Catholic clergy at lower levels. In addition, there are small numbers of Calvinists, Methodists, Seventh-day Adventists, Baptists, and Muslims. There were more than 3 million Jews in prewar Poland, but Nazi extermination policies and postwar emigrations has reduced their number to an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 in 1972. Interreligious frictions have virtually disappeared because of the negligible number of non-Roman Catholics, but latent anti-Semitism, which has both social and political origins, remains a problem.
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