I think one of the problems that has affected Civic Platform in the last few years is the perception, encouraged by the party itself, that - to echo Alastair Campbell on Labour - it “doesn’t do God”. This has two consequences. It drives away genuinely conservative voters who https://twitter.com/bdstanley/status/1310452455826653184

want a party committed to Christian social doctrine but without the arrogance and cruelty that prominent representatives of the Church have been wont to indulge in over recent years. It also adds to their aura of inauthenticity - “this is a party that says it stands for something

but can’t even stand up for liberal Catholicism despite being packed full of believers.” When PiS aligns itself with a vicious, sadistic strain in the Church, at least it does so unapologetically. That strikes people as authentic.

You’ll often hear moderate Poles say “I have met wonderful priests in my time, people who are genuinely dedicated to their parishes instead of abusing their authority.” There is a gap in Polish politics for a political party that attempts to articulate that view. A party that

doesn’t respond to clerical bigotry and abuse of power by trying to pretend the Church no longer matters or that its voice isn’t intrinsically political, but which articulates the mainstream Catholic values that most believers actually live by, rather than the radicalised

version that doesn’t correspond to what the majority of believers actually feel. People who go to Sunday mass but who feel like walking out - or actually do - when they hear tirades against a vulnerable minority, or thinly-veiled electoral campaigning. People who would like

to go to Sunday mass again, but who feel so alienated by the arrogance and high-handedness of the Church as an institution that they can no longer in good conscience support such an organisation with their presence.

When I worked as a language teacher in Warsaw-based companies a few years ago, I used to meet a lot of these people. Religion often comes up as a topic in such classes, and I’d hear the same phrase over and over: “I still believe in God, but I’ve stopped believing in the Church.”

These are people who, when asked in surveys, say they are Catholic and that they hold social values associated with their religious beliefs, but don’t participate in the life of the Church anymore. They are usually written off as cosmopolitan liberal atheists, but in fact many

of them don’t hold views that I -a card-carrying member of the Cosmopolitan Liberal Atheist Party- would recognise as consistent with that description. There is a sleeping moderate Catholic potential in Poland, and political parties are losing it just as surely as the Church is.