Even in Poland, the Church struggles with low attendance at Sunday Masses. Contrary to appearances, this is not a new problem at all. Quite simply, in the Middle Ages and the modern era, the clergy reacted to him much more forcefully. What times, such methods.
The basic control tools will probably not surprise anyone, because they are, to a large extent, still valid today. During the annual confession (in the past, confessions were usually made once a year), the priest ruthlessly asked how often the penitent participated in obligatory masses and services, and how many times he missed them.
In addition, during the Christmas carols, the presbytery asked the faithful about the content of the sermons given in the last year. This is where the similarities end, because in old Poland the "Mass duty" was taken very seriously. If it was a duty, violating it had to be punished. Severely .
Probably many peasants would prefer to spend their Sunday here, not in the church, but it's a must ...
The inhabitants of villages and towns belonging to the church were the worst. There, nobody cared about freedom of choice. Truly Orwellian systems of control were created to ensure that everyone dutifully went to matins. Izabela Skierska, the author of the book "Mass Duty in Medieval Poland" gives an example of regulations introduced by the Krakow chapter in its Pabianice and Rzgów estates in the years 1600 and 1604.
According to them, every townsperson and citizen he was obliged to attend the Holy Mass on Sundays and holidays and listen to the sermon. The recipe was enforced by special "decimals" who were seeded on every street and in the market square and in the countryside . They wrote down the names of people who did not go to church and passed the list to the local authorities. Each offender was then punished in the amount of PLN 0.01.
Not everyone wanted to spend time in such scenery…
According to Izabela Skierska, a similar system operated in the Małopolska villages of Świlcza and Woliczka, as well as in the estates of Kraków bishops. In the latter decades they had a slightly different name, but they dealt with the same. The penalty for avoiding mass there was 1 pound of wax. The total amount of penalties ranged from 1 to 10 groszy, which is also confirmed by the statutes of the Warmia diocese from the end of the 14th century.
The article is based mainly on the book by Izabela Skierska entitled "Mass duty in medieval Poland" (Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, 2003).
Another historian, Tomasz Wiślicz ("Earning a Sultry Salvation. Religiousness of Peasants ..."), gives similar examples from areas and towns that did not belong to the Church at all. In the Łękorski starosty, at the end of the 17th century, an organist was responsible for checking the attendance at masses, collecting 10 groszy from recalcitrant sheep. In turn, in the villages near Kalisz, in the middle of this century, jurors were involved in enforcing the Mass. Interestingly, even the nobility with a liberal approach to religion chased their peasants to church. Skierska writes about a Calvinist owner of Gorlice, who forced her subjects to weekly visits to the Catholic church if they did not want to go to the congregation.
What if someone stood up? If neither wanted to go to church nor pay the penalty? Secular authorities warned that they would severely punish such cases and so they did. Tomasz Wiślicz gives cases of flogging punishments for absence from the Christmas Mass . No wonder that at least where the church was close, and the parson had his finger on the pulse, the mass attendance broke records ...