In Poland, it’s hard to escape the cross.

Ceremonies to open public buildings, fire stations, football pitches, even traffic circles, usually don’t take place without the blessing of a priest. National celebrations are accompanied by a mass. A crucifix often hangs in public offices, schools and courts, next to the Polish coat of arms.

And yet, in recent years, the Polish Roman Catholic Church’s omnipresence is starting to cause it problems. Specifically, some believers are taking issue with the church’s cozy relationship with the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party and its support of the government’s hardline stance on issues like LGBTQ rights.

In theory, the Polish constitution recognizes a division between the Catholic Church and the state, saying the state “maintains impartiality in matters of religious beliefs.” In practice, however, bishops and priests have much wider influence over education, culture, the law and politics than any other group, aside from civil servants and politicians.

For many politicians, support from a priest translates into more votes during an election. In return, the church is well-placed to push for changes to local and national regulation.

“The church hierarchy definitely pressure the ruling party" — Paweł Borecki, University of Warsaw academic

The church has played an outsized role ever since the end of communism in 1989, with both parties of the left and right accommodating its demands, ranging from teaching religion in public schools to limiting access to abortion and birth control. The church also has access to robust public funding and was favored with the return of enormous numbers of properties confiscated under communism.

However, while all previous governments had close relations with the church, under PiS the ties verge on the symbiotic.

“It’s a pressure group, a lobbying group,” said Paweł Borecki, an academic at the department of ecclesiastical law at the University of Warsaw. “The church hierarchy definitely pressure the ruling party.

“The victims here are civil liberties,” he added. “Many citizens feel unwelcome in such a country.”

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In a country of about 38 million people, some 33 million are baptized, according to 2017 government data. In many families, Catholic ceremonies are still the only way to celebrate weddings, birthdays and Sundays. Many also still remember the significant role played by the church and the Polish Pope John Paul II, in the fight against communism.

The mood in Poland toward the church has been shifting ever since the 2005 death of John Paul II. His death unleashed a national outpouring of grief, but also loosened ties with the institutional church. Secularization is being driven by the same factors that weakened powerful Catholic churches from Quebec to Ireland and beyond: a mix of increasing wealth, a conservative church out of touch with believers, sex scandals, and broader social shifts. In Poland, that’s been given an extra boost by a growing distaste for the ostentatious ties between church and state.

According to a 2017 study, 48 percent of Poles now say they have a “negative” view of the relationship between the church and the ruling party, which took office in 2015 and has gradually consolidated power over state institutions since. Some 70 percent say priests should refrain from talking about politics during mass.

A growing number of people are turning away from the church altogether: In 2018, Poland had the biggest gap between younger and older generations when it comes to the importance of religion in their lives, meaning it is secularizing the fastest, according to the Pew Center, which surveyed religious affiliation in 108 countries. Church attendance at Sunday mass among believers was down to 38.3 percent in 2017, compared with 50 percent in 1990, according to official church data.

It’s no surprise young people are leaving the church, said Karol Wilczyński, a Catholic ex-journalist and a fervent believer. Many feel the Polish church has failed to offer credible answers to modern issues such as patchwork families, technology and feminism.

The scale of the child sex-abuse scandal among priests, revealed earlier this year in the documentary film “Tell No One,” was also a turning point for many.

“It’s not even about what we saw in the movie, but how the church reacted,” Wilczyński said, referring to the many priests who refused to watch the film or disparaged it as an “attack” on the Polish clergy.

Wilczyński is also one of the organizers of a protest in November in Kraków, when a group of Catholics gathered next to the window where John Paul II used to greet the crowds during his pilgrimages to silently protest against what they say is a conservative change in the Polish church.

In an open letter addressed to Poland’s bishops, titled “We want the church back,” the group said that they felt “there is less and less of Jesus’ message present in the Roman Catholic Church in Poland.”

“We often hear sermons dividing people and spreading hostility toward others instead of teaching about our merciful God,” the letter read.

“The church can’t let young people go, it has to realize they’re its future" — Marcin Przeciszewski, head of the Catholic newswire KAI

The group criticized a recent mass commemorating the Warsaw Uprising — the push by the Polish underground resistance to free the city from German occupation in the summer of 1944 — by the archbishop of Kraków, Marek Jędraszewski, in which he compared the threat of communism to the LGBTQ movement.

“These are the words that repel many faithful from the church as well as exclude LGBT+ Catholics, their families and friends,” the protest group said in its letter.

Marcin Przeciszewski, the head of the Catholic newswire KAI since 1993, says that the secularization of Poland’s youth is in line with a wider trend in Western Europe. But in Poland, he adds, most young people are leaving because of what they perceive as a strong link between the church and politics.

The Polish church, he says, should look into the words of Pope Francis, who has stressed the importance of reaching out to communities that are turning away from religion. “The church can’t let young people go, it has to realize they’re its future,” he said.

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For non-Catholic parents, religion classes are another source of tension.

Although children should, in theory, be allowed to study ethics instead, many schools don’t have the resources to offer the classes — or simply don’t want to. Often, non-Catholic or non-religious children are forced to attend school masses, or are offered ethics classes run by a priest.

“What’s the most appalling is that those public officials or headmasters don’t respect the law, don’t respect the people, are brash, and nothing can be done about them in our country,” said Dorota Wójcik, who runs the NGO Freedom from Religion.

Recently, she said, a local mayor in Tuszów Narodowy in southeastern Poland hung the Ten Commandments on the door of every school in his county and faced no sanctions.

The religious establishment’s exclusion of the “unfaithful” is also at work in the political sphere, where Polish priests — from high-level bishops to vicars in small villages — regularly comment on political issues, usually in favor of PiS.

Politicians from the ruling party have been eager to tap into the church’s support.

Ahead of the Polish general election in October, Krystyna Wróblewska, a PiS candidate running for parliament in the southeastern city of Rzeszów, sent a letter to priests asking them for their backing, stressing that she has been “effectively fighting with the LGBTQ community.”

Another candidate, Ryszard Czarnecki, now an MEP with the PiS party, addressed the crowd from the altar during the election campaign at a church in Czernica in southwestern Poland.

On its website, the church in the northern village of Niestępów published a list of parties the congregation should not vote for in the election: essentially all of them, aside from PiS and the far-right party Konfederacja.

But Przeciszewski says that the stereotype of the links between the church and any government are “unfair.”

“There were no official statements from the church to encourage people to vote for a concrete party,” he said. “The church always says they should vote according to their consciences.”

“These protests just don’t work. I think people will just leave the church” — Karol Wilczyński, Catholic ex-journalist

PiS’s deputy spokesperson, Radosław Fogiel, said that PiS does not have a “strategy” of working with the church. “Our views, our axiology, the moral issues we care about — they are line with the church’s preaching. We respect the social role of the church,” he said.

He dismissed the criticism as driven by “the fact that the opposition, which has little in common with the teaching of the church, would also like to use the church’s social impact.”

Whatever the nature of the relationship, for some liberal Polish Catholics, the church’s close ties to the ruling party are turning them off the institution altogether. “People don’t fear the religion and the church anymore,” said Borecki, the ecclesiastical law professor.

Wilczyński said that many of his fellow believers are starting to lose faith in their ability to change the direction the church has taken.

The organizers of the November protest, calling on the church to rethink its relationship with the government, never got a response, he said.

“No one wanted to talk to us. These protests just don’t work,” he added. “I think people will just leave the church.”