For one week this summer, Poland will be the centre of the Catholic world. Some 2.5 million young people are expected to join Pope Francis in Kraków for World Youth Day. The week-long event, described by one pundit as “the Olympic Games of the Catholic Church”, is actually a Polish invention. It was created by St John Paul II in 1985. Now, for the first time, it will be held in his home town.
Poland has hosted World Youth Day once before: in Częstochowa in 1991. John Paul II was then midway through his 27-year pontificate; Poland was emerging from 44 years of communist rule; and an estimated 57 per cent of Poles attended Sunday Mass. Today, there is a new pope from “the ends of the earth”; Poland is governed by the first party to win an outright majority since the fall of communism; and average Sunday attendance is down to 39 per cent.
That last figure would be considered healthy in most other countries. But in Poland it is the source of much soul-searching. Is it a signal that the land of John Paul II is going the way of Spain and Ireland, where a centuries-long connection between Church and culture was severed in a single generation?
Doomsayers point to a fall in seminary admissions, baptisms, first Communions and marriages. But optimists note that Poland still reportedly accounts for a quarter of all priestly vocations in Europe. They also suggest that the decline in average Mass attendance is deceptive: some two million Poles have emigrated to Western Europe since 2004 but are still counted as belonging to their former parishes.
Archbishop Wojciech Polak, the 51-year-old Primate of Poland, concedes that “secularisation is occurring as strongly here in Poland as everywhere else”, but believes that the Church “engages young people more than anywhere else in Europe and it’s still able to rally most of society around religious values”. Polish Catholics have just celebrated the 1,050th anniversary of the baptism of Poland, when King Mieszko I embraced Christianity in 966, and the new government is pursuing a total ban on abortion with Church backing.
World Youth Day will be Pope Francis’s first visit to Poland. Many assume that, because of Polish Catholicism’s conservative nature, Francis is unpopular there. Far from it: there is something in Francis’s joyous, bantering style that reminds them of John Paul II.
The two men’s lives are deeply intertwined. It was the Polish pope who ended the exile imposed on Fr Jorge Mario Bergoglio by his fellow Jesuits, when he appointed him auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires in 1992. It was John Paul II who gave the Argentine bishop the red hat in 2001. It was Francis who, in turn, canonised John Paul II in 2014.
Yet some commentators argue that Francis is ambivalent about aspects of John Paul II’s papacy, such as his approach to economics and moral theology. It is hard to evaluate these claims as Francis has made few public comments about John Paul. Even his canonisation homily only devoted a few paragraphs to the Polish pope.
In Kraków this July, Pope Francis has a chance to explicitly define his relationship with a giant of post-Vatican II Catholicism and cement his relationship with one of Europe’s most energetically Christian nations. He is likely to seize it.
In an interview with the French Catholic magazine Famille Chrétienne, Cardinal Robert Sarah, head of the Vatican dicastery that deals with matters liturgical, has urged all priests to celebrate Mass facing east. The cardinal said: “As soon as we reach the moment when one addresses God – from the offertory onwards – it is essential that the priest and faithful look together towards the east. This corresponds exactly to what the Council Fathers wanted.”
Cardinal Sarah’s is an authoritative voice, not just because of the position he holds, but also because of the personal qualities that he brings to this position. No one can doubt that he is a man of great prayer, with a formidable love of the Liturgy of the Church.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that several parishes in Britain already regularly celebrate the Mass ad orientem in just the way the cardinal suggests, and perhaps now he has spoken and encouraged this, more will do so.
What will be gained by the change? First of all, from the offertory on, celebrant and congregation will all be looking in the same direction, towards God. This will powerfully underline one of the crucial insights of the Second Vatican Council, that the Mass is not the action of the priest alone, but of the entire Church.
Secondly, celebration ad orientem might greatly add to the reverence with which the Mass is celebrated, by emphasing the transcendental element to the liturgy, something that is too easily lost nowadays.
Change, however, is never popular per se. Parish priests will need to explain such a change to their congregations, so they can understand and enjoy the benefits of ad orientem celebrations. Studying the words of Cardinal Sarah would be a good place to start.
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