The mainly ethnic Irish and German bishops helped establish hundreds of parishes for Poles, but priests were usually unable to speak Polish, and the new immigrants had poor or limited English.

There were also disputes over who owned church property, particularly in Buffalo, New York, and Scranton, Pennsylvania, with the parishioners demanding greater control.

[6] The church began missionary work in Poland after the country regained independence following World War I.

[7] In 2002, Robert M. Nemkovich was elected by the twenty-first general synod to be the sixth prime bishop of the Polish National Catholic Church.

In 2010, Anthony Mikovsky was elected by the twenty-third general synod to be the seventh prime bishop of the Polish National Catholic Church.

[8] The church believes that "Marriage is the sacrament which makes a Christian man and woman husband and wife, gives them grace to be faithful to each other and to bring up their children in love and devotion to God.

The PNCC continued to refuse full communion with those churches that ordained women; thus, in 2003 the International Old Catholic Bishops' Conference expelled the PNCC from the Utrecht Union, determining that "full communion, as determined in the statute of the IBC, could not be restored and that therefore, as a consequence, the separation of our Churches follows".

[17] Dialogue with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, with the approval of the Holy See, led in 1996 to an arrangement that Laurence J. Orzell has called "limited inter-communion".

Obstacles to full communion include different understandings about papal primacy, the level of involvement of the laity in church governance, and the PNCC reception of some former Roman Catholic clergy, most of whom subsequently married.