Parish priest Zbigniew Pędziwiatr was accused of using an installation in the form of parish bells outside ceremonies related to religious worship, namely of an offence under Article 343(1) in conjunction with Article 156(1) of the Environmental Protection Act. He was initially convicted, but filed an objection. We wrote about this in the article Parish priest filed an objection to the verdict. The court punished him for ringing the bells.
Judge Agnieszka Piłasiewicz had to determine whether the Angelus prayer, recited privately in homes, is a “ceremony related to religious worship.” At the ordinary hearing on 9 March 2023, the parish priest explained what the Catholic Church is and outlined its history in order to establish the context and widespread nature of the Angelus prayer.
“The Catholic Church is built on two foundations,” the parish priest explained. “One is divine revelation (Holy Scripture), which is the foundation of the Church’s law and mission, and the second pillar is the tradition of the Church. The Church is an organisation, a community of living faith. Each era somehow contributes something new and broader to the life of the Church. The Church is alive and cannot be limited to certain formulas, such as, as was said here, cultivating theology in a specific place and building. It is about community. The bells were meant to call people to pray the Angelus. This is a very old tradition. In the Polish Catholic Church, as St John Paul II said, ‘the day is marked by moments of stopping for prayer.’ The Angelus prayer cannot be attributed solely to a temple or one place. It is about community, about the living Church. The entire Catholic Church takes part in this prayer; it does not call people to go to a temple, but to meditate and pray wherever we are. Perhaps there is a distant analogy with the Muslim community: there, no one is bothered when a cleric calls from a minaret six times, several times a day, to prayer,” Zbigniew Pędziwiatr added. The clarification here is that in Muslim countries it is not a cleric, as Pędziwiatr claims, who calls people to prayer, but a muezzin—a man chosen from the community who is distinguished by a good voice and character. He has nothing to do with a cleric in the religious sense. Also, there are five prayers during the day in Islam, not six as the Bolesławiec priest said.
The court found that the midday “moments of reflection” embedded in Catholic tradition are nevertheless a “ceremony” related to religious worship, and that the ringing of the bells, compared to the muezzin’s call to the five traditional prayers in Islam, is a call for the faithful to attend this ceremony. It acquitted the parish priest.
“None of the acts contains a legal definition of what a ‘ceremony’ or ‘event’ related to religious worship means,” Judge Agnieszka Piłasiewicz said in the reasoning for the verdict. “In this situation, the term should be subordinated to the concept of ‘religious worship.’ According to the dictionary definition, this means reverence shown, among other things, to deities. The court took into account that the ringing of the bells at 12:00 was connected with calling the faithful to pray the Angelus. As the accused explained, bells for the Angelus have been a tradition for many centuries, and this is a generally known fact and an expression of religious worship. In the court’s view, ringing the bells for the Angelus falls within the scope of Article 156(2) of the Environmental Protection Act. The court found no guilt on the part of the defendant. He did it so that the tradition would be preserved, and his act was not socially harmful,” the judge added.
In summary, according to Judge Agnieszka Piłasiewicz, the bells may be rung at 12:00 because at that time there is a ceremony related to religious worship, even though the church building is closed and no ceremony is taking place inside it.
It should also be explained that the bells at the Parish of Christ the King in Bolesławiec are not operated anyway, because the noise they generate significantly exceeds the permitted limits. The parish continues to appeal against the decision of starosta Tomasz Gabrysiak and the decision of the Local Government Appeals Board in Jelenia Góra.
Another interesting issue during the hearing was that the parish priest had to specify his personal income. This is extremely interesting because we cannot always learn from a priest himself how much he earns.
“We support ourselves through offerings from the faithful; the position of parish priest has no fixed salary,” said Zbigniew Pędziwiatr. “It may happen that there are no offerings at all, as was the case during the pandemic. Unless I worked as a chaplain or as a teacher at a school, but I perform the duties of a parish priest and manage the parish in both civil and ecclesiastical terms. My personal income is regulated by the regulations of the Church of our Diocese of Legnica; it consists of donations given for Mass intentions. On average, my monthly income is between PLN 1,000 and PLN 3,000. This is my personal salary, while everything else is the parish fund. It is very easy to determine, because an offering at one Holy Mass is between PLN 50 and PLN 100, multiplied by 30 days, and that is my income,” the parish priest explained.