Forty percent of Polish Roman Catholics attend Sunday mass, according to Poland’s Statistical Institute of the Catholic Church.
The annual count was carried out in the autumn of last year in all of the country’s 10,000 parishes and shows that church attendance has not changed since 2011 but has dropped by 10 percentage points over the past three decades.
Attendance differs considerably from region to region, with almost 70 percent of Catholics going to Sunday mass in the southern diocese of Tarnów and only 25.8 per cent in the Szczecin diocese in the north-western Baltic province.
According to Father Tadeusz Zdaniewicz from the Statistical Institute of the Catholic Church, falling church attendance is not tantamount to a lower level of religiousness.
“What we are witnessing,” he told the Polish Press Agency, “is the experiencing of faith at a deeper level, as evidenced by the growing number of people receiving the Holy Communion.”
Thirty years ago, 7 percent of those attending Sunday mass took Holy Communion. The number grew to 13 per cent in 1993 and 16.2 percent last year.
The year 2000 was the record year in this respect, with 19.4 percent of Catholics receiving Holy Communion.
(mk/pg)
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