Religion in Poland
[6] The church's reputation has declined significantly in response to sexual abuse scandals, its support of a near-total abortion ban in Poland, and close ties to the Law and Justice party, often considered its de facto political proxy in the country.
[2][3][4] The current extent of this numerical dominance results largely from The Holocaust of Jews living in Poland carried out by Nazi Germany and the World War II casualties among Polish religious minorities.
[15] For centuries the ancient West Slavic and Lechitic peoples inhabiting the lands of modern-day Poland have practiced various forms of paganism known as Rodzimowierstwo (“native faith”).
The persistence was demonstrated by a series of rebellions known as the Pagan reaction in the first half of the 11th century, which also showed elements of a peasant uprising against landowners and feudalism,[21] and led to a mutiny that destabilized the country.
[28] The Protestant movement gained a significant following in Poland and, though Roman Catholicism retained a dominant position within the state, the liberal Warsaw Confederation (1573) guaranteed wide religious tolerance.
[28] But the Counter-Reformation's reactionary movement succeeded in reducing the scope for tolerance by the late 17th and early 18th century – as evidenced by events such as the Tumult of Toruń (1724).
[28][29][30] When Poland was divided between its neighbors in the late eighteenth century, some Poles were subjected to religious discrimination in the newly expanded German Prussia and Russia.
Comparatively few managed to survive the German occupation or to escape eastward into the territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union, beyond the reach of the Nazi Germany.
As elsewhere in Europe during the interwar period, there was both official and popular anti-Semitism in Poland, at times encouraged by the Roman Catholic Church and by some political parties (particularly the right-wing endecja and small ONR groups and factions), but not directly by the Polish government itself.
