SO MUCH FOR CATHOLIC POLAND!

Women across Poland are set to protest against attempts by the government to further restrict access to abortion.

Demonstrations across at least 50 cities have been organized by Polish Women’s Strike, a coalition of women’s rights groups.

Pro-abortion demonstrators plan to wear black as a sign of mourning for their reproductive rights, which have come under threat under the ruling conservative Law and Justice party.

Demonstrations will also take place in Krakow, Gdansk, Szczecin and Wroclaw, as well as outside the Polish embassy in London.

The protests are the result of a vote in the lower chamber of the Parliament, which saw politicians choose to send a bill to ban the abortion of a sick foetus to a Parliamentary committee.

The new bill would ban terminations due to irreversible damage to the foetus, removing the main legal recourse Polish women have to obtain an abortion.

The government rejected a bill entitled ”Save Women” on the same day, which advocated greater access to abortion, free contraception and sex education in schools.

A woman can have an abortion if the life of the mother or foetus is in danger, in cases of grave foetal defect, or when the pregnancy occurred as a result of rape or incest – and only within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

The Law and Justice party has a close relationship with the Catholic Church, which exerts a strong influence over Poland as around 87 per cent of the population declare themselves Catholic.

In October 2016, thousands of women marched across Poland to protest abortion restrictions in a bill proposed by the Stop Abortion coalition, which introduced the so-called “citizen’s initiative” in Parliament.

The legislation advocated prison sentences of up to five years for women who had abortions, as well as legal implications for doctors who assisted with terminations.

Campaigners claim tens of thousands of terminations take place in the country illegally annually  and many women must travel to Slovakia or Germany to undergo the procedure.

I have often commented that the Church appeared to be as strong as it was in Poland precisely because it was under Communist control.

The Roman collar represented not only a spiritual authority but, perhaps more accurately, a resistance movement against the authoritarian government.

Pope St. John Paul II imagined a Poland free and independent of Communism would become a beacon of Catholicity for all the world to admire, its people walking in lockstep to the teachings and precepts of the Church.

It is clear that, once the Polish people were successful in throwing off the shackles of totalitarianism, they were not prepared nor willing to replace those political chains with religious fetters.

Sadly, Poland has gone the way of Western Europe in its growing secularism and distancing from the Catholic Church.

It is now in the grip of moral divisions which the Saintly Pope could not have possibly imagined of his once faithful flock.