Poland: Proportion of Catholics falls from 88% to 71%
The proportion of people in Poland identifying as Roman Catholics has fallen to 71% in the latest national census, down from 88% a decade earlier.
The new data, released by Statistics Poland (GUS), a state agency, show that in the 2021 census, 27.1 million people (71.3%) identified themselves as followers of the Roman Catholic church. That was down from 33.7 million (87.6%) at the last census a decade earlier.
Meanwhile, the proportion saying that they belonged to no faith almost tripled, from 2.4% in 2011 to 6.9% in 2021. Likewise, those who refused to answer the question also almost tripled, from 7.1% to 20.5%.
The highest proportions of Roman Catholics were found in Subcarpathia (82.9%), the lowest in West Pomerania (64.5%).
Apart from Roman Catholicism, all other religious denominations remained small in the 2021 census, with the Orthodox church the second largest (151,648 believers, 0.4% of the population), followed by Jehovah’s Witnesses (108,754, 0.3%) and Lutherans belonging to the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession (65,407, 0.2%).
Among non-Christian denominations, none were larger than 0.1% of the population. The biggest, with 3,236 followers, was Diamond Way Buddhism.
Meanwhile, the number belonging to the Muslim Religious Union (2,209) was smaller than the number identifying as Pastafarians (2,312) – followers of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a parody religion.
Regular polling by state research agency CBOS shows that the proportion of Poles who declare themselves to be religious believers fell from 94% in 1992 to 87% in 2021. Over the same period, those regularly practising their religion dropped from 70% to 43%.
Among young Poles, the decline was even more dramatic: from 69% practising regularly in 1992 to 23% in 2021.
The church’s own figures show that the proportion of Catholics in Poland attending mass fell from 37% in 2019 to 28% in 2021. While the pandemic played a part, the church admits that “socio-cultural factors” were also involved. It has also noted a growing number of people formally leaving the church through apostasy.