In their letter the bishops also went after the World Health Organization, writing that it “promotes, among other things, masturbation by preschool-aged children, encouraging them to seek joy and pleasure in touching their own bodies and those of their peers.” The bishops warned that “as a consequence of the education implemented by youth sexual educators, young people become regular customers of pharmaceutical, erotic, pornographic, pedophile and abortion enterprises.” The letter, perhaps not surprisingly, was replaced with a toned-down version less than two hours after it was published, according to Gazeta Wyborcza. Even so, the bishops announced that both versions were legitimate, but that the original was for pastoral use, and the second version for the laity.

The church hierarchy claims none are immune to the influence of gender. It might be that even the Polish Church itself is threatened. “Church” was originally a feminine-declined noun (from the Greek “ecclesia”). And it is traditionally personified by the image of a woman. In Polish, however, this same word is masculine. Is the Catholic Church also having gender issues?

A more serious question many in Poland are asking is, Why is this anti-gender paranoia happening now? If “gender ideology” were such an apocalyptical threat, it should have wiped out a significant part of the Polish population before our church’s recent wake-up call.

For two decades, the church hierarchy exhibited no interest in the “ideology of gender” until suddenly one day it began to speak of little else. The reasons behind such an orchestrated action might be found in the church’s recent problems. Poles have been outraged by the large-scale financial fraud carried out by the commission tasked with the reprivatization of church property that had been seized by the Communist government. Poles also continue to be disturbed by increasingly common disclosures of pedophilia within the church.

In Poland, politics is the one area in which the church does not need any lessons. And in today’s politics, when a party finds itself in trouble, its best bet is to change the subject with a media campaign. Necessity is the mother of invention, and thus arose the church’s new invention, the “ideology of gender.” This seems to be working wonderfully, since “gender” has become the word of the year, handily beating not just “wiretapping” and “Euromaidan,” but also “pedophilia” and “property commission.”

Slawomir Sierakowski is a sociologist and a founder of the Krytyka Polityczna movement. This article was translated by Maria Blackwood from the Polish.