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Research

What are the effects of migration on religion? Polish Catholics in the UK and Ireland

Kerry Gallagher & Marta Trzebiatowska

Research Summary

The question is often asked, how does migration affect religion? The number of Polish Catholics in the UK and Ireland has grown rapidly, but little is known about the religious aspects of their journey. This report is based on the researchers’ fieldwork with Polish migrants in the UK and Ireland. Drawing on interviews and participant observation with Polish migrants of various ages and class backgrounds, three possible outcomes are identified for Catholics transplanted to a new context. Firstly, they continue to practise in the same way as they did in their home country. Secondly, they begin to question their faith and leave the church altogether. Thirdly, they take the opportunity to explore their faith in a flexible and relatively independent manner.

Researchers

Kerry Gallagher & Marta Trzebiatowska

Research Institution

University of Maynooth, University of Aberdeen

What is this about?

  • When people migrate, how does it effect their religion.
  • Specifically, when Catholics migrate from Poland to the UK or Ireland, how does it affect their religion?
  • What kinds of continuities and changes can be found in their religious views and practices? How are these religious views and practices affected by the transplantation of themselves and their Catholicism to the new country?

What was done?

The data come from two research projects conducted between 2008 and 2013. The interview material from England and Scotland is drawn from a larger study of Polish priests and parishioners in Great Britain, carried out simultaneously in London, Nottingham, and Aberdeen. The Irish portion of the data comes from a project based in County Dublin. Both projects comprised interviews with Polish migrants as well as participant observation at masses and social and cultural events. Overall, data from 71 interviews inform this research: 10 from Scotland, 20 from England, 41 from the Republic of Ireland. All participants had been residents in the UK and Ireland for at least a year. Of the 71 interviewees, 58 were female.

Main findings and outputs

  • Polish migration into the UK and Ireland has been significant. Official statistics from 2011 and 2008 show that Polish is the second most spoken language in the UK, 600,000 people of Polish background live in the UK, and 200,000 in Ireland.
  • There is a deep link between Polish identity and Catholicism. The presence of Polish migrants has ‘transformed’ Catholic parishes in the UK, with comparable effects in Ireland.
  • But little is known of the effect of the journey on migrants’ religion. Does it strengthen or weaken it, for instance? Faiths moving from one place to another has always been part of the religious landscape.
  • There is some evidence that the migrants’ Catholic identity is unchanged by the move. Masses are in Polish, people stay connected to the Church, or their connectedness increases and helps negotiate the change to the new country.
  • Yet there is also evidence that migrants feel freer in the new setting, presented with new choices and opportunities including the decision not to stay part of the faith community.
  • There is also evidence that some people use the change as a way to explore their faith in a more individual, open, personal manner, which has also altered the status of priests.

Relevance to RE

RE sets out to prepare young people for life in twenty-first century Britain, and the research is an example of how the country’s social and religious make-up changes all the time; teachers need to keep in touch with this. The relationship between migration and religion is a significant one but is perhaps under-explored in RE. Young people can sometimes express prejudices about it. Perhaps the researchers’ methodology offers a good model for a community or lived religion RE topic where pupils meet members of different communities and talk with them about how the experience of moving countries has affected their religious beliefs and practices.

Generalisability and potential limitations

The data are drawn from two fairly large-scale quantitative studies. The researchers acknowledge that their ‘snowball’ (spreading via networks) sample is not representative, but does reflect different settings and chime with other relevant literature.

Find out more

The full article is: Kerry Gallagher & Marta Trzebiatowska (2017) Becoming a ‘real’ Catholic: Polish migrants and lived religiosity in the UK and Ireland, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 32:3, 431-445.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13537903.2017.1362883?journalCode=cjcr20

 

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