Archbishop Adrian Galbas made himself known as a man very positively assessing the synod face of the Church. However, this does not mean that it can be easy saved into a progressive camp. Only the Warsaw metropolis will be a actual ‘check’, the more so that the Archbishop can number on being elevated to Cardinal's dignity.
The fresh metropolitan of Warsaw was Archbishop Adrian Galbas SAC. Due to his age – 56 years old – he can stay in office for up to 2 decades, permanently imprinting on the form of the Church in the capital.
Archbishop Adrian Galbas became a Katowice metropolitan in 2023. He shortly held this office; unfortunately, no 1 in the Church has the courage to break distant from the practice of transferring bishops between dioceses and treating any only as temporary. This is not a charge against archbishop himself. Galbasa or the Church in Poland even; it is alternatively a reflection of a more general nature, which these moved only evoke.
However, Archbishop Adrian Galbas can be expected to spend more time in Warsaw: even for an ambitious bishop, it is hard to look for a more crucial archdiocese in the country. Rather, we must anticipate another forms of further promotion, not only in functions within the Polish Episcopal Conference. Warsaw is the Cardinal's capital and it would be perfectly natural if Archbishop Galbas was given purple at the hands of Francis on another consistory.
It is possibly not that from the position of the current Pope the fresh Warsaw metropolitan is any embodiment of the Synod Church of the future. Archbishop Adrian Galbas has not been on the top of Catholic portals so far due to any revolutionary statements. On controversial subjects he usually spoke so as not to provoke controversy, either on 1 side or on the another side of the dispute. However, he was able to defend the sacramental structure of power in the Church rather strongly, arguing against the egalitarian ideas of inverting order forged in Germanic countries. He besides defended children's rights to life, not including the slippery trend of relativisation of this right, to which any another bishops or priests of professors are inclined, manifestly distancing themselves from the 2020 Constitutional Court's judgment. Archbishop Adrian Galbas stressed in public statements only the request to defend the conceived life.
On the another hand, there are no reasons why Francis should have something against the metropolitan of Warsaw erstwhile it comes to the selection of fresh cardinals. erstwhile the Pope announced the synodial process in 2021, Archbishop Galbas spoke positively about it, at the same time distancing himself from the ideas of the German Synodary Way. In 2023 he was 1 of the KEP delegates for a synod session in Rome. In his statements on the synod, he pointed to the chances associated with the process, seeing it – as the Pope himself wants – as a way to reconstruct the Church. I judged this attitude critically due to the serious dangers associated with the synodic process, which, in fact, were mostly manifested in the assembly’s final document. Diplomatic caution and authoritative optimism in assessments of the synod, however, is not a peculiar feature of the fresh metropolitan of Warsaw, but alternatively a typical attitude for all Polish bishops dealing with this subject, possibly with the exception of extraordinaryly enthusiastic cardinals. Gregory Rys.
Diplomacy is something that is peculiarly essential in Warsaw. Building a relation with the eternal left-wing authority of the city; managing dynamically developing charisma communities, which at any time endanger to “break off” and establish their own para-church; facing a very strong environment associated with conventional liturgy – these are just a fewer standard capital challenges. We can hope that the fresh metropolitan will not be lost in this confusion, due to the fact that the danger of putting diplomacy above the fact is peculiarly large in the age of synod Catholicism, threatening specified a link between the Church and the present, that 1 from the another will be indistinguishable.
Paweł Chmielewski
