ABSTRACT
Religious orders in recent decades in Poland have faced social challenges. In this chapter, we present how deeply the process of clericalisation has affected religious life in Poland. We demonstrate to what extent religious life is so tightly connected to the institutionalisation of Polish Catholicism, which has also shaped other monastic forms of religious life, for example, the Cistercians and resulted in the decline of religious brothers. Clericalisation means not only a statistical shift in the number of priests within religious orders but also transformation of religious identity, especially in relationship to the mission. Clericalisation of religious life in Poland was accompanied by a crisis of identity for religious brothers within communities. This crisis was accompanied by the growing importance of education within Polish society and new prospects for social advancement and the devaluation of manual labour. In the first part of the chapter, we focus on statistical trends in regard to clericalisation. In the second part, we characterise that process from the perspective of the social actors. Using evidence from a case study, we demonstrate that the decline in number of religious brothers may be also linked to a corrosion of their idealism or their identity and we go on to reveal contemporary re-inventions.
