The Roman Catholic archbishop of Kraków, Poland, has claimed LGBTQ activism threatens to oppress his nation as communism did.

“Currently we are living at a time in which the next great threat to our freedom has appeared,” Archbishop Marek Jędraszewski said in a pastoral letter dated September 28, “and it is of a totalitarian nature. … Its source is — just like the totalitarianisms of the 20th century — a radical rejection of God.” The letter is in Polish, but it was translated by right-wing U.S. site LifeSite News.

“As a consequence of this rejection, a new vision of man is being proclaimed in which he becomes a caricature of himself,” he continued. “As part of gender ideology, there are attempts to obliterate the natural differences between woman and man. Moreover, through the aggressive propaganda of LGBT ideology in the name of so-called ‘tolerance’ and ‘progress,’ that which is most sacred to us is mocked.”

“This clearly reminds us of the totalitarian times of the [communist] Polish People’s Republic, when social advancement was guaranteed only to members of the Communist Party, and [Christian] believers were treated like second-class citizens,” he added. He further said that LGBTQ-inclusive sex education programs, recommended by the World Health Organization, were harmful to children.

Another right-wing site, Church Militant, also reported approvingly on Jędraszewski’s letter and noted that he had given a sermon earlier in September in which he called LGBTQ activism a “rainbow plague” that is afflicting the nation just as communism, the “red plague,” once did. “Not Marxist, Bolshevik, but born of the same spirit, neo-Marxist,” he said, according to the site’s translation. “Not red, but rainbow.”

Poland is heavily Catholic, and while the Catholic hierarchy in some European nations has made friendly overtures to LGBTQ people (although the church has not budged in its doctrine), Poland remains deeply conservative and homophobic. However, in the past few years, LGBTQ activists and supporters have held Pride parades in some Polish cities and made other efforts to push the nation toward a more accepting attitude.

A conservative American student in Kraków, Filip Mazurczak, told LifeSite News that Poland is in the midst of a “religious cold war.” But he predicted the nation will resist calls for LGBTQ equality, and he offered a bizarrely caricatured view of LGBTQ activists and allies.

“While Warsaw hipsters may love LGBT as much as they love veganism, bands nobody else has heard of, and not shaving, a large part of Polish society is conservative and Catholic and opposes this,” he said.