Polish university now teaches Family Studies and Biblical Studies

The disciplines include Biblical studies and family studies, which will be taught at the Catholic University of Lublin, according to a Notes from Poland report. Czarnek, who is also a law professor, noted that a “number of researchers” are qualified to teach the academic disciplines. “Family studies,” he says, “remains crucial to the country’s future.”

“For several years in Poland – and for several decades in western Europe – we have seen a powerful attack on the family,” he said. This societal assault, he adds, has led to a “crisis of the family,” which has underlined the importance in creating these fields.

Czarnek is quoted in another Notes from Poland article that the country “will either be Christian,” or it will simply fail to exist.

“This is our responsibility, our duty,” he said. “We are the sum of our whole Christian heritage, over a thousand years,” he said.

Restoring traditional family values

In the past, Czarnek has also highlighted the importance of a Christian education, so that “Latin civilisation can be saved.” He has also promoted the idea of schools using the teachings of Pope John Paul II in commerce and sexuality, as reported by Notes from Poland.

Not all are on board with Czarnek’s vision in restoring traditional family values. Jan Hartman, a professor at Krakow’s Jagiellonian University, says that the new academic fields is a way to siphon more money into the Catholic church. Hundreds of academic officials have also called for his removal in the form of boycotts and letters.

“Minister Czarnek does his best to ensure that his ministry's participation in the Church's nibbling on the Polish budget is as high as possible. He does not hide that he is obliged to be faithful to the constitution, which excludes him from taking part in lawmaking and ruling in a manner inspired by religious faith and in the interest of a foreign state on the basis of religious beliefs equated with the interests of Poland,” Hartman said in a Polityka commentary.

Cultural war

Despite his critics, the education minister remains certain that the West is in a cultural war, where Catholicism and Christianity are “spat upon.”

“If we do not want to be the West – in the cultural sense of this putrid, anti-religious activity – then we must be counter-revolutionaries,” he said to Notes from Poland.