Poland Rethinks Supervision of 'Sects' After Minority Church Complaints

The Polish government has been forced to rethink its campaign against new religious movements after complaints of discrimination by minority churches.

A senior government official told ENI that attention would now focus on “psycho-manipulative groups” rather than on religious associations which “merely offered an alternative religiousness.”

“An inter-ministerial team will still be needed, because the sect phenomenon is too multi-faceted to be dealt with like other social pathologies,” said Krzysztof Wiktor, secretary of the Warsaw government’s Inter-Ministerial Team for New Religious Movements. “But state policy is undergoing qualitative changes, which will enable us to avoid charges of violating religious freedom.”

Wiktor was speaking after announcing plans to set up a new “Inter-Ministerial Team for Psycho-Manipulative Groups” to replace the team set up in August 1997 by Polish premier Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz.

He said new religious movements had been identified as the key problem when his team was formed in 1997, whereas the chief concern now was with groups using “psycho-manipulative methods.”

“We will no longer deal with religious movements just because they are new,” Wiktor told ENI. “Nor are we interested in the activities of this or that church. But there has been a big increase in therapeutic, health and crypto-political groups which have nothing in common with religious associations. These will be curbed as we gain knowledge and are able to catch them.”

The Inter-Ministerial Team denied in a June 2000 report that religious sects posed a “big threat to society,” but called on state institutions to begin training personnel in how to deal with them.

A Polish police spokesman, Pawel Biedziak, confirmed that material from Roman Catholic groups campaigning against sects had been used to instruct two or three officers from each Polish county. But he denied that law enforcers were acting under pressure from the predominant Roman Catholic Church.

However, the secretary-general of Poland’s 9,000-member Adventist church, Andrzej Sicinski, said that Catholic information centers were also giving “sect training sessions” to school directors and teachers. He added that an Adventist pastor had been barred from schools in Zamosc, in southeast Poland, after his church was branded a “threatening sect” in an education ministry brochure.

“Top-level officials aren’t always familiar with the specifics of religion,” added Sicinski, whose church is one of 15 Christian denominations recognized under special laws. “In reality, the threat from sects is largely imaginary, and there are far more important dangers facing Polish citizens. But they provide a convenient target for politicians and officials, who think they’ll gain the Catholic Church’s gratitude by attacking them.”

Krzysztof Wiktor told ENI that criticism from Adventists and other churches had been considered in preparing the new “change of accent,” which would “send an unambiguous signal” that his team was not violating religious freedom. “It may have happened that state organs received requests to study a particular phenomenon on the ground, and took an improper interest in certain churches,” he said.

“This is why we are trying to act discreetly and responsibly in this highly sensitive area.”

As well as 15 recognized Christian denominations, 139 religious associations are registered in Poland. Among them are nine Hindu groups and 14 Buddhist organizations.

However, Christian minorities have frequently expressed concern about pressure applied by the Roman Catholic Church, to which the vast majority of the country’s 39 million citizens belong.

Among recent complaints, the deputy chief presbyter of Poland’s 2,500-member Church of Evangelical Christians, Leon Dziadkowiec, said his church’s requests for equal rights had met with a “lack of interest” from government officials, while a leader of Poland’s 5,000-member Church of Christian Assemblies, Nina Hury, said all non-Catholic groups were “treated as sectarian and dangerous.”

Related Elsewhere

The U.S. State Department’s Annual Report on International Religious Freedom, last released in September 2000, gives more information on the country’s religious makeup, freedom, and persecution incidents over the last year. Though it notes the government’s plans to form a department to monitor “new religious groups,” it did so without comment.

More articles on religious freedom worldwide are available in Christianity Today’s persecution area.