Abstract
For a long time, the Roman Catholic Church had a problem with coming to terms with both democracy as a political system and the norm and concept of human rights. Generally speaking, the difficulties were an outcome of the incompatibilities between understanding of the concept of rights in the classical natural law tradition of the Catholic Church and in the theories of natural rights of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The ambivalent attitude of the Roman Catholic Church towards democracy and human rights started to change gradually only in the twentieth century, and particularly so with the Second Vatican Council. Nonetheless, various tensions still persist in several areas.
Poland, with its profound transformations resulting from post-socialist democratization and its strong religious identity as well as the public presence of the Roman Catholic Church, offers an interesting case study for discussing these tensions. The article focuses on two areas that are particularly problematic from the Church’s point of view: freedom of religion and women’s rights. These case studies are preceded by a general introduction to the issues of human rights and religion in Poland.
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Notes
- 1.
For more information see the Foundation of International Human Rights Law at http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/hr_law.shtml
- 2.
See Helsinki Foundation of Human Rights at http://www.hfhr.pl/en/komitet/.
- 3.
This includes various organizations representing and protecting the rights of various vulnerable groups like women, LGBT, religious, and ethnic or national minorities.
- 4.
A full list of all registered churches and religious organizations is available on the website of the Ministry of Administration and Digitization of Poland: (https://mac.gov.pl/files/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/E-Rejestr-29.10.2013.pdf)
- 5.
This right is given to all officially registered and legally recognized religious organizations. However, in practice the Roman Catholic Church is the biggest beneficent of this arrangement (Zielińska and Zwierżdżyński 2012, p. 277).
- 6.
Some religious groups operated in Poland in the 1970s, yet due to administrative restrictions (e.g. no possible way to legalize their activity) they could not operate officially.
- 7.
The strong negative reaction of the Presidium of the Bishops' Conference against signing the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence by the Polish government illustrates this standpoint well. The bishops openly criticized the convention and called upon the government not to ratify it. The bishops’ concerns included the Convention’s definition of differences between men and women in social and cultural terms (i.e. in terms of gender) and denying ‘natural biological differences between woman and man’. Furthermore, the bishops were opposed to the obligation which the convention imposes on a ratifying state to organize education on non-stereotyped gender roles. It was understood as ‘promotion of […] homosexuality and transsexuality’ (Polish Bishops’ Conference 2012a).
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Acknowledgment
This study was funded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Poland as part of the project ‘Religion in the Polish Politics in the Context of European Integration’ (no. 5535/B/H03/2011/40).
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Zielińska, K. (2015). The Roman Catholic Church and Human Rights in Poland. In: Ziebertz, HG., Črpić, G. (eds) Religion and Human Rights. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09731-2_11
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