Church critics and supporters said that the trend was partly an expression of disgust with the clergy for taking sides in recent political battles, and partly the influence of thousands of Poles who had returned home after working and studying in the more secular societies in the West.

But they also said there was a strong anticlerical movement in Poland, one that was unique to this nation and not tied to the sex scandals that have rocked the Roman Catholic Church elsewhere. It is more closely linked to an almost genetic predisposition to rebel against authority, many people here said, as much as the church’s often heavy-handed intervention in national politics and debates over social issues, particularly in vitro fertilization.

“I think most people would say their priest is a drunkard, that he is corrupt, that he takes too much money from weddings, that he bought himself a fancy car,” said Pawel Spiewak, a sociologist at the University of Warsaw, who added that the perception was not always fair or accurate.

The list of grievances against the church tends to be Polish specific: that it managed to recover its property after Communism, but that average people often could not; that it appeared to take sides in politics, supporting the more conservative and nationalistic Law and Justice party of former President Lech Kaczynski over the governing Civic Platform party; and that the church allowed Mr. Kaczynski and his wife, Maria, to be buried in the historic cemetery at Wawel Castle after they died in a plane crash in April, a decision now seen by many as partisan.

During the decades after World War II, when Poland was controlled by the Soviet Union, the church and its leaders were not allowed to have their hands  or their voices  involved in the temporal matters of government. Instead, the church served as a “moral leader,” said Witold Kawecki, a priest and the director of the new Institute for Studies of Culture at Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw.