Catholic Church Flexing Its New Muscle in Poland : Politics: Schools are teaching religion, and an anti-abortion bill gains. Some are alarmed by the trend.

WARSAW —  When classes started in September at Duracza High School in Warsaw, Elzbieta Domanska and Agnieszka Rostkowska, both 16, were among many of the 800 students at the school stunned over a new feature of the curriculum: religious instruction, one hour weekly, taught by a Roman Catholic priest.

“No one expected to see this,” said Agnieszka. “It seemed out of place here.”

“It is more normal to have religious instruction in a holy place,” said Elzbieta. “It seems like religion should be taught in a church.”

Similar surprise, with varying degrees of dismay or satisfaction, was common across the country when the first genuinely post-Communist public school classes convened in Poland this fall. Catholic priests turned up at every school from kindergarten through high school, catechisms in hand, eager to repair what they regard as the spiritual neglect imposed by a 40-year Communist ban on religious teaching in the schools.

Participation is voluntary, but parents say the pressure to attend, especially on primary school students, is prevalent and effective.

Now, on the heels of that development, the upper house of the Polish National Assembly has passed a controversial anti-abortion bill that, if it is passed by the lower house and signed into law, would provide for two-year prison sentences for physicians or others convicted of performing abortions.

Opponents of the proposed law say the measure would also ban virtually all oral contraceptives from sale in Poland.

The driving force behind the anti-abortion bill and the resumption of religious teaching in public schools is the powerful Roman Catholic Church of Poland. In a country where 95% of the population is baptized in the church, and where 65% remain observant Catholics throughout their lives, such measures have unusually widespread support.

But there are others who see the church, victorious in the aftermath of the rout of the Communists from power here, as acting in a newly high-handed and dictatorial manner, in effect substituting religious authority for that once wielded by the Communists, all in the name of higher morality. To some critics, it is as if the church, after years of providing shelter against the Communists, has decided to come forward and claim its reward.

Certainly, the church is a more obvious presence than ever before. When a new consignment of police vans went into service in Gdansk, a priest was there to bless them, an event shown on the television news. Virtually no official event takes place without clerical benediction.

And recently, Archbishop Jerzy Dabrowski of Warsaw attacked Polish television for showing protesters demonstrating over the abortion vote. Critics say the complaint was an attempt to intimidate the news media.

Church officials decline to comment on the subject of the church’s new political assertiveness.

“There is nothing going on,” said Bishop Alojzy Orsulik, the church spokesman. “If some persons are using all this for political purposes, it is not our problem.”

In the face of the church’s massive political and social clout, many with misgivings are wary of expressing their doubts publicly.

Parents who object to religious teaching in the schools, particularly parents of children in primary schools, are reluctant to make any protest that might single out their children among their classmates. Most say they are not anti-religion or anti-Catholic, but they say they prefer for religion to be confined to the church.

Politicians who oppose the church’s position on the abortion issue are either cowed into submission or, if defiant, clearly prepared for defeat in any future election, certain that the church will work against them. The vote in the 100-member Senate was 50 to 17 in favor of passage, the high number of absentees suggesting the delicacy of the issue.

“The church has become a leading political power here,” said Anna Bogucka-Skowronska, a Solidarity senator who cast one of 17 votes against the bill. She said she has no doubt that the church will one day work against her reelection.

“The church can destroy any politician,” she said.

“For years the church has been for Poles a bastion of freedom,” she said. “You could go to the church and feel free. Now the church has entered into a dangerous period. It is now an institution concerned with power.”

The church, she said, has promoted “a stereotype that a good Pole is also a good Catholic. This is bound not only to moral issues, but to public issues as well.”

The decision to introduce religious teaching in schools, she points out, was reached in negotiations between the church and the government’s Ministry of Education, then simply announced to the public. The steamroller approach, she believes, is not in harmony with Poland’s new democracy. “This was done outside any public discussion,” she said. “Our nation has so long fought to be able to decide for itself that it should not allow anything to be imposed on it, even if it is a good thing.”

Her reason for opposing the anti-abortion bill, she said, is simple: “Women will die because of this legislation.”

Studies have shown, she said, that most abortions in Poland have been performed on women who have already given birth to two or three or four children.

“The number of abortions is not due to the moral collapse of women,” she said. “It is due to the economic conditions, to the fact people have very small apartments and no hope of finding larger ones, to situations that are beyond their control. If the state cannot make life easier for women, it certainly has no right to penalize women or to deprive them of making a free choice over their lives.”

Dr. Zofia Kuratowska, a leading Solidarity senator and a deputy minister of health, also voted against the bill. As a physician and a medical school professor, Kuratowska said she is aware that the medical profession is against the new law, but she admits that “the doctors have been very quiet.”

“Many have spoken to me privately,” she said, “but they are intimidated as well.”

Not just individuals but governmental bodies can be intimidated, the church’s critics say. Some town councils, which in some cases are responsible for funding local hospitals and clinics, can be pressured by local church officials to withdraw financial support if doctors publicly oppose the law. In its extreme, observers say, the system of control is able to function in a style remarkably similar to the one devised by the Communists.

“I am very worried about the church taking over public life,” said Ivona Osuch, 37, a free-lance journalist who has volunteered to work with a new group called Neutrum, which defines itself as an “organization for an ideologically free Poland.”

“We have to be grateful for what the church has done for Poland in recent years,” she said. “But we have to avoid the situation where there is an extra-political force that influences government. We used to think, in the ‘80s, that if we could only have our country back, then our problems would be over. But that is precisely where our problems are beginning, and we are too tired now. I shouldn’t be saying this, but I am a pessimist on these two issues--religion and abortion. I think these are lost issues now.”

Sens. Kuratowska and Bogucka-Skowronska are also pessimistic. Although there are signs that the important vote on the issue by the Sejm, or lower house, will be postponed as long as possible, both feel that the issue will inevitably come up for a vote. As was evident in the Senate, where 99 of 100 members are from Solidarity, the church is on safe ground with the country’s leading political movement.

The two leading presidential candidates, Solidarity leader Lech Walesa and Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, have not yet been pressed on whether they would sign the bill into law as it now stands. Walesa, father of eight, has declared himself against abortion. Both men are famously devout Catholics. Feminists say they believe their chances are better with the more liberal Mazowiecki, but they say the pressure on him will be enormous.

“I think any Polish president would be forced to sign it,” said Jolanta Plakwicz of the Polish Feminists Assn., a group that has only 70 members but has suddenly begun to attract new interest. During debate on the anti-abortion bill, Plakwicz stalked the corridors of the National Assembly daily, campaigning, vainly, along with a handful of other activists.

“This is a very male-oriented society,” she said, “and it has been hard to attract women to a feminist organization. In Poland, people think that being feminist is being anti-male, and that is the No. 1 crime here. Women are still not interested in questions such as why women get laid off their jobs before men, although we have tried to get them interested.

“But on this abortion issue, people are learning quickly that this is dangerous. They sense that what was a tendency a year ago is now a reality. We are not organized, but we are furious, so there is hope.”

One hope that Plakwicz and some others see is that the church’s assertiveness may, in the end, work against it. Some say dissident groups are likely to form in the church, although there is no outward sign of this yet. More likely, they say, some adherents may simply be driven away.

A Warsaw high school is not necessarily an accurate reflection of the whole society, but the students at Duracza High School noted that attendance at the religion classes has fallen off dramatically. According to Father Jan Ujma, the priest teaching the classes, 81% of the students signed up to take the course. Students interviewed outside the school last week indicated that less than half of those enrolled actually show up.