In this article, the author argues that neither post-war Poland (nor any historical Poland) was ever secular in the social sense. It also has not been secular in the political sense, despite the different formal declarations of the PRL’s authorities and the declaration of the separation of Church and state in the new Poland after 1989. The Polish state has remained entangled with its Church. The key word here is “its” because, as the author points out, it is not simply an entanglement with “the Church” or “Catholicism,” but a specifically Polish kind of relationship with its own understanding of ecclesiasticism. The article presents three forms of this entanglement: the Polish variety of ecclesiastical usurpation, the Polish variety of cultural Catholicism, and the Polish variety of state religion.

Keywords: Poland, secularism, Church, usurpation, cultural Catholicism, state, religion, entanglement