Poland’s new progressive political leadership is complaining to the Vatican that the nation’s Catholic bishops are speaking too forcefully against mass immigration. During a pilgrimage to the Jasna Góra monastery last week, the retired Bishop Wiesław Mering of Wlocławek spoke against mass immigration in a homily, highlighting the government’s complicity in what is quickly becoming a crisis. Mering said, “Our borders are threatened from both the west and the east,” referring to Germany, Belarus, and Ukraine. The bishop also averred that the Polish government “is ruled by political gangsters.”
Poland’s bishops are participating in a long tradition of Catholic shepherds facing off against wolves.
Germany began tightening its immigration controls in 2023 and has, more recently, been “deporting” illegal immigrants by simply dropping them across the border into Poland. Conservative-aligned Polish President Andrzej Duda called on left-of-center Prime Minister Donald Tusk to address the situation with Germany, saying, “It is a pity the Polish government is not reacting to the pushing of migrants from Germany into Poland.”
While Tusk and his deputies have insisted that Poland’s border security agents are addressing the illegal immigration issue, Poles have formed citizen patrols, known as the Border Defense Movement, traveling in groups of several hundred, to ensure that Germany’s illegal immigration problem does not become Poland’s.
Former Polish Minister of National Defense Mariusz Blaszczak, a member of the conservative Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość or PiS) party, warned, “Poland’s western border is ceasing to exist!” He continued, “Illegal migrants are regularly being transferred to us from Germany, and Tusk’s government is pretending that nothing is happening.” He added, “Scenes from border towns are beginning to resemble those from Berlin, Paris or Stockholm — groups of illegal migrants sleeping on benches, in parks, wandering around.”
Bishop Antoni Długosz, auxiliary bishop emeritus of Częstochowa, also spoke against the burgeoning illegal immigration crisis facing Poland. Długosz asserted that “for decades, the Islamization of Europe has been progressing through mass immigration,” adding that “illegal immigrants … create serious problems in the countries they arrive in.”
Tusk’s Foreign Ministry and ambassador to the Holy See, Adam Kwiatkowski, have filed a complaint with the Vatican in response to the bishops’ remarks. Kwiatkowski accused the bishops of “slandering the government”, “indicating clear support for nationalist groups”, and “undermining fundamental principles of human dignity.”
In its complaint to the Vatican, the Foreign Ministry said, “The words of the two bishops mentioned are shameful and unworthy of the institution they represent and the faithful.” The complaint added, “We kindly suggest that appropriate consequences be taken against the bishops … so that similarly unfortunate, false, and unjustified statements do not appear in the future in public discourse, tarnishing the good name of the Catholic Church.”
“The voice of the Catholic church in Poland is respected…. We wouldn’t want such comments to be labelled as incitement or even hate speech,” the Foreign Ministry continued, coming dangerously close to threatening the Vatican. “[T]he Holy See has exclusive authority to appoint bishops, but this authority also imposes the obligation to bear the consequences of the actions of those appointed, including dismissing them, if they exceed the scope of good relations or violate the principles described in the concordat.”
The Catholic Church, of course, has centuries’ worth of moral teachings on the handling of immigration and its relationship to national sovereignty and cultural identity. (I have written on the issue extensively here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) Bishops Mering and Długosz are not contradicting the teachings of the Church but upholding them, in addition to calling for the preservation of the rule of law, Polish sovereignty, and Poland’s rich and beautiful cultural identity and heritage.
Interestingly, Tusk’s Foreign Ministry claimed that Catholic priests and bishops should not be involved in political matters. The annals of Church history suggest otherwise. In the fourth century, St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, excommunicated the Emperor Theodosius I following a massacre Theodosius ordered. Ambrose demanded public penance from the emperor, who famously knelt before the bishop and repented. St. Athanasius was exiled on several occasions for resisting state control over religious appointments and St. John Chrysostom was exiled for publicly criticizing corruption in the court of Empress Eudoxia. When Atilla the Hun threatened to sack Rome, Pope St. Leo the Great famously rode out to confront the warlord and succeeded in convincing him to leave Rome in peace.
St. Thomas Becket openly defied his one-time friend King Henry II’s efforts to exert political authority over the Church and held rogue nobles accountable for their encroachments and crimes against Catholic priests and monks. Becket was rewarded with martyrdom when a band of Henry’s knights split his head open. Although not a cleric, St. Thomas More likewise opposed an English king, Henry VIII, and was imprisoned in the Tower of London before being beheaded.
In more recent decades, priests like Miguel Pro stood against the anti-Catholic regime in Mexico, even when it cost them their lives. Catholic clerics in Germany and Poland boldly spoke against the Third Reich and its machinations. Best remembered for his martyrdom in the Auschwitz concentration camp, the Franciscan St. Maximilian Kolbe published several newspapers and magazines and ran a radio station, often engaging in political discourse and criticizing Nazism, communism, and freemasonry. Pope St. John Paul II famously opposed the Soviet regime and galvanized the Polish Solidarity movement in the 1980s, culminating in the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Soviet Union.
Far from deviating from the norm with their political commentary, Poland’s bishops are participating in a long tradition of Catholic shepherds facing off against wolves. As the Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen reminded us, “A religion that does not interfere with the secular order will soon discover that the secular order will not refrain from interfering with it.”
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