The newly elected president of the Polish bishops conference, Archbishop Tadeusz Wojda of Gdansk, the port city famous for being the birthplace of Solidarity, is taking up his tasks in challenging times for the church in his country.
He will need to steer the boat of the church through the rough waters of the abuse crisis, the secularisation of Europe’s biggest Catholic nation and plummeting rates of trust in the church in recent years due to lack of accountability.
Archbishop Wojda, whose episcopal motto is “Oportet praedicari evangelium” in Latin, meaning “That the Gospel may be proclaimed,” spent years in the Vatican serving in what was then the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, known as Propaganda Fide, starting in the early 1990s under St. John Paul II.
Pope Benedict XVI appointed then-Father Wojda as the congregation’s undersecretary in 2012. In 2017, Pope Francis named him archbishop of Bialystok. In March 2021 he was appointed archbishop of Gdansk. Asked about the way to get out of the crisis the new president of Polish bishops said the key is “cooperation … everyone needs to feel responsible for the church.”
“The most important thing is to listen now,” Archbishop Wojda said in one of the first media interviews after his election. “I am trying to do it in my archdiocese,” he told OSV News. “I listen to understand what the world is living today.”
Picture: Archbishop Tadeusz Wojda of Gdansk, Poland, speaks during a news conference in Warsaw after being elected the new president of the Polish bishops’ conference, 14th March 2024. (OSV News photo/courtesy Polish bishops’ conference)