The Secular Role of the Catholic Church in Present-Day Poland∗

Abstract

Many writers, among them Alexis de Toqueville, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jose Ortega y Gasset and, more recently, Jacques Ellul, have predicted that as a result of technological and political development, the mass societies in which we now live will be fully transformed into distopian regimes by the end of this century. They foresaw the emergence of vast, regimented systems in which people would live lonely, dehumanized lives under the tutelage of all-providing and all-pervading hierarchies made up of functionaries and intellectuals, pitifully subservient to the ruling elite.