Marriage is very much under assault in the Western world, in part by false notions of “freedom” that assume a person’s choices can reconstruct the nature and definition of marriage. Poland is one place where that assault is underway. Although the Polish Constitution defines marriage as a man-woman relationship, the highest court of the European Union — the Court of Justice of — ruled last November that even if Poland’s law does not permit “same-sex marriage,” it must register such relationships when such a “marriage” is performed in another EU country where it is legal. The obvious next question is: How much must Poland also extend the rights and privileges of marriage to such persons, contrary to its own laws?

Fr. Zygmunt Zieliński is professor emeritus of Church History at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin in Poland, where he began teaching in 1964. His expertise is 19^th and 20^th century Church history, with special attention to the Church under Nazism and Communism. He recently wrote the following essay on what’s happening to marriage in Poland, setting it within broader trends.

The Devil Isn’t Stupid. His Courtiers? — That’s Another Story

by Rev. Zygmunt Zieliński

I’m 94. One hundred years have not yet passed since my youth. But if somebody returned to life after 40 or 50 years of not being around, he’d be unable to find himself in today’s world — and that’s not just because of technological progress.

“Progress” itself is a strange word, with even stranger meanings. It’s associated ever more frequently with changes, changes whose sense or purpose people don’t understand. But they are changes shouted for by a minority, including the media. What they call “progress” is today almost exclusively associated with the rejection of even the most obvious norms and principles, so that man might assume the attributes of the Creator without saying that word. This way of proceeding can even be given names that make no sense, as long as they are provided to the public for the latter to believe. The person who gives up his own rationality to submit to it becomes — pardon my candor — the devil’s courtier. He submits his reason and actions to him.

That phenomenon was sufficiently obvious in Old Testament times that Psalm 53 says, “The fool has said in his heart: ‘there is no God!’ They are degenerate, doing disgusting things; there are none that do good.”

The atheist should not feel insulted that these words are about him. Atheism is a lifestyle, not (necessarily) a contestation of existing reality. The latter infers something completely different. One can say, “I believe God exists because, without Him, I cannot understand the beings of this world of which I am a part.” One can also say, “I doubt that God exists, because I find no traces of Him in the world.” That is the attitude of the agnostic, one that is wholly understandable, in contrast to the attitude of the atheist, handing down an apodictic judgment lacking any objective basis.

In contrast to the positions “in the matter of God” just mentioned, we today have the phenomenon of removing God from the field of vision, not unlike the exclusion of the foundation upon which a parliamentary democracy rests — the rule of law. Bureaucrats have found a better method: regulations that afford them absolute power. It is a return to totalitarianism. One gives a decree the value of revealed truth, i.e., something demanding a priori faith that does not look for its justification. The master of that understanding of power is a certain Waldemar Żurek, Poland’s Justice Minister; its beneficiary is a certain Donald Tusk, Poland’s Prime Minister.

Digital Affairs Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski signed the marriage regulations, which the opposition has called “a backdoor revolution.” The current forms used by offices of civil affairs contain the rubrics “woman” and “man.” Technically, therefore, they preclude recording a marriage of two persons of the same sex. In the wake of Gawkowski’s changes, the terms “first spouse” and “second spouse” have now appeared. The section about their parents have also been analogically updated, i.e., “father of the first spouse” and “mother of the second spouse.”

The Digital Affairs Minister and Deputy Prime Minister either pretends to be a fool or considers the citizenry to be fools, writing, “These are but technical adaptations to the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union of November 25, 2025, and not changes to the definition of marriage in Polish law. The decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union is not a question of ideology but a legal obligation that Poland must observe.”

First of all, what does the Court of Justice of the European Union have to do with Poland’s legal order governing civil status? That is a purely internal Polish matter. The Constitution of the Republic of Poland explicitly defines the status of marriage and of spouses and no European court has the right to violate the Polish Constitution. If Gawkowski has another view, it’s because he belongs to a government that has undertaken the liquidation of Poland in favor of what the European Union would replace it with when the EU finally comes to its end.

Even more insulting is the claim that “the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union is not a question of ideology.” It is the opening of the gate to the destruction of the family and a green light to handing children over to so-called same-sex marriages. Neither Gawkowski nor certainly the judges of the Court of Justice of the European Union remember the Nazi Lebensborn where Nordic girls were fertilized by Nazi SS-men, giving birth to children then handed over for “Nazi upbringing.” Such breeding was required back then to make up for the losses incurred on the front as well as for the production of new pagans. The trauma wrought on those poor children — who never knew their biological parents — is difficult to describe. That is why former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki rightly speaks of the Court’s “shameless and brazen interference in the legal order regarding family life of member states.”

The just-ratified Mercosur Treaty — a trade deal with South America that is a lifesaver for Germany but a death trap for the rest of Europe — is nothing in comparison with the European Court’s usurpation, which dared to sanction a shameful “reconstruction” of the natural order in which every living being is subject to the law of survival based on two elements: male and female. One can regard this as the work of the Creator or of nature, but one cannot deny that obvious fact, even if a perverted person demands we do so for his comfort. Only a complete fool would agree to that. If 17 European states find themselves in that situation, it demonstrates only one thing: Europe is coming to an end.

Must we really have to keep insisting that the Court of Justice of the European Union has no authority to interfere in the constitutional definition of marriage of member states?  States have not under EU Treaties transferred competence over family law to the Union. Family policy and the status of marriage remain the domain of national states.

Mercosur, the EU agreement on refugee sharing and relocation, the Green Deal, and the increasingly absurd pronouncements of European bureaucrats imposed on Europe further their pursuit of extinguishing Europe. They want to eliminate the order built over centuries based on divine law, positive law, common sense, and experience. That is why the question arises that terrifies so many in Poland and beyond: Is it worth remaining in this crumbling edifice that Europe has become, paralyzed by the European Union?

Let us not be courtiers of the devil. Let us not contribute to the destruction of what the world stands upon, a world not built by leftists or libertines. There is hope in God that they will not ultimately destroy it but, in the process, there will be no lack of chaos and all kinds of filth. This is evident today, on our streets, in the media, and even the schools, where we should bequeath a good start, not depravity, to the young. It begins by saying: let us remain a “woman” and a “man” — a family, i.e., a truly parental institution.

Let us simply remain ourselves.

In Pope Leo XIV’s address to the Vatican Diplomatic Corps on January 9, he criticized the neo-“Orwellian” turn in language, adopted ostensibly in the name of “inclusion,” that results in negating individual, social, and even religious rights because it unanchors language from truth.

Fr. Zieliński’s essay elicits provocative questions. How is language reconstruction a “backdoor revolution”? Or, as Paul Greenberg once framed it about abortion, does verbicide precede homicide? And why is “self-identification” everybody’s “right” except that of believing and practicing Catholics, including in states whose culture derives from that tradition?