On 1st April, Palm Sunday, the new Archbishop of Warsaw, the Right Rev. Kazimierz Nycz, will take possession of his diocese. Since 1999 he has chaired the Education Committee of the Polish Bishops’ Conference (Konferencja Episkopatu Polski – KEP) and since 2004 has been a member of the permanent Council of the KEP. Archbishop Nycz, placing the emphasis on the “processes of secularisation now underway throughout Poland”, points out that the most urgent problem is “reaching out to those who no longer come to church” and this “poses to the Church in Poland the question” of how to make her pastoral mission “more markedly missionary”. “I would like to dedicate a lot of time to the pastoral care of the laity, and to all those new communities and movements that are centres of formation and schools of faith for adults. Hitherto the Polish Church has dedicated a great deal of energy to young children, but the difficulties begin after Confirmation”, he explained. Meanwhile in the Russian Far East, at Pietropavlosk in the Kamchatka peninsula, the first Catholic church will shortly be built thanks to the aid organization Kirche in Not (Aid to the Suffering Church). The Polish priest, Father Krzysztof Kowal, for six years responsible for the half million people who live in the vast territory of the parish belonging to the diocese of Irkuck, has succeeded in obtaining from the Russian authorities permission to build a church dedicated to St. Theresa of the Child Jesus. The Catholics of Kamchatka are for the most part descendents of Polish, Lithuanian, Belarussian and Ukrainian citizens deported by the Soviets to this remote peninsula on the Bering Sea.
