Archbishop Tadeusz Wojda SAC of Gdansk advocates a Synodal Church

It is a great honour for the Pallottine family: on 14th March our confrere Archbishop Tadeusz Wojda SAC was elected President of the Polish Bishops’ Conference. The Polish Bishops’ Conference has about 90 voting members.

“This is a great challenge, I did not expect to be elected despite my relatively short seven years of experience as a bishop. It is a leap of faith and I will try not to disappoint them in cooperation with the entire Polish Bishops’ Conference, which leads the Church in Poland,” he said in his first statement to the media.

He named the creation of a synodal Church as one of his priorities, a task entrusted to him by Pope Francis. “This is a long process that requires the collaboration of the laity, who need to be more involved. We also have social challenges related to the family, youth, catechesis and Church-State relations,” Archbishop Wojda added.

Pallottines also appointed members of the Permanent Council

During the Plenary Assembly, the members of the so-called “Permanent Council”, which coordinates the work of the Conference, were also elected. Adrian Galbas SAC, Metropolitan Archbishop of Katowice, was also elected a member of the Permanent Council.

Many years as General Secretary for the Missions of the Community

Archbishop Tadeusz Wojda, SAC, was born in 1957. His younger brother is also a Pallotine and his older sister is a member of the Congregation of the Sisters of St Elisabeth of Teschen. Tadeusz Wojda began his novitiate in 1976; from 1977 to 1983 he studied philosophy and theology at the seminary in Oltarzew, near Warsaw, and at the same time from 1980 to 1983 he studied fundamental theology at the Catholic Theological Academy in Warsaw, where he obtained his master’s degree.

He was ordained a priest on 8 May 1983. After his ordination, he worked for a few months as a parochial vicar in the parish of Christ the King in Warsaw and then at the Pallottine Missionary Secretariat in Ząbki. In May 1984 he came to Rome to study Missiology at the Pontifical Gregorian University, graduating in 1989. The subject of his doctoral thesis was “The Currents of Missionary Theology in Münster and Leuven”. For many years he was Secretary General for Missions of our Congregation. Since 1990 he has worked in the Congregation/Dicastery for the Evangelisation of Peoples. Since 2007 he has headed the office of this dicastery, and in 2011 Pope Benedict XVI appointed him its Under-Secretary.

In 2017, Pope Francis appointed him Archbishop of Białystok in north-eastern Poland and he was consecrated Bishop on 10 June 2017 by the Prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelisation, Cardinal Fernando Filoni. The co-consecrator was Archbishop Henryk Hoser SAC. The motto of Archbishop Wojda’s episcopal ministry is the words of the Gospel of Mark (13:10): “Oportet praedicari evangelium” (The Gospel must be proclaimed). In 2021 Archbishop Wojda was appointed Metropolitan of Gdansk by Pope Francis.

Sources: www.sac.info; Vatican News
Photo: Silar, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons