In the period before and during the Second World War, the parish of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Bolesławiec was a medium-sized parish in terms of the number of faithful. According to the German ecclesiastical directory from 1939, there were 3,075 Catholics in Bolesławiec. There were at least six times as many Evangelicals, who had their own church. After the end of the Second World War, the German Protestant and Catholic population was replaced by a Polish population that was almost entirely Catholic. From May to December 1945, the first Poles settled permanently in the town on the Bóbr. They were prisoners returning from forced labor and concentration camps, displaced persons from the Tarnopol Voivodeship and other regions, as well as Polish Army soldiers. Settlers, repatriates and re-emigrants subsequently began to arrive. In April and May 1946, a repatriation mission of Poles from Yugoslavia arrived in Bolesławiec. Approximately 18,000 people arrived by rail transports during 1946–1947—almost the entire Polish community in Yugoslavia. Eight transports of Lemkos also arrived in Bolesławiec. In 1948 alone, 496 of them arrived. In 1946, 3,000 people lived in Bolesławiec; in 1948, 5,500; and in 1950, 8,000. In 1959, Bolesławiec had as many civilian inhabitants as before the war, namely 20,000 people living in 12,800 residential rooms. How can the parishioners of Bolesławiec be assessed during the period of interest to us, 1945–1970?
The residents of the parish during this period were for the most part families “torn” from their previous environment, with which they had been connected for years by psychological, traditional, economic and emotional ties that somehow influenced their lives under changed conditions. For them, the Church and the parish constituted an integrating factor. The Church was the factor that first and foremost removed the sense of alienation experienced by newcomers in their new circumstances. Their shared faith united them into one great family, bound by ties of love; slowly but steadily, they grew together into one new whole. In church they felt “at home,” and this left a distinctive mark on the formation of a new type of parishioner. Socially, they included miners, factory and railway workers, former farmers who wished to settle in the city, officials employed by state enterprises and institutions, and quite a large number of military families. They were Catholics who were greatly involved in parish life, attended Masses and services, distinguished themselves by their great generosity toward church causes, their willingness to undertake community work, and their attachment to their pastors. Over time, the social structure of the parish visibly changed. The number of people with secondary and higher education, particularly technical education, increased, while the number of unskilled manual workers decreased considerably. People of rural origin gradually became urban residents over the years and acquired urban characteristics. During the 25-year period from 1945 to 1970, Bolesławiec expanded and the number of its inhabitants grew dynamically. For years, there was a steady influx of residents from neighboring villages, estimated at approximately 1,000 people annually. At the same time, a certain outflow could be observed; some people, especially from central Poland, returned to their native regions. The religious and moral character of the population settled in Bolesławiec was not uniform because of the historical past that shaped it differently in various parts of the country, particularly during the period of one and a half centuries of foreign rule. Repatriates from Poland’s former eastern borderlands—namely, from the Archdioceses of Lviv and Vilnius and the Dioceses of Pinsk and Łódź—as well as newcomers from the Poznań and Pomeranian regions, stood out for their piety and religious zeal. The outgoing and highly emotional population from the former eastern voivodeships showed the greatest attachment to faith and the Church. Parishioners from the former Prussian and Austrian partitions, on the other hand, were characterized by industriousness, greater religious awareness and discipline. Newcomers from the Kielce, Lublin and Łódź Voivodeships constituted a more difficult group from a pastoral perspective. Regarding the religiosity of particular social groups, it should be emphasized that the workers, who formed and continue to form the essential core of the parish, constituted a rewarding field of pastoral work. The intelligentsia, fairly numerous in the parish, was very diverse in religious terms. Those who practiced their faith and considered themselves Catholics treated their faith more deeply than others. Assessing the faithful as a whole, it must be acknowledged that the majority were very attached to the faith and the Church, generous and disciplined. Moreover, during the twenty-five-year period, a new generation of Catholics began to make its voice heard: people raised under new post-war conditions and later born in Bolesławiec, who are now determining the parish’s further direction of development.