God’s Backyard: Politics and the Catholic Church in Poland

Abstract

This chapter by Dawid Tatarczyk examines Poland, a postcommunist country with a dominant Roman Catholic religious society. The author follows Jeffrey Haynes and Anja Henning’s useful theoretical framework. First, he looks at the fusion of religious and national identities that allowed the church to be the dominant institution that it now is (path development). When thinking about what the church wants to achieve (objectives), especially after 1989, he makes the distinction between the church helping to sustain the whole political system in the early 1990s, all while pushing, sometimes covertly, for specific public policy outcomes. Finally, Tatarczyk finds that although public perception of the church varies, it is still widely popular, as documented through public opinion research.