WHY THE POLISH CHURCH RETURNED TO THE JULIAN CALENDAR

—Were there those opposed to the Julian Calendar in the Orthodox sphere?—Many point to problems in the foreign diasporas connected with preserving the Julian Calendar in the Church, especially in big cities where work schedules hinder the celebration of Orthodox feasts on weekdays. There the people asked not to move onto the “old style” but to keep the “new.”

—Did the Polish Church undertake any earlier efforts to reintroduce the Julian Calendar after 1924, when the Church officially announced it would be following the “new style?”

—In practice the decision to change the calendar in 1924 was never implemented in the majority of parishes. Thus in the post-war period (after 1945) parishes organized their own liturgical life according to the demands of the faithful. The entire North-East, where the majority of Orthodox live, retained the old calendar.

—Were there any accusations that the Polish Church is too friendly with the Russian Church or too attached to Moscow?

—I don’t think the faithful ever considered that the calendar was engineered by Moscow. In their minds the “new” or “old style” of calendar isn’t connected with any geographical location of this or that Local Church. For the faithful and clergy it’s more important that we should celebrate the feasts on the same days as in the Moscow Patriarchate, the Serbian Church, and in the monasteries of Mt. Athos. The Russophile argument for explaining the move to the Julian Calendar is rather more contrived than real.

Don’t forget that the Polish Orthodox Church was experiencing persecution at the hands of the government when it received its autocephaly and it forcedly made the decision to move over to the so-called “new style.” Also at that time began the work of translating liturgical texts into Polish. After the Second World War these government initiations were not continued, and especially no one forced the Church to continue the process of changing to the “new style” calendar or to change the liturgical language. Thus, we should look at this decision of the Synod of Bishops as a self-evident and unprovoked decision of the Church, as first of all an affirmation of the existing facts, and not the creation of a new reality.

—Why do you think there was this reaction of slowing down the introduction of the “new style” in Poland? There was strong opposition against moving to the “new style” in Greece as well, but the majority of parishes have still moved over to it. In Poland the parishes simply ignored the innovation. Why do you think there was this difference?

—The Orthodox in Poland have repeatedly experienced difficulties from their heterodox neighbors: the Union of Brest, the confiscation of Orthodox churches… Tensions grew after the partitioning of the country, when Orthodoxy in Poland became identified with the Russian Tsarist regime.

In the twentieth century people began to fear that the 1924 change of calendar was meant to lead, not without forethought, to a “new union,” or, to put it another way—towards the absorption of the Orthodox communities by the Roman Catholic Church.

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Historical note:

In the united Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1569 until the first division of the country in 1772 the Roman Catholic Church was the most numerous, although it comprised only half of the population. It was never a one hundred percent Catholic country, which the partitioning of Poland, involving the nation’s Protestants and Orthodox, indirectly facilitated. Poland’s historically intrinsic, since the time of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, tolerance towards various confessions helped the Orthodox in the twenties of the previous century.