POLAND
Sunday Catholic Weekly
Milena Kindziuk
The issues of financing the Church and salaries of priests are still raising emotions. And many environments have been repeating the myth about the wealth of priests for years. The report of the Catholic Information Agency shows what truth on this issue is.
It clearly results from the document that the Church is maintained from the gifts of the faithful in 80%. – The Church is as rich as the faithful are sacrificial – says Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz, the chairman of the Episcopal Economic Council. Moreover, the system of financing the Church is also created by: the economic activity of Church institutions and financing from the public means.
A tray not for a priest
There is nearly a general belief that donations ‘on a tray’ are given to priests by the faithful; and that priests ‘gain’ a lot of money every Sunday, whereas a parish, a church and parish buildings and not priests are maintained from the tray or voluntary donations from the faithful. However, the incomes from the tray are various, depending on a region of Poland. As it results from the report of the Catholic Information Agency presented in the Episcopal Secretarial Office ‘Finances of the Catholic Church in Poland’, the average amount of money on the Sunday tray in a small village parish of nearly 1000 inhabitants in the diocese of Tarnów is 487 zlotys. But in a parish of 3-thousand people in the diocese of Bielsko and Żywiec – it is 2300 zlotys, and in a parish in a city, like the archdiocese of Katowice – it can be even 4 thousand zlotys. However, these are not representative data; for we must remember that in Poland there are very poor parishes living on the verge of poverty, like, for example, Korytowo in the diocese of Szczecin and Kamieńsko.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.