One quarter of Europe's new priests are Polish, and they serve in parishes across the continent, reports Derek Scally in Warsaw
A curious sight greets a visitor to any Polish city: earnest young men in black cassocks hurrying along the street. Just one seminary remains in Ireland but in Poland the vocations are in rude health. In a country of 38 million people, the number of seminarians has risen from 4,500 in 1998 to more than 7,000 today, with no sign of a drop in admissions.
One quarter of all new vocations in Europe are in Poland and the Polish priest is well on his way to replacing the Polish plumber in the popular lexicon.
"Because so few Irishmen are becoming priests, we've had Irish bishops asking for Polish priests," says Fr Tomasz, a 40-something priest at Warsaw Seminary. "They say they trust the Polish priests because they never let them down."
Priests are leaving Poland in record numbers. Some go on long-term postings of 10 years and more, others for five-year spells. The advent of low-cost airlines has meant that many can fly to Ireland and Britain for a weekend to say Mass, hear confessions and conduct a baptism or two.
"The needs are even bigger when Easter comes," Father Jozef Szymanski of the Institute of Research of Polish Diaspora said in a recent newspaper interview.
But now the demand has risen beyond pastoral care for new Polish communities in Britain and Ireland. Bishop Peter Moran of Aberdeen visited Krakow recently and returned home with three new priests for parishes in Inverness. Polish church authorities say similar requests have come from the Irish bishops.
The archdiocese of Vienna has 115 Polish priests already, while officials in Poland's southeastern diocese of Lublin say they have 80 priests working abroad.
However much of a novelty it may seem, the phenomenon of emigrant Polish priests goes back centuries. Organisations to send priests to Polish migrant communities abroad were established in the inter-war period; even after 1959, under communist rule, Polish priests went to work as far away as Australia, Brazil and Canada.
A recent survey of seminarians in Warsaw, Krakow and Lodz showed that, along with the increasing number of seminarians, the average age has risen from 19 to 21. Where the seminaries once had a majority of applicants from rural areas, applications are now rising from large cities as well. The survey also found that one in 10 seminarians comes from what the Catholic church used to call a "broken home".
"The priesthood is not a caste anymore, it's more like a lens projecting what is in Polish society," remarked a priest in the weekly Catholic intellectual newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny.
An overpowering whiff of furniture polish hits visitors who enter Warsaw seminary, tucked away behind a church on the main street towards the old town. Young men in cassocks wander the wood-panelled corridors with black-and-white tiled floors and coved plaster ceilings. There are 83 seminarians in all here, studying a six-year programme.
"It was definitely the influence of John Paul that made me want to be a priest," says Seweryn Gos, a young seminarian. "But I wanted to be close to people too, during the main events of their lives: births, deaths." Similar to the Ireland of the past, Polish seminarians of previous generations felt a spiritual calling and saw the priesthood as a chance to receive an education and get out of a small-town home.
But the Irish and Polish experiences parted company in the 1980s and 1990s. As child abuse scandals decimated the moral authority of the Irish Catholic church and the seminary intake, Poland saw a boom of young men anxious to follow the example of Pope John Paul II.
The continued high level of seminary admissions reflects the continued high esteem for priests and the Catholic church in Poland. Yet the priests here are no saints either. Just last week, a bishop took the highly unusual step of apologising publicly for a child-abusing priest in his diocese.
In another well-publicised case of clerical child abuse it was not the abusing priest - later convicted - who was demonised in public by his bishop and the local community, but the accuser.
Clerical abuse cases have remained isolated incidents here and have not developed a momentum as in Ireland. But there are other scandals in the Polish Catholic church, such as the priest who vanished from his parish near Warsaw this week with all the parish funds. He left his car at the airport and a note telling the finder: "Don't look for me."
Despite the scandals, religious tradition persists in Poland, so much so that news magazine Polityka told its readers this week that the country is attracting a new type of tourist: Catholics from Britain who miss their church of 50 years ago and come to Krakow and Warsaw to experience again full churches, habits and cassocks and colourful street processions.
"It's a bit of an ambiguous compliment," commented the magazine. "With it, Poland and Polish religiosity are connected to the past, but without a future." Regardless of the future of the Catholic church in Poland, the future of the church in Europe seems to be in Polish hands - even without a Polish pontiff.
On Thursday, Pope Benedict XVI gave his blessing to the phenomenon, telling Polish priests: "Do not be afraid to leave your secure and familiar world to go and serve in places where priests are lacking and where your generosity can bear abundant fruit."