Krakow, Poland - After working for 12 years in a village near Krakow, Richard Swider headed off last week to the airport. The 50-year-old Pole got on a Ryanair flight and two hours later arrived in Glasgow, en route to a new life in the north of Scotland.
He is not the proverbial Polish plumber. Instead of dealing with Britain's blocked U-bends, he has come to cater for a market that has opened up for Poland's ever-mobile population - pastoral care. Father Swider is one of dozens of priests arriving each month to look after British parishes, and to minister to the growing number of Polish migrant workers, because the supply of home-grown priests in Britain has dried up. "I'm happy because there is a big need," Father Swider said. "In Scotland I can serve God, the diocese, and the people. And it's interesting work."
This new migration has gone largely unnoticed. In recent months more than 62 priests from the diocese of Krakow - where the late Pope John Paul II famously served as bishop, and where Father Swider worked - have set off to destinations around the world.
"This is an unexpected challenge for us," said Jozef Morawa, the rector of Krakow's seminary, opposite the city's Wawel castle. "It all happened very suddenly. There are many people in Britain who need pastoral care. Many priests are learning English. Others are already flying over for the weekend on easyJet to give communion."
Last month the Bishop of Aberdeen, the Right Rev Peter Moran, toured Poland to recruit more priests like Fr Swider for his remote northern parishes. The priests were needed, he said, to minister to Scotland's existing Roman Catholics and to the rapidly growing population of Poles who have moved to Britain since EU enlargement in 2004.
Catholic leaders across Europe face a similar problem. In Africa and America the number of priests is going up. But in Europe the trend is relentlessly downward. In Ireland seven out of eight seminaries have closed over the past decade, while in Spain and France the numbers applying to join the priesthood have slumped. It is priests from Poland who are filling the gap. "My students go where they can help," Dr Morawa said.
Cardinal Keith O'Brien, of the Catholic church in Scotland, said: "There is a crisis of vocations. Young men here do not seem to realise the challenge of the priesthood, with its role in the community - far greater than ever before. Many of our young men are missing the boat. Of course there are not the numbers in the Catholic population. If a couple have only two children they are less likely to encourage one of them to be a priest than if they have six, seven or eight."
Church leaders have offered various explanations for the decline in recruits: an unwillingness to make sacrifices; a "distorted vision" of what being a priest means; even addiction to the internet. Poland is the only European nation where the number of vocations is rising. It accounts for a quarter of all European applicants.
Krakow's famous higher seminary now has 240 students, who spend five years here before ordination. Karol Wojtyla, the future John Paul II, studied here in 1942. (His student room still exists. The SS occupied the building during the war; he attended secret lessons in the Bishop's Palace nearby.)
After a dip in the 1990s, the number of Poles applying to join the priesthood has gone up, from 4,500 in 1998 to 7,100 last year. The rise can be explained by the church's role in the struggle against communism, when it was Poland's only truly independent force. "The church was a place of freedom and joy and truth," Fr Swider said. "I didn't love communism much."
But it is also due to the extraordinary charismatic influence of Pope John Paul II. "He was definitely a big factor," Pavel Boron, a 22-year-old seminarian, explained, when asked why he wanted to become a priest. "I was born in 1983. For most of my life I have only known one Pope, and he was Polish."
"I heard an internal voice," Pavel's roommate, Piotr Gora, 22, added. "My family was surprised. The last calling in my village was 40 years ago."
For the trainee priests in their flowing black robes, life is rigorous. Students get up at 5.30am, meditate in the chapel and attend mass. After that there are prayers and lectures. During John Paul's time there were no heaters but now seminarians share comfortable rooms. The late pope is visible everywhere. His portrait hangs in the lecture room used to put on plays and he adorns the corridors.
Priests from Krakow are serving in Britain, Brazil, Ireland, Germany, the US, Ukraine, Austria and Tanzania, said Robert Necek, spokesman for the new Archbishop of Krakow, Stanislaw Dziwisz, John Paul's former private secretary. Father Necek said that every summer he did his bit too, travelling to Austria or Italy, where he stood in for priests so they could go on holiday. "They don't have anyone else. If it wasn't for me they would never get a break," he said.
The Catholic church in Poland is not without its critics. The Bishop of Krakow recently ordered an inquiry into allegations that several priests collaborated with the communist secret police, spying on Solidarity activists. Files recording their involvement have vanished. The church has also been criticised for its "belligerent" role in the 90s when it actively supported Lech Walesa, the former Solidarity leader, in his failed attempt to get re-elected as president.
And there is concern about the influence of Radio Maria, a fundamentalist radio station that mixes traditional Catholic devotions with xenophobic politics. The station campaigned vigorously for Lech Kaczynski, Poland's controversial conservative leader, who won last October's presidential election.
"The Polish church may be on the verge of a schism," said Andrzej Flis, a professor of sociology at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. "There is a very strong grassroots movement which is nationalistic, militant and pseudo-Catholic. And there are enlightened Catholics committed to deepening Catholicism." He added: "Poland is a big mess at the moment. The liberal project is in clear retreat."
But with 95% of Poles members of the Catholic church, there is little prospect that Poland will experience the shrinking congregations of Anglican Britain. In Wadowice, the late pope's birthplace, two-thirds of the 10,000-strong population regularly go to church.
Meanwhile, Fr Swider said he was settling in well in Peterhead and Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire. "I'm prepared for the weather because in Poland it's even worse in winter time," he said. And the Scots? "They are very beautiful and gentle," he said.
Backstory
The number of applicants to be priests has shown a remarkable decline across Europe, with the exception of Poland, homeland of the late Pope John Paul II. In 2004, 6,377 young men joined religious colleges in Poland, with 29,089 already serving as ordained priests. Poland also has some 1,845 monks and 23,105 nuns. Elsewhere the numbers have been sinking for some time. In traditionally Catholic Ireland there were only 110 seminarians in 2003. There has been a similar decline in Belgium, which also has deep Catholic roots. In France theological seminaries accepted 927 applicants in 2001, compared with 1,210 a decade earlier. In England and Wales only 27 were accepted for training in seminaries in 2003. In the French-speaking part of Switzerland in 2002 there were no applications to join the priesthood.