A culture war has been raging in Poland since the fall of Communism in 1989, pitting secular forces against the Roman Catholic Church on issues ranging from abortion to taxes to education.

The latest battle in that war arose from an unlikely place, a staging of the play Golgota Picnic by the Argentine author Rodrigo Garc�a, and has produced an even more unlikely result: a defeat for the church.

The church in Poland is both omnipresent - we have one of the world's largest statues of Jesus, at about 30 metres high - and, at least from its perspective, the victim of constant, brutal attacks from modernizing, progressive forces.

The fact that more than 90 per cent of Poles belong to the church, and that it enjoys almost complete control over legislation concerning social issues (there is also a legal ban on offending religious feelings) is apparently irrelevant.

In every election, the church is effectively the largest party in the parliament; regardless of their actual party affiliation, well over 50 per cent of legislators unofficially take orders from the episcopate. It is impossible to pass legislation on insurance coverage for in vitro fertilization, to say nothing of sexual education in schools, legalized abortion or same-sex unions.

To maintain its power, the church invents threats against it. Recently it was the catch-all boogeyman of "gender" - feminism, abortion, birth control - considered by the clergy to be an ideology "worse than Nazism and Communism combined." Now it is modern art, with a long list of artistic events deemed "anti-Christian."

Which is where Garc�a and his play come in.

On June 20, the organizers of the Malta International Theater Festival, which takes place annually in Poznan and is one of the largest such events in this part of Europe, gave in to a coalition of Catholic fundamentalists and right-wing hooligans and cancelled the performance of Golgota Picnic, after repeated accusations that the play was blasphemous. Instead of upholding the constitutional right to artistic freedom, the mayor of Poznan, Ryszard Grobelny, endorsed the organizers' self-censorship, claiming that "the play threatens Poznan's traditional values and as such is perceived as a provocation."

Catholic censorship, unlike Communist censorship, is characterized by the fact that Catholics themselves do not know what exactly they are censoring. None of the protesters had seen Garc�a's play. Not that it mattered to them. Communists once boasted that they knew the future, and in this sense, Catholics are similar: A work of art must be banned before it corrupts our souls.

Garc�a's play is something of a Last Supper of modernity, criticizing Western societies mired in consumerism. And because one of the foundations of Western society is Christianity, the artist used a biblical theme.

In the landscape of modern theatre, Garc�a's play is nothing special - without the controversy, it could easily be overlooked. The Curse, a theatrical series by Pawel Demirski and Monika Strzepka, is much stronger artistically and, at the same time, is genuinely blasphemous, directly ridiculing Poland's parliamentary Catholicism. Jesus appears, but unlike in Garc�a's play, is treated with dismissive irony. And yet, for some reason, no one has protested The Curse, and Demirski and Strzepka can only dream about the level of publicity and artistic importance that Golgota Picnic has received.

Meanwhile, the cowardice of the Malta festival's organizers mobilized leading representatives of Polish culture, among them the artist Wojciech Ziemilski, the museum director Joanna Mytkowska and the theatre director Michal Zadara, to call for public performances and readings of the play across the country. The response was huge - the play appeared in 30 cities, in Poland and around Europe.

To compound this "evil," one of the country's largest daily newspapers, Gazeta Wyborcza, published the entire text of the play in its weekend edition, so that every citizen could read it at home.

In most instances, the actors reading the play were surrounded by crowds of people saying the rosary or singing hymns, politicians from the right-wing Law and Justice Party and soccer hooligans. No riots occurred, although Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki did call for a "nationwide protest that would threaten unrest."

Still, in Poland, this is the first such victory of culture over art censorship. For the first time, there was a large-scale mobilization of cultural institutions and figures, rather than just open letters or press campaigns. But the ultimate victory for defenders of culture took place during a debate organized by the festival's creators, which was attended by the play's director and Grobelny, the mayor of Poznan. When the floor was opened for questions, a blond-haired youth stood and asked to speak.

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"My name is Tomasz Maciejuk, and I am a nationalist," he said. "I would like to apologize to you for the fact that you were unable to enjoy artistic freedom and perform your play because of a bunch of soccer hooligans. This is a disgrace for our country. I am ashamed of the mayor, who was intimidated by the hooligans and did not fulfil his obligations."

It is unclear whether this brave young nationalist will have anyone to defend him from the hooligans. Ideally, he would have the backing of the city authorities and the festival's organizers. But this is Poland, where the culture war rages on.