The war has helped to resurrect Poland’s Catholic church

In my wife’s home city of Wroclaw, there’s a luxury hotel named after John Paul II. It has always seemed strange that the Catholic church sanctioned this. Giant chandeliers and glitzy bathrooms weren’t really what St John Paul stood for, and since the hotel opened in 2002 it had seemed as much a monument to the church’s decline as a tribute to a saint. But everything changed with the war in Ukraine. Some 2.5 million Ukrainians have fled to Poland since Russia’s invasion and the hotel is currently home to more than 100 refugees. It’s as if the building has finally discovered its real purpose.

What’s true of the John Paul II hotel is true more widely of the Polish Catholic church. The response of Polish Catholics to the war was immediate, all-out and magnificently unbureaucratic. A vast chain of care was formed that ran from nuns offering cups of tea to exhausted refugees at the Ukrainian border, to counsellors giving psychological support to terrified children, to the archbishop welcoming new arrivals to stay in his cavernous palace. This great humanitarian effort is all the more remarkable because the Polish Catholic church appeared, until very recently, to be demoralised and adrift. Its reinvigoration could hold some lessons for the wider church – not just the Catholic church, but the Church of England too.

For many, the words ‘Polish Catholicism’ evoke images from the 1980s: of dissidents speaking at shipyard gates in front of pictures of the Virgin Mary, vast crowds assembled for the funerals of martyred priests, and John Paul II, dashing in his red cape. But it’s time to update that picture, because the Polish Catholic church has changed greatly.

Following the Pope’s death in 2005, it began to lose its way. The most obvious sign was the abuse crisis. Disturbing disclosures led the Vatican to punish a series of bishops for negligence: a humiliating twist for a church that had enjoyed such moral prestige.