On June 2, the day after the presidential election in which Karol Nawrocki defeated Rafał Trzaskowski, the apostazja.eu website recorded a tenfold increase in visits. Hundreds of people generated declarations of withdrawal from the Catholic Church. Although the sudden wave is already subsiding, traffic on the site remains above normal.
Krzysztof Gwizdała, the creator of the apostazja.eu website, comments:
– People saw that the Church, as usual, was getting involved in politics. Besides, some are probably discovering that the Church and its ideology are responsible for Polish women and men thinking poorly of themselves, feeling inferior, and therefore choosing Nawrocki. It is the Church that is responsible for our low opinion of ourselves, because it promotes a distorted version of humility that makes people feel worthless. Instead of teaching that humility means awareness of one’s own limitations and admiration for goodness, the Church presents humility as pride in being nobody. The faithful are expected to see themselves as the worst possible people and to regard humiliation as something that “ennobles” them.
A good example of this attitude can be found in the words of Rozalia Celakówna – a mystic whose beatification process has been conducted by the Church for years. She wrote explicitly that a soul cannot please Jesus if it “is not, and does not want to be, trampled like a rag in the mud.” This sentence perfectly illustrates the ideal promoted by the Church: not striving for goodness, reason, or beauty, but self-abasement.
– This teaching, repeated for decades, has produced its effects. Polish women and men have learned to see themselves as weak, unworthy, and inferior. Instead of believing in their own agency and value, many of us still live in the shadow of religious narratives about guilt, sin, and suffering – Krzysztof Gwizdała adds.
According to the creator of the apostazja.eu website, this is precisely why the election of Karol Nawrocki – a man from the lower social strata, a former “good hooligan” who rose to prominence – should come as no surprise. To many, he was “one of their own”: inconspicuous, ordinary, battered by life. Reports of his addiction, or the unclear circumstances surrounding his acquisition of an apartment from an elderly man, did not stand in his way. On the contrary – this image of weakness and being lost made him seem more authentic in the eyes of those who had themselves felt throughout their lives that they were not good enough to reach for something more. Trzaskowski was someone from the elites, in relation to whom many people feel inferior.
The Nawrocki effect, namely the rise in apostasy, shows not only a revolt against the current arrangement of power between the Church and the state, but also a deeper process of social healing. More and more people are rejecting the religious pedagogy of humiliation – and taking the first step toward reclaiming their own sense of worth.