The architecture of faith: Catholic churches in communist Poland

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Catholic Church in Poland built churches. This was not, in the context of a communist state that officially promoted atheism and controlled construction materials, a simple thing. It was, in some cases, a political act of considerable courage, and in others an act of quiet, persistent stubbornness that amounted to the same thing.

The churches built in this period are not, for the most part, architecturally distinguished. They are often large, often awkward, often using the materials that were available rather than those that were ideal. But they are there — physically, materially present in Polish towns and suburbs in a way that the regime's own buildings, many of which have since been demolished or converted, often are not.

I have been thinking about what this means — about the specific choice to build in stone and concrete rather than to exist in the temporary structures that the regime permitted for religious gatherings, about the statement made by permanence in a system that treated everything as provisional.

The historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote about Poland in this period as a society that had, to an unusual degree, maintained its own institutions parallel to those of the state. The Church was the most visible of these, but not the only one. What the church buildings represent is the physical infrastructure of that parallel society — the places where it gathered, remembered itself, and asserted its own continuity against the regime's insistence that it was building something new.