Poland's bishops concerned about secularization of schools and sex ed

Poland’s Catholic bishops have published a sharp cautionary note as the new school year begins, warning that state-mandated “health education” is becoming more secularized, normalizing things like contraception. In addition, administrative moves are sidelining religion classes, representing a decisive shift in who is allowed to shape the morality of the country’s youth.

Key Takeaways:

The Presidium of the Polish Episcopal Conference said the government is going beyond its boundaries in teaching human development.
The bishops also said the church is being sidelined in religious education in public schools.
They warn that education is becoming increasingly secular.

The Details:

In a statement from August 24, 2026, “A Young Person Deserves More,” the Presidium of the Polish Episcopal Conference (KEP) argued that the state is going beyond its proper role by assuming parental functions in the most intimate areas of human development — sexuality, marriage, and family life — while concurrently sidelining the church's traditional educational presence in public schools.

Signed by Archbishop Tadeusz Wojda (KEP president), Archbishop Józef Kupny, and Bishop Marek Marczak, the bishops’ declaration proclaimed education as a shared project among family, school, religious communities, and the state, premised on mutual respect for the various competencies.

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The bishops emphasized that the Church does not demand an educational monopoly, but provides a vision of the human person drawn from the Gospel, aimed at integral formation: truth, love, responsibility, and the ability to select the good.

As EWTN reported:

“Religion classes are not a privilege of the Church” but “a constitutional right” based on “freedom of conscience and religion and the right of parents to raise their children in accordance with their own beliefs,” the document stresses.

They also say religious classes can help nonbelievers in schools better understand the history of the nation and Europe as well as the arts, culture, and literature. “Especially in times of crisis,” the document says, religion is a “guiding light that prevents them from getting lost.”

Two concrete policy amendments sparked the bishops’ concern:

New scheduling and grading rules effectively put religion classes on the back burner.
The Ministry of National Education (MEN) moved to make “health education” mandatory from 1 September, with only the sexuality module earmarked as optional.

In turn, the bishops maintained that making the sexuality component optional “does not solve the problem,” as the subject’s overall anthropological framework — its vision of the person, marriage, and family — still impacts how students understand sexuality even when specific lessons can be avoided.

Together, these changes indicate to students, parents, and teachers that religion is peripheral to the core mission of schooling.

In context, a July 2024 education ministry regulation permitted schools to blend pupils from different year groups into a single religion class — a change that, in practice, relegated religion lessons to the very start or end of the timetable.

That move was followed by a government decision that religion grades would no longer be included in students’ overall GPA.

Then, in January 2025, another regulation halved weekly instruction time for religion classes, decreasing it from two hours to one.

Zoom In:

At first glance, each measure could be framed as a minor, administrative tweak to school logistics. Nonetheless, Piotr Janowicz, head of the Association of Lay Catechists, said, “The purpose of these changes is to usher religion and ethics out of the schools through the back door. We were completely left out of the consultations.”

A central argument in the KEP statement is that religion classes are not a privilege given to the church, but a “constitutional right” of pupils and parents and from parents’ rights to raise children in accord with their convictions.

Poland is demonstrating how religion can be removed from public life without being banned, through small adjustments that cumulatively secularize the school day. The bishops’ response is thus both pastoral and constitutional: they urge for an “immediate restoration” of religion classes to their proper place, and for genuine dialogue with religious communities.

Why It Matters:

They also embrace the need for health education in schools, covering disease prevention, mental health, and responsible social attitudes, but resist the worldview embedded in the curriculum guidelines and newly published textbooks. They are concerned not only that contraception is being taught as acceptable, but also that it is presented within an anthropological framework that divorces sexuality from marriage and family, and fails to reinforce explicitly that marriage is the union of a man and a woman.

Health Education now includes efforts to “educate” students about “methods of contraception, the mechanism of their action, and the criteria for choosing an appropriate method of contraception” and “methods of treatment” for infertility, which could include in vitro fertilization (IVF). The Catholic Church regards IVF and contraception as sinful and immoral.

The Polish case was an explicit illustration of a pattern visible across Western democracies: the state increasingly becomes the key moral educator in matters of sexuality, reproduction, and identity, while religious voices are administratively sidelined without formal bans.

As per the bishops, embedding sexual-health content within a compulsory subject, even as an opt-out module, transfers authority away from parents and risks presenting sexuality outside the marital context as normal or neutral. The lack of a wide social consensus and meaningful consultation with parents, educators, and religious communities in designing the program is palpable.

The Bottom Line:

The bishops’ stance that “the state should support the family, not take over its basic functions” echoes the views of many pro-lifers that put the family unit at the crux of human flourishing, and oppose state propagation and normalization of contraception and non-marital sexual arrangements.

Pro-life advocates have long cautioned that school-based sexual education, when treated as different from marriage and family, imperceptibly influences attitudes toward contraception, abortion, and the meaning of sexuality itself.

All in all, the Polish bishops’ statement is both a warning and a model that state-sponsored sexual and reproductive education, notwithstanding “opt-out” clauses, can negatively influence the moral horizon of a generation.

The Polish example is a good illustration of how religious authorities can resist anti-family state ideologies, not by dismissing health education outright, but by trying to respect the dignity of the person, the truth about marriage, and the primordial responsibilities of parents to be the primary educators of their children, such as in the areas of faith and morality.

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