Pater et Patria

Traditionalist Catholicism, libertarians and international interests in Poland’s right-wing sphere

by Juliet Schnabel (VVN-BdA Berlin), June 2025

Like many other European countries, Poland has its own neofascists who rage against refugees and the EU, adore Hitler, and are coddled both by a weakened justice system and politicians from several political parties. This includes the former governing right-wing PiS party as well as the smaller monarchist party ‘Konfederacja’, which was only founded in 2019, but has since attracted young voters with their opposition against ‘Jews, homosexuals, abortions, taxes and the European Union’. Catholicism retains its strong influence in Polish politics, and unsurprisingly, this has led to a wide-spread opposition to queer rights as well as reproductive healthcare, leading to many cities and provinces, especially in the southeast of Poland, to declare themselves ‘LGBT-free zones‘, as well as the establishment of draconian abortion bans.

These efforts are often amplified, both through ideological and financial support, by groups from other countries, who see Poland as the ‘pivot point’ on the ‘battleground’ of Europe in the fight against secularism, according to a paper from the World Congress of Families (WCF), a conference that took place in Warsaw in 2007 with several thousand attendees. It was organised by more than 20 American groups, including Focus on the Family, the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF – now rebranded as Alliance Defending Freedom) and the Family Research Council. All three organisations are listed as anti-gay hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center (just like the WCF is since 2014), and all three were founded by James Dobson, a highly influential fundamentalist evangelical, whose mentor was the American eugenicist Paul Popenoe. Dobson is also a long-time member of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive right-wing network that funnels money from radical libertarian donors and the fossil fuel industry into right-wing think tanks, media, universities and activism.

According to Anne Nelson, the author of the book ‘Shadow Network’, the CNP was founded in the early 1980s as a reaction to the civil-rights-movement and a perceived left-wing ‘takeover’ of society fuelled by social movements at colleges and universities. The CNP has since grown into a powerhouse of influence with connections in all branches of the US-government, as well as beyond US-borders. The study ‘Tip of the Iceberg‘ from 2021 chronicles ‘Anti-Gender’ (anti-abortion and anti-queer) money in Europe, and most of the top donors from the US are associated with the CNP, including the ADF, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), the Cato Institute, the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. Especially the Heritage Foundation has very deep ties to the CNP, since both Heritage and the CNP were founded by the same man, Paul Weyrich. Recently, the Heritage Foundation has received more media attention during the US-election, since it is the main organiser behind the infamous ‘Project 2025’, which aims to turn the US into a christo-fascist oligarchy, with both the ADF and the ACLJ as contributors.

Heritage has also organised a conference in September 2024 in Warsaw with speeches from people tied to the Trump administration and the Republican Party, the EU parliament as well as the Polish parliament, and other political organisations across Europe. While some speakers pressed pro-business and anti-regulation points when it comes to climate change, some veered into more conspiratorial territory, accusing Brussels of ‘tricking’ nations into giving up their sovereignty for more sinister plans to come. Similarly, they espouse nationalist views in regards to defence and migration.

The paranoid musings reached a fever pitch when the panelists, some of whom are directly connected to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) (a right-wing education institute financially and ideologically subservient to Viktor Orban and the Hungarian state), talked about gender and sexuality, accusing a nebulous ‘woke movement’ of attacking logic and reason, the ‘basic values of Western civilisation’, while portraying themselves as the victims of marginalisation in the public debate who heroically fighting against the ‘elites’ who are ‘destroying the foundations of humanity’, i.e. the distinction between genders. According to the panelists, Brussels has ‘weaponised’ its budget to enforce ‘wokeism’, which they compare to both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, while also tracing it back to Herbert Marcuse, and dropping ominous warnings about the UN 2030 agenda; both implying a reference to the antisemitic conspiracy narrative trope of ‘cultural marxism’ aka ‘jewish-bolshevist world-conspiracy’. In the same vein, they accuse the gay movement of placing agents in Hollywood to push the ‘gay agenda’, and social media of brainwashing and ‘rewiring’ the population to oppose conservatism (all while one of the biggest social media platforms is run by Trump ally, conspiracy theorist and fierce transphobe Elon Musk). Similarly, they describe the EU enforcement of human rights as ‘cultic jargon’, ‘sectarian’ and an ‘autocratic regime’, and claim that the practice of fact-checking is a ‘woke conspiracy’ threatening free speech.

When pressed to provide examples for these outlandish claims, they either repeat long disproven lies, such as small children being ‘mutilated’ by gender-affirming surgeries (they aren’t), or conspiracy narratives that have nothing to do with the subject of gender, such as the ‘Wuhan lab’-narrative and climate change denial. They further claim that women’s rights, policies against domestic violence, policies addressing child poverty and violence against children are insidious attempts of the invisible elites to corrode the nuclear family, and must therefore be opposed. They blame sex education for intergenerational estrangement, and queer history of ‘dispossessing young people of their heritage’. As a solution, they unsurprisingly endorse conversion ‘therapy’ (which has been defined as a form of torture), as well as the astroturfed organisation Moms for Liberty, which has infiltrated school boards all over the US, pushing for book bans and the abolition of sex education, and which has been labelled a far-right extremist organisation in 2023 by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Moms for Liberty are not only part of both the CNP and ‘Project 2025’, and are financed primarily through the Heritage Foundation, but they also have connections to right-wing militias like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers as well as to the assault-rifle-cult Rod of Iron Ministries, all of which were involved in storming the US-Capitol on January 6th, 2021.

This conference was co-organised by Ordo Iuris, an organisation that was highly influential in the legal struggle against queer rights, divorce and reproductive healthcare. The latter has resulted in one of the most restrictive abortion bans in Europe, where abortion is illegal except in cases where the pregnancy is a result of a criminal act or when the woman’s life or health is in danger. So far, attempts by the new government under Donald Tusk for a more lenient approach have been unsuccessful. The original draft by Ordo Iuris from 2016 was even more restrictive, aiming at a full prohibition of abortion, including rape and incest, but this was rejected by the Polish parliament after the so-called ‘Black Protests’, despite having the support of the Catholic church and the then-ruling PiS party. They were also the driving force behind the various ‘Local Government Charter of Family Rights’ which have led to the aforementioned ‘LGBT-free zones’.

Ordo Iuris is not only connected to high-ranking politicians in Poland, but also to international ultra-conservative groups, in the US, Europe and Russia. One of them is CitizenGo, which signed a declaration of support of the Russian anti-queer laws in 2013, which has led to a severe increase in hate crimes. These close ties to Russia are not surprising, since Alexey Komov, a Russian representative of the WCF and close ally to Putin-friendly oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, sits on the Foundation Board of Trustees of CitizenGo. Just like the WCF, CitizenGo has also influenced campaigns in Africa to criminalise homosexuality. Ordo Iuris is also allied to the aforementioned ADF by co-sponsoring legal proposals (e.g. in Romania in 2015) and ADF representatives speaking at Ordo Iuris conferences.

While Ordo Iuris maintains to be merely inspired by the transnational fundamentalist movement Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), these claims ring hollow considering that active members of the TFP were also involved, sometimes in leadership positions, in the Piotr Skarga Institute, which then founded Ordo Iuris in 2013. All three organisations still use the same logo featuring a golden lion. The TFP itself is quite controversial, even within Catholic circles, with some going so far as to accuse them of being esoteric, fanatic, or a cult (e.g. in France in the 1990s). It was founded by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira in Brazil in 1960, and allegedly involved in the assassination attempt on pope John Paul II in 1981, which they have denied. After Oliveira’s death in 1995, the TFP has split. One part has continued under the name ‘Heralds of the Gospel’, and they have been under Vatican investigation since 2017 over alleged cult worship and exorcism practices. The other part kept the TFP name and has also been a vocal critic of a Vatican that has abandoned the right path since the 1960s.

This sentiment dates back to the TFP’s roots in ‘traditional Catholicism’ (tradcath), which was Oliveira’s primary motivation to found the TFP. Even before founding the TFP, Oliveira was deeply embedded in right-wing ideology, when he accused ‘the Jews’ of running the world and ‘founding communism’. He founded the TFP in response to some parts of the Catholic church endorsing liberation theology. In the early 1960s, he travelled to Rome to attend the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), which he described as a ‘point in history as sad as the Death of our Lord’, meaning the crucifixion of Christ. His unfulfilled dream was the foundation of a ‘religious order of Chivalry’, which in itself is not uncommon for religious groups and other organisations. However, in Oliveira’s case it might have been a more sinister idea, since he described it as a ‘commando force of the TFP’, ready to fight during an impending worldwide Catholic uprising, which sounds much more like a right-wing militia waiting for ‘Day X’ and less like bored aristocrats pinning medals to each other’s lapels.

While Oliveira openly despised Vatican II and aimed to change its outcomes, he did not deny the pope’s authority, as is common amongst tradcaths. Tradcath ideology itself is a wide spectrum: from latinophile bible-nerds in suits arguing whether all popes since Vatican II are illegitimate, or if they should call for a conclave to elect an antipope; to geocentrists with fake academic titles; all the way to white supremacist, Holocaust denier, rampant homophobe, sexist, antisemite and potential incel Nick Fuentes. He is the founder of the heavily memefied far-right troll movement called ‘groypers’, who advocated for the implementation of a ‘Catholic Taliban’-regime, reducing women to dispossessed and disenfranchised sex slaves. Fuentes spent Thanksgiving 2022 with Trump, coining the misogynistic slogan ‘your body, my choice‘ on social media after Trump’s election in 2024. Especially the unbridled racism of Fuentes, as well as the focus on aesthetics of some of his fellow young tradcath influencers might suggest that the identification as tradcath might occasionally just be a disguise for more sinister or more benign motivations, rather than being originally inspired by a disagreement within Catholicism.

That said, most political groups on this spectrum espouse some form of anticommunism, antisemitism, anti-queer resentment (all of these often steeped in paranoia, conspiracy narratives and admonitions about the end of civilisation), a glorification of the crusades as well as virulent misogyny, usually under the veil of opposition to abortion, no-fault divorce, feminism and women’s rights. While the TFP was shaped by its opposition to the more lenient and modernised positions of Vatican II, the CNP was founded roughly two decades later as a response to progressivism and civil rights within wider society, but both were a reaction to a perceived leftist takeover. Unsurprisingly, Oliveira was in close contact with Weyrich, the founder of the CNP.

While the TFP was moulded after the ideal of the ‘order of chivalry’, and the CNP was conceived as a ‘conservative version of the Council on Foreign Relations’ (a New York City based think tank founded in 1921), another group, the American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ), was created as a conservative answer to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), an American nonprofit civil rights organisation founded in 1920. Founded by Pat Robertson, an evangelical televangelist who famously claimed that the devastation caused by 2005 hurricane Katrina in New Orleans was God’s punishment for the existence of abortion and gay people, the ACLJ has since spawned a European (ECLJ) and a Slavic branch (SCLJ). Despite their denominational differences, Ordo Iuris states on their own website that one of their partner organisations is the ECLJ. Robertson is also a long-time CNP member, just like Trump-lawyer Jay Sekulow, the man who is currently running the ACLJ.

Sekulow, who started out as a self-declared ‘Jew for Jesus’ before converting to Messianic Judaism (a mixture between Judaism and Evangelical theology), shows how the denominational lines blur within these alliances, despite the fact that one of the common tradcath criticisms against Vatican II is the ecumenical cooperation between denominations. Similarly, the lines between true believers and political tacticians can also blur, considering that Sekulow seems to use the ACLJ also as his private bank account for his own enrichment, a behaviour that is not uncommon in these organisations. All these practices are rarely questioned, since within this sphere, capitalism and the strive for profit is not seen as a contradiction to Christian values. Rather, radical libertarian viewpoints are a cornerstone of it, as the last word ‘property’ in TFP already suggests. In fact, while the christo-fascist elements of their ideology often receive the most attention, large amounts of the content produced by Ordo Iuris and Heritage focus on deregulation, as did parts of ‘Project 2025’. These proposals by ‘Project 2025’ aim to dismantle the administrative state, rendering any regulatory agency within the US-government redundant, and enabling the already existing oligarchy to act solely on the incentive of profit with no regards for the environment, work safety, food and product safety, or violations of other laws. Similarly, while all of these groups have international ties, they stress a return to the nation and a rejection of any supranational union like the EU or the UN, thereby attracting new followers from deep into the far-right. As journalist Mateusz Mazzini put it: ‘To lead the far-right, you must be more nationalist than the nationalists, and more Catholic than the Catholics’, despite aligning themselves with other denominations and other countries. After all, when it comes to money, power, influence, and above all the degradation of their political enemies, even tradcaths have learned to play along.

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We are aware the connections are many and it’s difficult to map the constellation of associations and individuals across continents and time. We have provided a diagram to help you

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Further reading