A cross erected in front of the presidential palace in Warsaw for late president Lech Kaczynski has sparked sharp debate in deeply Catholic Poland over the role of religion in public life.A recent attempt to move it has provoked high-pitched protests by both supporters, who want it to stay put, and opponents, who believe the religious symbol should not stand in front of an equally symbolic secular state institution.
In a first in devoutly Catholic Poland, several thousand people rallied in Warsaw this week protesting against the religious symbol standing in a public space. The mostly young demonstrators gathered around midnight Monday for the rally, organised on the Facebook social networking site where the "Akcja Krzyz" (Cross Action) group has drawn over 43,000 members.
"Its a new phenomenon. These young people are protesting against the church as an institution, not against religion per se," Polish sociologist Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski told AFP. A day later, a thousand people rallied in Warsaw demanding the cross stay put in front of the presidential palace in honour of the victims of the April 10 crash of a Polish presidential jet in Russia that killed all 96 people on board including Kaczynski, Poland's top military brass and the central bank governor among other Polish dignitaries.
According to an opinion poll issued this week by the independent SMG/KRC pollsters, 71 percent of Poles want the cross moved to a nearby church as agreed two weeks ago by the presidential palace, the archbishop of Warsaw and scouts groups.
Ironically, Poland's Catholic Church itself has called for the cross to be moved to a nearby church.
"To all those who pray at the cross, we must say that despite their good intentions they are being exploited for political purposes. We urge everyone to make the transfer of the cross possible," press secretary for the Polish Episcopate, Bishop Stanislaw Budzik, told reporters in Warsaw Thursday.
"We call on politicians not to use the cross as a tool to achieve their goals. We urge the government to open dialogue that would defuse social tensions," he added.
Polish scouts spontaneously erected the wooden cross in front of the official residence of Poland's head of state in central Warsaw days after the crash -- dubbed Poland's worst peace time tragedy.
The plain wooden cross became a focal point for a national outpouring of emotion and mourning with tens of thousands laying flowers and lighting candles around it in front of the palace in the days following the crash.
"The quarrel over the cross is the symbolic front of the struggle between supporters of patriotic and Catholic values, represented by the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, twin brother of the late president, and those who want a civil society where these values are not so important," social psychologist Janusz Czaplinski told AFP.
In political terms, Czaplinski says the SLD ex-communist social democrats, Poland's third political force behind the governing liberal Civic Platform and the opposition PiS, stand to benefit from the rising tide of opposition to religious symbols in public life.
This week, the SLD launched a petition calling for "respect for the Constitution and protecting the secular character of the state." In 1993, the social democrats vehemently opposed a concordat between the Roman Catholic church and the Polish state which enlarged the role of the church in public life.
The cross took on a strong political dimension in the wake of Jaroslaw Kaczynski's failed bid for the presidency, when the office of freshly-elected liberal President Bronislaw Komorowski, church authorities and scout groups announced it would be moved.
But Poland's liberal Prime Minister Donald Tusk, closely allied to Komorowski, has down-played the controversy. "There's no catastrophe here, even if we sometimes have difficulty accepting certain surprising forms of protest or debate. No doubt, some more time is needed for emotions to settle down," he told reporters recently.