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As Poland's Church embraces politics, Catholics depart – Reuters

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WARSAW (Reuters) – Katarzyna Lipka is no longer Catholic, and she says that is a political statement.

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Katarzyna Lipka, 35, poses during an interview with Reuters at her home in Warsaw, Poland December 6, 2020. Picture taken December 6, 2020. Poster reads “No injunction no prohibition free choice” REUTERS/Kacper Pempel

Like most Poles, the 35-year-old has marked life’s milestones in the Church, a beacon of freedom in Communist times. Also like many, she’d been drifting away. In November, after the country’s courts decreed a clampdown on abortion that the bishops had lobbied for, she filed papers to cut loose.

“I used to think being passive was enough – I just didn’t take part,” Lipka told Reuters, curled up in an armchair in her apartment. “But I decided to speak up.”

For Lipka, abortion is only part of the problem. Her main concern is one many Poles, particularly young people on social media, often complain of: The Church’s increasing reach into other areas of life.

“I want – and I think all those who are leaving the Church now want – to voice our objection to what is happening now. To influence politics, our rights,” she said, adding that the Church was being allowed to have too much influence in areas such as politics, state spending and education.

Young adults in many countries are becoming less religious, according to research by the Pew Center. In Poland, a growing number of its 32 million Catholics are turning away. In 1989 when Communist rule ended, nearly 90% of Poles approved of the Church, according to the state-affiliated CBOS opinion poll. That figure is now 41% – the lowest since 1993.

The relationship between Church and state in Poland is governed by an agreement signed by Warsaw and the Holy See from 1993 that says they are independent and autonomous.

In reality, Poles see an increasingly explicit connection.

For example, priests have displayed election posters on parish property or discussed elections during mass – almost always in favour of the governing party – in more than 140 cases over the last five years, according to a Reuters tally of archived local media reports. During that time Poland has held five elections.

“What I don’t like in the Church is that it turns places of worship into a political bazaar, where my rights are being traded,” Lipka said.

The Polish Bishops’ Conference, which represents the Church in the country, declined to comment on the role of the clergy in political campaigning.

The government said it remained impartial towards religious belief and protected freedom of religion. “The relationship between the state and the Church as well as other religious organisations is based on respecting their autonomy and mutual independence … as well as cooperation for the common good,” it said in an emailed statement.

APOSTASY

In October, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal ruled that women should be prohibited from aborting a foetus with abnormalities, a ruling the government enforced on Jan. 27. About 1,000 pregnancies have been terminated legally each year in Poland, most due to foetal problems.

The Church considers all abortion to be murder. It says it was not involved in the court decision and government officials also told Reuters the Church had not influenced it. But in mass protests that followed, tens of thousands of people blocked roads and city centres carrying banners with slogans like “Get your rosaries off my ovaries.”

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Church officials stopped collating data on defections in 2010 so there is no nationwide total. In Warsaw, more people filed to quit last November than in all of 2019. The 577 acts of apostasy – the formal process of leaving the Church – booked between January and mid-December were nearly double the 2019 figure.

After the abortion ruling, Polish Google searches for ‘apostasy’ jumped to their highest since counting began in 2004. Thousands signed up for Facebook pages advising the documents needed, which include recent proof of baptism obtained from the parish where the ceremony took place. A website offering documentation, www.apostazja.eu, has had more than 30,000 downloads, its founder says.

“Whatever the reason, this is dramatic,” archbishop Grzegorz Rys, one of the most senior clerics in Poland, told Reuters.

Given the scale of revolt, he believes many are quitting in protest at what they see as increasingly tight bonds between the Church and the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party. The party’s ratings in most opinion polls have slipped to around 30% from more than 40% last August.

“SPECIAL MERITS”

The Catholic Church is at Poland’s core. According to Church data, 88% of children attend catechism classes in state-run schools.

In the 1980s, the Church was a voice of freedom: Pope John Paul II earned iconic status for inspiring people to stand up against Communist rule. Parish priests sheltered anti-government activists and helped distribute food and underground newspapers.

After Communism fell, the clergy pushed for a return to conservative Catholic values and in 1993, when Poland introduced new curbs on abortion, Church approval ratings fell below 40%. They have since recovered but never above 75%.

Over the next few years, as Poland introduced market reforms and joined the European Union, poorer, less educated voters felt left behind – a trend PiS promised to reverse when it came to power in 2015.

The party, whose strongest support is among older, rural voters, has spent millions of euros on Church-run projects, government documents show. PiS has overhauled a number of institutions, including the Constitutional Court, in reforms that the European Union says have increased political influence on the legal system. PiS disputes that.

The party sees the Church and Polish national identity as one. Ryszard Czarnecki, a senior lawmaker for PiS, says that while the party and the clergy should be seen as independent, the Church’s role in “preserving national identity” is undeniable.

“Poland has its specificity and the Church has its special merits here,” he told Reuters.

MORAL TEACHINGS

For PiS, the Church is a repository of Poland’s moral teaching: “The only alternative … is nihilism,” it said in a 2019 election campaign programme.

Public TV, run by a former PiS politician, runs nearly nine hours of Catholic programming a week, including church service broadcasts.

Church symbolism reaches deep into Poland’s political life. In 2015, a group of lawmakers from across the political spectrum placed a vial of blood from the late John Paul II – born in Poland and declared a saint in 2014 – in the chapel of the House of Parliament.

Last December, parliament added another relic – a strand of beard hair purportedly belonging to a monk killed in a Nazi German concentration camp. The monk, Saint Maximilian Maria Kolbe, was canonized in 1982 for volunteering to die in place of another prisoner.

Elzbieta Witek, the PiS-appointed parliament speaker, ceremonially received the relic for the house. She declined to comment for this story.

PiS fuses piety and nationalism to the point where a central banker nominated and chosen by the party has published his views on moral topics.

Eryk Lon wrote a piece about interest rates in 2019 in which he urged the faithful to pray for the “evil spirit of cosmopolitanism” to be eradicated from universities, particularly from business schools. He did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Same-sex marriage is illegal in Poland and senior Church officials have supported a government crackdown on LGBT rights. One archbishop, Marek Jedraszewski, warned in 2019 against a “rainbow plague” spreading through the nation. He did not respond to a request for comment.

Lipka feels it is inappropriate to hold up the Church as a moral beacon. She said she was particularly repulsed by a report from the Vatican in November that said John Paul II had promoted ex-U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick despite rumours of his sexual misconduct. McCarrick has declined to comment on the report.

“AFRAID OF THE NEW”

Sebastian Duda, a theologian and a Catholic journalist, says Poland’s court ruling on abortion brought to light how far faith has eroded – a trend that he thinks has accelerated because of “the evident marriage between PiS and the Church,” which he said is unacceptable for many.

Some priests, such as Pawel Batory from the southern city of Rzeszow, a PiS heartland, say it’s time for the clergy to retreat from politics.

Batory, who was among more than 150 priests and nuns who issued a public appeal in October for more separation of Church and State, complains about election campaigning in places of worship.

Lipka says she believes popular opinion in the country as a whole is slowly turning away from conservative Catholicism.

Even her mother, a devout Catholic, agrees with some of her reasoning, she said, but worries about what funeral rites her daughter can expect.

“My mother doesn’t know any funerals other than Catholic ones,” said Lipka. “And she is afraid of the new.”

Pawel Florkiewicz, Anna Koper and Anna WLodarczak-Semczuk in Warsaw and Philip Pullella in Rome; Edited by Sara Ledwith

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Opinion: Canada's foreign policy and its domestic politics on Israel's war against Hamas are shifting – The Globe and Mail

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The vote in the House of Commons last week on Israel’s war against Hamas represents a shift in both Canada’s foreign policy and its domestic politics.

The Liberal government is now markedly more supportive of the rights of Palestinians and less supportive of the state of Israel than in the past. That shift mirrors changing demographics, and the increasing importance of Muslim voters within the Liberal coalition.

Both the Liberal and Conservative parties once voiced unqualified support for Israel’s right to defend itself from hostile neighbours. But the Muslim community is growing in Canada. Today it represents 5 per cent of the population, compared with 1 per cent who identify as Jewish.

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Although data is sparse prior to 2015, it is believed that Muslim Canadians tended to prefer the Liberal Party over the Conservative Party. They were also less likely to vote than the general population.

But the Conservative Party under Stephen Harper deeply angered the community with talk about “barbaric cultural practices” and musing during the 2015 election campaign about banning public servants from wearing the niqab. Meanwhile, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau was promising to bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada if elected.

These factors galvanized community groups to encourage Muslims to vote. And they did. According to an Environics poll, 79 per cent of eligible Muslims cast a ballot in the 2015 election, compared with an overall turnout of 68 per cent. Sixty-five per cent of Muslim voters cast ballots for the Liberal Party, compared with 10 per cent who voted for the NDP and just 2 per cent for the Conservatives. (Telephone interviews of 600 adults across Canada who self-identified as Muslim, were conducted between Nov. 19, 2015 and Jan. 23, 2016, with an expected margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points 19 times out of 20.)

Muslim Canadians also strongly supported the Liberals in the elections of 2019 and 2021. The party is understandably anxious not to lose that support. I’m told that Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly often mentions the large Muslim community in her Montreal riding. (According to the 2021 census, 18 per cent of the people in Ahuntsic-Cartierville identify as Muslim.)

This is one reason why the Liberal leadership laboured so mightily to find a way to support last week’s NDP motion that would, among other measures, have recognized the state of Palestine. The Liberal caucus was deeply divided on the issue. My colleague Marieke Walsh reports that dozens of Liberal MPs were prepared to vote for the NDP motion.

In the end, almost all Liberal MPs ended up voting for a watered-down version of the motion – statehood recognition was taken off the table – while three Liberal MPs voted against it. One of them, Anthony Housefather, is considering whether to remain inside the Liberal caucus.

This is not simply a question of political calculation. Many Canadians are deeply concerned over the sufferings of the people in Gaza as the Israel Defence Forces seek to root out Hamas fighters.

The Conservatives enjoy the moral clarity of their unreserved support for the state of Israel in this conflict. The NDP place greater emphasis on supporting the rights of Palestinians.

The Liberals have tried to keep both Jewish and Muslim constituencies onside. But as last week’s vote suggests, they increasingly accord a high priority to the rights of Palestinians and to the Muslim community in Canada.

As with other religious communities, Muslims are hardly monolithic. Someone who comes to Canada from Senegal may have different values and priorities than a Canadian who comes from Syria or Pakistan or Indonesia.

And the plight of Palestinians in Gaza may not be the only issue influencing Muslims, who struggle with inflation, interest rates and housing affordability as much as other voters.

Many new Canadians come from societies that are socially conservative. Some Muslim voters may be uncomfortable with the Liberal Party’s strong support for the rights of LGBTQ Canadians.

Finally, Muslim voters for whom supporting the rights of Palestinians is the ballot question may be drawn more to the NDP than the Liberals.

Regardless, the days of Liberal/Conservative bipartisan consensus in support of Israel are over. This is the new lay of the land.

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Recall Gondek group planned to launch its own petition before political novice did – CBC.ca

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The third-party group helping promote the recall campaign against Mayor Jyoti Gondek had devised plans to launch its own petition drive, as part of a broader mission to make Calgary council more conservative.

Project YYC had planned with other conservative political organizations to gather signatures demanding Calgary’s mayor be removed, says group leader Roy Beyer. But their drive would have begun later in the year, when nicer weather made for easier canvassing for supporters, he said.

Those efforts were stymied when Landon Johnston, an HVAC contractor largely unknown in local politics, applied at city hall to launch his own recall drive in early February. Since provincial recall laws allow only one recall attempt per politician per term, Project YYC chose to lend support to Johnston’s bid.

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“Now we have to try to do door-knocking in the winter, and there’s a lot of preparation that you have to contemplate prior to starting. And Landon didn’t do that,” Beyer told CBC News in an interview.

Project YYC has helped gather signatures, created a website and erected large, anti-Gondek signs around town. It has supplied organizational heft that Johnston admits to lacking.

Their task is daunting.

According to provincial law, in order to force a recall plebiscite to oust the mayor before the term is up, they have two months to gather more than 514,000 signatures, an amount equal to 40 per cent of Calgary’s population in 2019.

They have until April 4 to collect that many signatures, and by March 21 had only 42,000.

Beyer criticizes the victory threshold for recall petition as so high that it’s “a joke,” and the province may as well not have politician recall laws.

So if he thinks it’s an impossible pursuit, why is he involved with this?

“You can send a message to the mayor that she should be sitting down and resigning … without achieving those numbers,” Beyer said.

Project YYC founder Roy Beyer, from a Take Back Alberta video in 2022. He is no longer with that provincial activist group. (royjbeyer screenshot/Rumble)

He likened it to former premier Jason Kenney getting 52 per cent support in a UCP leadership review — enough to technically continue as leader, but a lousy enough show of confidence that he announced immediately he would step down.

Gondek has given no indication she’ll voluntarily leave before her term is up next year. But she did emerge from a meeting last week with Johnston to admit the petition has resonated with many Calgarians and is a signal she must work harder to listen to public concerns and explain council’s decisions.

The mayor also told the Calgary Sun this week that she’s undecided about running for re-election in 2025. 

“There used to be this thing where if you’re the mayor, of course you’re going to run for another term because there’s unfinished business,” Gondek told the newspaper.

“And yes, there will be unfinished business, but the times are not what they were. You need to make sure you’re the right leader for the times you’re in.”

The last several Calgary mayors have enjoyed multiple terms in office, going back to Ralph Klein in the 1980s. The last one-term mayor was Ross Alger, the man Klein defeated in 1980.

Beyer and fellow conservative organizers launched Project YYC before the recall campaign. The goal was to elect a conservative mayor and councillors — “a common-sense city council, instead of what we currently have,” he said.

Beyer is one of a few former activists with the provincial pressure group Take Back Alberta to have latched themselves to the recall bid and Project YYC, along with some United Conservative Party riding officials in Calgary. 

Beyer’s acknowledgment of his group’s broader mission comes as Premier Danielle Smith and her cabinet ministers have said they want to introduce political party politics in large municipalities — even though most civic politicians have said they don’t want to bring clear partisanship into city halls.

Although Beyer admits Project YYC’s own recall campaign would have been a coalition effort with other conservative groups, he wouldn’t specify which ones. He did insist that Take Back Alberta wasn’t one of them.

A man in a grey baseball cap speaks to reporters.
Calgary business owner Landon Johnston speaks to reporters at City Hall on March 22 following his 15-minute conversation with Mayor Jyoti Gondek. (Laurence Taschereau/CBC)

Johnston says he was approached by Beyer’s group shortly after applying to recall Gondek, and gave them $3,000 from donations he’d raised.

He initially denied any knowledge of Project YYC when documents first emerged about that group’s role in the recall, but later said he didn’t initially realize that was the organizational name of his campaign allies.

“They said they could get me signatures, so I said, ‘OK, if you can do it by the book, here’s some money.’ And it’s worked,” he said.

Johnston has said he’s new to politics but simply wants to remove Gondek because of policies he’s disagreed with, like the soon-to-be-ended ban on single-use plastics and bags at restaurant takeouts and drive-thrus.

He’s no steadfast conservative, either. He told CBC’s Calgary Eyeopener that he voted for Rachel Notley’s NDP because one of its green-renovation incentives helped his HVAC business.

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Larry David shares how he feels about Trump – CNN

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Larry David shares how he feels about Trump

“Curb Your Enthusiasm” star Larry David shares how he feels about former President Donald Trump and the 2020 election. Watch the full episode of “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace,” streaming March 29 on Max.


03:21

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CNN

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