Religions in Poland
Religious creeds in Poland according to Eurobarometer 2019
The dominant religion in Poland is Christianity . The Roman Catholic Church is by far the largest denomination with a following of 87% of the population. There are also Orthodox and Protestant churches in Poland , as well as a relatively small minority of Jews and Muslims . Approx. 10% of the population is not organized religiously.
Until the end of the Second World War , Poland could be viewed as a multi-ethnic state that was also shaped by different denominations and religions. The predominantly east of the so-called Curzon Line resident Belarusians and Ukrainians were among the most orthodox, the Ruthenian Catholic Church and the United Church of. About 10% of the residents of the Polish territory were of Jewish faith. In the metropolitan areas of Posen, Pomerania, Lodz and Volyn resident Germans were, unlike the mostly Catholic German Ostoberschlesier, mostly Protestant. The Armenians and Lipka Tatars residing in southeastern pre-war Poland also did not belong to the Roman Catholic Church as a rule.
Until the re-Catholicization in the 17th century, the Reformation - Unitarian Polish brothers were also widespread in Poland-Lithuania. At times there were also Mennonite communities on the Vistula . The current situation of an ethnically and denominationally largely homogeneous state is to be seen as the result of war, genocide, displacement and, above all, Poland's displacement to the west in 1945, in the context of which the settlement area of most of the Orthodox and Ruthenian Catholic Ukrainians and Belarusians was annexed to the USSR.
After the Catholic Church, the Polish Orthodox Church with 504,150 members and the seat of the Metropolitan in Warsaw is the next largest religious community.
The Uniate Greek Catholic Church with 55,000 members was effectively recognized again in 1992 after a period of repression since 1946.
The “ Evangelical Augsburg Church in Poland ”, which has been a Lutheran church in Poland since the 16th century , had around 400,000 members before the Second World War, around 75% of whom were German and around 25% Polish. In the course of the forced resettlement of the German-speaking community members after the Second World War, the number of members fell to around 100,000. In the post-war period, the Evangelical-Augsburg Church was often discredited because of the - incorrect - equation of Protestantism and German nationality. Today the Evangelical Augsburg Church in Poland has 61,738 parish members. Evangelical are u. a. former Polish Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek and Adam Małysz .
The major minority churches in Poland belong to the Polish Ecumenical Council :
- Polish Orthodox Church (504,150 members)
- Evangelical Augsburg Church in Poland ( Lutherans ) (61,738 members)
- Old Catholic Church of the Mariavites (23,436 members)
- Polish Catholic Church (20,402 members)
- Baptists in Poland (4,864 members) - Seventh-day Baptists , Free Baptists (1,300 members)
- Methodist Church (4,352 members)
- Evangelical Reformed Church in Poland ( Calvinists ) (3,488 members)
Non-members of the Polish Ecumenical Council include: a .:
- Jehovah's Witnesses (129,270 active members)
- Pentecostal Church (22,429 members)
- Church of God in Christ (4,140 members)
- Catholic Church of the Mariavites (1,980 members)
- Old Catholic Church in Poland (1006 members)
The number of Jews , 3.3 million in 1939, is only 5,000 today.
The number of Muslims is around 25,000 - 31,000 believers, including around 5,000 Polish Tatars (see Islam in Poland, Lithuania and Belarus ).
The Catholic Church in Poland still has a great influence in everyday life and politics, which can be traced back to the history of Poland after the Second World War. During the communist regime, many Poles felt that the Catholic Church was on their side and found support from the then Pope, the Pole John Paul II.
literature
- Dieter Bingen, Krzysztof Ruchniewicz (Ed.): Country Report Poland. Federal Agency for Civic Education, Bonn 2009, ISBN 978-3-593-38991-2 , pp. 360–414
Footnotes
- ↑ European Commission : Discrimination in the European Union (= Special Eurobarometer, No. 493). Brussels, September 2019, pp. 229–230 ( online , PDF), accessed on July 2, 2020.
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Główny Urząd Statystyczny: Mały rocznik statystyczny Polski 2012 (PDF; 13.7 MB) , Zakład Wydawnictw Statystycznych, Warszawa, 2012, pp. 134–135
- ↑ Główny Urząd Statystyczny : Ludność - bilans opracowany w oparciu o wyniki NSP 2011: December 31, 2011 r. , October 8, 2012