The Socio-Cultural Transformations of Marriage and Family in the Pastoral Discernment of the Archbishops of Warsaw, based on the Analysis of the Five-Year Reports of the Archdiocese of Warsaw in the Last Half Century

Abstract

The effort to diagnose the changes taking place in the Church and in society, undertaken in the post-conciliar structure of pastoral discernment in the Catholic Church, is based primarily on the analysis of data sent to the Vatican from dioceses all over the world. This procedure, which has been used for Italy since the antiquity and for the whole world since the Middle Ages, underlines the great importance of the documents analysed here. The study of these documents allows us to conclude that the eminent pastors of the Church in Warsaw were fully aware of the extent to which secularisation was growing in the Polish capital, and of the problem of the gradual dissociation of society from religion and faith, including numerous marriages and families. During the tenure of the Primate of the Millennium, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, the negative social changes were external to the Church and was caused by the communist authorities. However, the Church remained the main and effective creator of the ethos of values and morals of Polish social life. The governance of the Warsaw diocese by Cardinal Józef Glemp was part of a period of dynamic political changes in the Polish state, and later changes in the boundaries of dioceses after the creation of more dioceses. With the economic crisis and later developments around marriage and the family, a great debate was opened about the right to abortion. During this time, Cardinal Glemp’s pastoral ministry focused on strengthening structures for the preparation and formation of marriage and family. A different balance of forces in the area of socio-cultural change is seen in the ministry of the current Ordinary of Warsaw, Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz. In the last decade, socio-cultural changes have shown a strong polarisation for socio-political and ideological reasons. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated the process of atomisation of the faithful, leading to major changes in the practice of religion. Faced with a crisis not only of faith, but of its dogmas and even of the anthropological vision of man himself, the challenge is to evangelise even more courageously, and to reach out to people who are lost in the context of a social structure in which faith is not taken for granted.