No one in Poland has banned the teaching of religion in schools. No law has been passed, no constitutional amendment adopted, and no concordat with the Holy See renounced. Yet a series of regulatory decisions is making religious instruction less accessible and less significant within the public school system. The Polish case illustrates a broader institutional phenomenon: administrative secularisation—reducing religion’s place in public life through technical rules rather than an explicit democratic decision to exclude it.
A change made through administration
The mechanism unfolded in stages. First, a July 2024 regulation issued by the Ministry of Education allowed schools to combine students from different grades into a single religion class. In practice, this contributed to the lessons being placed at the beginning or end of the school day. Next came a decision that grades in religion would no longer count toward a student’s grade point average. Finally, a January 2025 regulation cut instruction time from two hours a week to one.
Taken separately, each step can be presented as a technical adjustment to school organisation. Taken together, they reveal how administrative choices can change the practical status of a subject without abolishing it. Piotr Janowicz, president of the Association of Lay Catechists, described the process bluntly: “The purpose of these changes is to usher religion and ethics out of the schools through the back door.” He added: “We were completely left out of the consultations.”
The Association represents lay religion teachers for whom catechesis is both a profession and a livelihood. Responding to the January regulation, it stated: “Never in the history of Polish education has any group of teachers experienced such employment discrimination as teachers of religion.” It also recalled an assurance attributed to the education minister: “We were deceived by Minister Nowacka, who pledged to look after lay catechists.”
What the employment figures show
Data disclosed by the Ministry of Education in response to inquiries from Poland’s human rights ombudsman show that the number of religion teachers and catechists in Polish schools fell by 4,517 in a single year. The figure demonstrates the scale of the contraction, but it should not automatically be read as 4,517 individual dismissals: a year-to-year decline in the teaching workforce may include different forms of departure or reduced employment. Education Minister Barbara Nowacka had previously assured the public that her reforms “did not cause mass layoffs of teachers.”
The distinction matters. So does the institutional effect. When instruction time is halved and classes can be merged across grades, fewer teaching posts and hours are required even though the subject formally remains available.
A rule-of-law dispute
The controversy is not limited to education policy. It also concerns the legal route by which the changes were introduced. In November 2024, the Constitutional Tribunal suspended the regulation on combined classes. In May 2025, it found the exclusion of religion grades from students’ averages unconstitutional. In July 2025, acting on a petition from Małgorzata Manowska, First President of the Supreme Court—Poland’s counterpart to a chief justice—it ruled unanimously that the one-hour-a-week regulation was unconstitutional as well.
The reasoning was similar in each case. Poland’s Education System Act requires the minister to issue regulations on religious instruction “in agreement with” churches and religious communities. No such agreement was reached. “The Minister of Education shaped the content of the contested regulation arbitrarily,” the Tribunal held. “The substantive positions of the interested parties were disregarded.”
The government responded that it would not recognise the rulings because the Tribunal in its current composition—seated under the previous government and contested for years by today’s ruling coalition—“has no right to make law in Poland.” The dispute over the legitimacy of Poland’s constitutional court is real and longstanding. Even with that caveat, however, the procedure remains a legitimate rule-of-law question. The changes were not enacted by statute after a parliamentary vote, but by ministerial regulation; the agreement required by law was not obtained; and the constitutional rulings challenging that route were not implemented.
Voluntary classes and parental choice
Joanna Rudy teaches religion and coordinates the National Biblical Knowledge Competition in her diocese. She describes what the effects of the reform are in practice. More than 98% of her students attend her classes. Yet, she says, catechists are becoming “second-class teachers” now that their grades no longer count toward the average. Asked whether she fears that the changes are intended to remove religion from schools entirely, she answers: “I think so.”
Rudy is also concerned by the limited public response: “We have let ourselves be somewhat intimidated as people of faith.” In her view, acquiescence allows further boundaries to be tested.
The classes at issue are voluntary. Under Poland’s system, parents decide whether their children attend religious instruction. The central question is therefore not whether the state may compel religious education, but whether administrative decisions may progressively weaken an option that families are legally entitled to choose. A formally available right may become difficult to exercise when the class is placed at the margins of the timetable, receives no weight in the grade average, and is offered for only one hour a week.
A European context
Krzysztof Kotowicz, a columnist and spokesman for the Diocese of Świdnica, argues that religious instruction in public education is not a Polish anomaly: “Teaching religion within public education systems was not, and is not, anything extraordinary in Europe—it is, in fact, the norm.” Germany guarantees it in its constitution; Austria, Belgium, Finland and Hungary also provide religious instruction. In Poland, it rests on the country’s 1993 concordat with the Holy See and on national law.
This wider context complicates the claim that weakening religion classes is simply an expression of state neutrality. Neutrality can protect citizens from religious coercion, but it should also protect their freedom to choose religious education where the law provides for it. As Kotowicz observes, “Teaching any subject once a week means reducing its significance.” His criticism is that the language of the secular state can become an instrument for isolating Christians rather than a guarantee of equal treatment.
Institutional and civic responses
Poland’s bishops are preparing for the possibility that more religious formation will move outside the public system. Bishop Marek Mendyk, who for years oversaw Catholic education at the Polish Bishops’ Conference, spoke in June 2025 about strengthening parish-based catechesis: “Parish catechesis must be understood as an integral part of what we do in schools.” He added that effective parish catechesis requires “charismatic pastors and catechists”—people “who, by the witness of their lives, will inspire trust in the young generation.” Addressing teachers affected by the changes, he said: “We are doing everything we can to protect them and enable them to continue their work.”
Parish catechesis resembles a model familiar to American religious communities: formation organised outside the public-school system. In Poland, however, an expanded parish role would not simply represent a community’s independent preference. It would also be an adaptation to regulatory decisions within the state system. Parishes are unlikely to absorb, on a full-time basis, a workforce contraction of more than 4,500 school catechists and religion teachers.
The issue has also generated a political response. A citizens’ legislative initiative, ‘Yes to Religion and Ethics in School,’ under which every student would choose either religion or ethics, has gathered more than half a million signatures. In the spring of 2026, parliamentary committees took up the bill. The bishops have petitioned the Supreme Court, while catechists have discussed forming their own trade union.
The lesson beyond Poland
The outcome remains unsettled. The institutional lesson is already visible. A government does not need to prohibit a voluntary religious practice in order to reduce its place in public life. It can alter schedules, grading rules, staffing needs, and consultation procedures until the legal right remains intact but its practical exercise becomes steadily harder.
That is why the Polish dispute reaches beyond a disagreement over catechesis. It concerns parental choice, the limits of executive regulation, the treatment of voluntary religion within a neutral state, and the ability of governments to reshape public institutions without a clear legislative decision. Administrative secularisation is quiet by design. Its instruments are technical. Its consequences are not.
As Tomasz Sypniewski of the Association of Lay Catechists observes, “Behind each of these figures are real teachers, their families, and their students.”
Poland Shows How Religion Can Be Removed from Public Life Without Being Banned
Children holding baskets with petals kneel next to a flower carpet during a Corpus Christi procession in Spycimierz, Poland, on June 16, 2022.
JANEK SKARZYNSKI / AFP
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No one in Poland has banned the teaching of religion in schools. No law has been passed, no constitutional amendment adopted, and no concordat with the Holy See renounced. Yet a series of regulatory decisions is making religious instruction less accessible and less significant within the public school system. The Polish case illustrates a broader institutional phenomenon: administrative secularisation—reducing religion’s place in public life through technical rules rather than an explicit democratic decision to exclude it.
A change made through administration
The mechanism unfolded in stages. First, a July 2024 regulation issued by the Ministry of Education allowed schools to combine students from different grades into a single religion class. In practice, this contributed to the lessons being placed at the beginning or end of the school day. Next came a decision that grades in religion would no longer count toward a student’s grade point average. Finally, a January 2025 regulation cut instruction time from two hours a week to one.
Taken separately, each step can be presented as a technical adjustment to school organisation. Taken together, they reveal how administrative choices can change the practical status of a subject without abolishing it. Piotr Janowicz, president of the Association of Lay Catechists, described the process bluntly: “The purpose of these changes is to usher religion and ethics out of the schools through the back door.” He added: “We were completely left out of the consultations.”
The Association represents lay religion teachers for whom catechesis is both a profession and a livelihood. Responding to the January regulation, it stated: “Never in the history of Polish education has any group of teachers experienced such employment discrimination as teachers of religion.” It also recalled an assurance attributed to the education minister: “We were deceived by Minister Nowacka, who pledged to look after lay catechists.”
What the employment figures show
Data disclosed by the Ministry of Education in response to inquiries from Poland’s human rights ombudsman show that the number of religion teachers and catechists in Polish schools fell by 4,517 in a single year. The figure demonstrates the scale of the contraction, but it should not automatically be read as 4,517 individual dismissals: a year-to-year decline in the teaching workforce may include different forms of departure or reduced employment. Education Minister Barbara Nowacka had previously assured the public that her reforms “did not cause mass layoffs of teachers.”
The distinction matters. So does the institutional effect. When instruction time is halved and classes can be merged across grades, fewer teaching posts and hours are required even though the subject formally remains available.
A rule-of-law dispute
The controversy is not limited to education policy. It also concerns the legal route by which the changes were introduced. In November 2024, the Constitutional Tribunal suspended the regulation on combined classes. In May 2025, it found the exclusion of religion grades from students’ averages unconstitutional. In July 2025, acting on a petition from Małgorzata Manowska, First President of the Supreme Court—Poland’s counterpart to a chief justice—it ruled unanimously that the one-hour-a-week regulation was unconstitutional as well.
The reasoning was similar in each case. Poland’s Education System Act requires the minister to issue regulations on religious instruction “in agreement with” churches and religious communities. No such agreement was reached. “The Minister of Education shaped the content of the contested regulation arbitrarily,” the Tribunal held. “The substantive positions of the interested parties were disregarded.”
The government responded that it would not recognise the rulings because the Tribunal in its current composition—seated under the previous government and contested for years by today’s ruling coalition—“has no right to make law in Poland.” The dispute over the legitimacy of Poland’s constitutional court is real and longstanding. Even with that caveat, however, the procedure remains a legitimate rule-of-law question. The changes were not enacted by statute after a parliamentary vote, but by ministerial regulation; the agreement required by law was not obtained; and the constitutional rulings challenging that route were not implemented.
Voluntary classes and parental choice
Joanna Rudy teaches religion and coordinates the National Biblical Knowledge Competition in her diocese. She describes what the effects of the reform are in practice. More than 98% of her students attend her classes. Yet, she says, catechists are becoming “second-class teachers” now that their grades no longer count toward the average. Asked whether she fears that the changes are intended to remove religion from schools entirely, she answers: “I think so.”
Rudy is also concerned by the limited public response: “We have let ourselves be somewhat intimidated as people of faith.” In her view, acquiescence allows further boundaries to be tested.
The classes at issue are voluntary. Under Poland’s system, parents decide whether their children attend religious instruction. The central question is therefore not whether the state may compel religious education, but whether administrative decisions may progressively weaken an option that families are legally entitled to choose. A formally available right may become difficult to exercise when the class is placed at the margins of the timetable, receives no weight in the grade average, and is offered for only one hour a week.
A European context
Krzysztof Kotowicz, a columnist and spokesman for the Diocese of Świdnica, argues that religious instruction in public education is not a Polish anomaly: “Teaching religion within public education systems was not, and is not, anything extraordinary in Europe—it is, in fact, the norm.” Germany guarantees it in its constitution; Austria, Belgium, Finland and Hungary also provide religious instruction. In Poland, it rests on the country’s 1993 concordat with the Holy See and on national law.
This wider context complicates the claim that weakening religion classes is simply an expression of state neutrality. Neutrality can protect citizens from religious coercion, but it should also protect their freedom to choose religious education where the law provides for it. As Kotowicz observes, “Teaching any subject once a week means reducing its significance.” His criticism is that the language of the secular state can become an instrument for isolating Christians rather than a guarantee of equal treatment.
Institutional and civic responses
Poland’s bishops are preparing for the possibility that more religious formation will move outside the public system. Bishop Marek Mendyk, who for years oversaw Catholic education at the Polish Bishops’ Conference, spoke in June 2025 about strengthening parish-based catechesis: “Parish catechesis must be understood as an integral part of what we do in schools.” He added that effective parish catechesis requires “charismatic pastors and catechists”—people “who, by the witness of their lives, will inspire trust in the young generation.” Addressing teachers affected by the changes, he said: “We are doing everything we can to protect them and enable them to continue their work.”
Parish catechesis resembles a model familiar to American religious communities: formation organised outside the public-school system. In Poland, however, an expanded parish role would not simply represent a community’s independent preference. It would also be an adaptation to regulatory decisions within the state system. Parishes are unlikely to absorb, on a full-time basis, a workforce contraction of more than 4,500 school catechists and religion teachers.
The issue has also generated a political response. A citizens’ legislative initiative, ‘Yes to Religion and Ethics in School,’ under which every student would choose either religion or ethics, has gathered more than half a million signatures. In the spring of 2026, parliamentary committees took up the bill. The bishops have petitioned the Supreme Court, while catechists have discussed forming their own trade union.
The lesson beyond Poland
The outcome remains unsettled. The institutional lesson is already visible. A government does not need to prohibit a voluntary religious practice in order to reduce its place in public life. It can alter schedules, grading rules, staffing needs, and consultation procedures until the legal right remains intact but its practical exercise becomes steadily harder.
That is why the Polish dispute reaches beyond a disagreement over catechesis. It concerns parental choice, the limits of executive regulation, the treatment of voluntary religion within a neutral state, and the ability of governments to reshape public institutions without a clear legislative decision. Administrative secularisation is quiet by design. Its instruments are technical. Its consequences are not.
As Tomasz Sypniewski of the Association of Lay Catechists observes, “Behind each of these figures are real teachers, their families, and their students.”
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