The trouble with being a 21st-century Church leader in Poland is that people will always compare you to the giants of 20th-century Polish Catholicism — and find you wanting.
It’s tempting to measure the impact of contemporary Polish churchmen according to the standards set by St. John Paul II and Bl. Stefan Wyszyński. But perhaps it’s fairer to consider them in relation to their peers and the distinctive challenges of their times.
Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki, one of the most influential Polish Catholics of his generation, is now moving out of the public spotlight.
In 2024, he stepped down as president of Poland’s bishops’ conference after 10 years in the post. And on March 19, the Solemnity of St. Joseph, Pope Francis accepted his resignation as the Archbishop of Poznań, just five months after his 75th birthday.
Gądecki will serve as apostolic administrator of the Poznań archdiocese until his successor, Bishop Zbigniew Zieliński of Koszalin-Kołobrzeg, is installed May 1.
Who is Archbishop Gądecki? What were his defining moments? And what kind of legacy does he leave?
Who is Archbishop Gądecki?
Stanisław Gądecki was born in Strzelno, central Poland, in 1949, in a land shattered by Nazi occupation and now ruled by an oppressive communist regime.
After completing his seminary training in the Gniezno archdiocese, he was ordained a priest by Cardinal Wyszyński in 1973, at the age of 23. Wyszyński, a towering personality known as Poland’s “Primate of the Millennium,” sent Gądecki for biblical studies in Rome. While attached to the Pontifical Biblical Institute, the young priest also studied at the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum in Jerusalem, ultimately earning a doctorate in biblical theology.
Gądecki returned to Poland in 1982, not long after the government imposed martial law, in an effort to stamp out rising opposition led by the Solidarity trade union. He taught biblical studies at the seminary in Gniezno, while engaging in pastoral work.
Gądecki’s episcopal career began in 1992, when Pope John Paul II named him an auxiliary bishop of Gniezno. In 2002, the Polish pope appointed him Archbishop of Poznań, one of Poland’s most important sees, at the relatively young age of 52.
Two years later, he was elected vice-president of Poland’s bishops’ conference, a post he held for a decade before he was elected president in 2014.
What were his defining moments?
Many bishops found the transition from the John Paul II-Benedict XVI era to that of Pope Francis tricky. That was especially the case in Poland, where bishops saw themselves as custodians of the Polish pope’s legacy.
One of Gądecki’s principal tasks as bishops’ conference president was therefore to act as a buffer between Pope Francis and perhaps the majority of Polish bishops perturbed by signs that the Argentine pontiff wished to break with the JPII-Benedict XVI era.
It was fortunate that early in Francis’ tenure World Youth Day was held in Kraków, enabling the pope to see firsthand the vitality that still marks the Church in Poland, despite the advance of secularization.
But events over the border in Germany would come to overshadow Gądecki’s relationship with Pope Francis. The archbishop looked on aghast as the “synodal way” pushed for women deacons, a re-examination of priestly celibacy, lay preaching at Masses, a greater lay role in selecting bishops, and a revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on homosexuality, with the support of a majority of German bishops.
In 2022, Gądecki wrote a hard-hitting letter to his German counterpart Bishop Georg Bätzing. “Faithful to the Church’s teaching, we should not yield to the pressures of the world or to the patterns of the dominant culture since this can lead to moral and spiritual corruption,” he said.
Gądecki then took his concerns to Pope Francis. Following a private audience in March that year, the Polish bishops’ conference said pointedly that Francis was “briefed on the difficulties caused for the universal Church by the issues raised — in the words of the pope — by the so-called German ‘synodal way.’”
“Francis distances himself from this initiative,” it said, though the pope seemed ambivalent about the German project for some time afterward.
Gądecki’s conflict with Bätzing reignited at the first session of the synod on synodality in Rome. During the month-long gathering, the Polish archbishop wrote to Pope Francis, expressing alarm at the prospect that the German synodal way could shape the outcome of the global synodal process.
Gądecki said he hoped the synod would “not be manipulated in any way and used to authorize German theses that openly contradict the teaching of the Catholic Church.”
Bätzing responded by accusing Gądecki of “very unsynodal and unfraternal behavior.”
“I ask myself … under what right does the president of the bishops’ conference of a Church dare to judge the catholicity of another Church and its episcopate?” Bätzing said.
Gądecki appeared to accuse synod organizers of intrusive stage management in an outspoken interview published after the first session. He noted that during plenary sessions, some participants were called to speak three or four times.
“I, oddly enough, was not so lucky,” he said. “We were encouraged to send positions to the secretariat, but no one seems to have read them so far.”
Gądecki opted not to attend the synod on synodality’s second and final session in 2024. No reason was given, prompting speculation that he bowed out for age reasons, wanted to give another bishop a chance to attend, or believed the event’s outcome was already sealed and he could do little about it.
Meanwhile, back in Poland, Gądecki faced two exacting challenges: the aggressive march of secularization and a reckoning with clerical abuse.
Gądecki was bishops’ conference president when churches in Poland were vandalized, Masses disrupted, and statutes of St. John Paul II daubed with red paint during protests against the tightening of the country’s abortion law in 2020. The archbishop seemed dazed by the outburst of anti-clericalism at the height of the COVID pandemic, which included the targeting of his cathedral in Poznań.
In Gądecki’s final months as president, a new coalition government took power in Poland after eight years of rule by the Law and Justice party, which was seen as close to the Church. The new authorities were on a collision course with the Church, with plans to reduce religion classes in public schools, liberalize the abortion law, and reduce subsidies for religious groups. But the archbishop stepped down as bishops’ conference president before the issues truly ignited.
Gądecki was the face of the Polish Church when a devastating abuse crisis broke out in 2019. That same year, Pope Francis published Vos estis lux mundi, an apostolic letter establishing a mechanism for holding bishops to account for the mishandling of abuse cases.
Nowhere in the world was Vos estis put into effect more vigorously than in Poland. At least 15 bishops have been investigated following accusations of mishandling cases, including Gądecki, who in June 2021 was found not to have behaved negligently, following a probe.
Polish Catholic commentators don’t present Gądecki as the driving force behind the clean-up. They note that during a 2021 ad limina visit to Rome, the archbishop complained that the practice of publicizing penalties given to Polish bishops who mishandled abuse inflicted a kind of “civil death” on them. Following his intervention, there was a noticeable reduction in information released at the end of Vos estis investigations in Poland.
Critics might argue that Gądecki’s response to the abuse crisis wasn’t bold enough to repair the deeply dented public trust in the Polish Catholic authorities.
More positively, Gądecki helped to galvanize the Polish Church’s generous response to the influx of millions of Ukrainian refugees following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. He also issued a strongly worded appeal to Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill to press President Putin to end the war.
What legacy does he leave?
Gądecki was clearly respected by his brother bishops, who elected him twice to five-year terms as bishops’ conference president. But it’s unclear whether Rome shared their enthusiasm.
Certainly, Gądecki did not receive the red hat. Yet that wasn’t necessarily a personal snub. His predecessor as bishops’ conference president, Archbishop Józef Michalik, didn’t either. And Poznań isn’t historically a “cardinalatial see.”
But Gądecki might have felt passed over when Pope Francis named Łódź’s Cardinal Cardinal Grzegorz Ryś — a man 14 years his junior — as a cardinal in 2023.
What makes Gądecki’s legacy hard to define is that he lacked the “main character energy” of countrymen like John Paul II and Wyszyński. The archbishop dutifully held the line amid the crises of his times, but he didn’t shape his era like those post-war titans.
Gądecki should perhaps be seen as a transitional figure, between JPII era bishops, who vigorously upheld Poland’s Catholic identity, and a new generation of leaders more comfortable with Pope Francis’ priorities and greater faith that synodality is the answer to the Church’s problems.
Yet that may not do justice to Gądecki’s leadership skills, evident in his ability to hold together a divided bishops’ conference amid the abuse crisis, and social and ecclesial turmoil. It is perhaps this gift for balancing contending forces that will be most missed as he exits the national stage.
