SARAJEVO (BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA)
Reporting Democracy/Balkan Investigative Reporting Network
February 8, 2021
By Dariusz Kalan
Distrust of the Polish Catholic Church’s takeover of many aspects of life, its inability to handle internal scandals, and the discord between conservative dogma and some priests’ ostentatious wealth are driving many Poles away.
Warsaw – For Michal Rogalski, his Catholic faith meant much more than Sunday gatherings, decorating a Christmas tree and other religious routines. It was something he felt deeply about and has explored in various ways throughout his whole life.
Born in a staunchly Roman Catholic family, Rogalski, a 32-year-old translator, became an altar boy at the age of four. Later, for a year, he attended a pre-novitiate program required to join the Dominican friary, which he eventually abandoned, and he wrote a PhD thesis on Catholic modernism.
Now, asked the most fundamental question about whether God exists, Rogalski, after a while and with some hesitation, replies: “It would be nice if he did.”
In July, it will be two years since this former fervent believer undertook an apostasy – an act of formal disaffiliation from religion, seen as a major sin by Catholic dogma – but is only now prepared to talk about it, following last year’s mass protests against the tightening, with the church’s backing, of the abortion law.
In his case, leaving the church and faith has been spread over years. Yet what ultimately weighed the scales in favour of apostasy were reports on the scale of clerical child abuse and the cover-ups of it, as well as the church’s tight alliance with the ruling right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.