The design for the Church of St. Charles Borromeo in Opole was created in 2006 by Opole architect Janusz Oleniecki. The foundations for the building, which was a joint effort by the residents of the Chabrów housing estate, were laid in April 2007. The consecration of the temple took place in 2016. The builder of the church was Fr. Zbigniew Bienkiewicz, parish priest of St. Charles Borromeo Parish in Opole since 2006. Address: Chabrów, 45-222 Opole.

Long, long ago, long before the archbishop’s warning about the rainbow plague, the president’s distinction between people and ideology, the creation of free zones, and the repeated burning of the rainbow in front of the Church of the Saviour in Warsaw, Opole architect Janusz Oleniecki designed the Church of St. Charles Borromeo in Opole. In his rather bold vision, he referred to the Old Testament symbol of covenant, promise and grace that Noah saw just after the flood. Twenty or more years ago, there was nothing unusual about this. On TVP, children watched Noah’s Ark in a rainbow setting, the rainbow flag with the inscription PACE was a popular symbol of Christian pacifism throughout Europe, the rainbow appeared during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, and Jesus Christ sat on it in Easter church decorations.

 

On 9 January 2007, the Pastoral Council of the Parish of St. Charles Borromeo in Opole met with architect Janusz Oleniecki, who presented to the priests and lay people a design for a church whose façade was almost entirely covered with a rainbow of coloured glass. The concept was approved, and construction of the church began on 10 April with a solemn Mass, after which excavation and foundation work commenced. The church was consecrated nine years later, in 2016.

 

And those were completely different times. When the rainbow church was consecrated in Opole, the rainbow was no longer innocent, as it had gradually become a symbol of the LGBT community. On 14 September this year, the Presidium of the Polish Episcopal Conference strongly criticised the billboards of the ‘Let’s give each other a sign of peace’ campaign, which featured hands clasped together – one with a rosary, the other with a rainbow armband. A year earlier, Julita Wójcik’s ‘Rainbow’ (‘the triumphal arch of homosexuality’) finally disappeared from Zbawiciela Square, and shortly afterwards, two women were beaten up in Warsaw and Poznań for walking in public with rainbow bags. All of Poland was in a frenzy of fighting against or under the rainbow banner. On the other hand, the rainbow also became a weapon to attack believers and conservatives. Surrounded by rainbow halos, the Royal Vagina marched through Gdańsk, placed in the heart and parodying the Blessed Sacrament. There was no shortage of rainbow elements during the parody of Holy Mass, ‘celebrated’ (with a colander on the head of one of the celebrants) in June 2019 in Warsaw, or during the slitting of the throat of a doll bearing the image of Archbishop Jędraszewski by a drag queen nicknamed Mariolkaa Rebell in Poznań. A rainbow flag appeared on the statue of Christ ‘Sursum Corda’ on Krakowskie Przedmieście Street (with a vulgar inscription), and a rainbow halo adorned images of Our Lady of Częstochowa stuck on rubbish bins and portable toilets near St. Dominic’s Church in Płock.

 

-When looking at the new church from the outside, the rainbow stretching over the main entrance catches the eye first. Its meaning is very profound. ‘The rainbow is an Old Testament sign of the first covenant that God made with man at the end of the flood. And that is the idea behind the rainbow in our church,’ said Fr. Zbigniew Bienkiewicz, parish priest of St. Charles Borromeo’s Parish in Opole, in an article in Gość Niedzielny, which was published in connection with the consecration of the church.

 

What do lovers of sacred architecture on Facebook think about this? Criticism of the architectural style (hangar, underground, hobbit hole, swimming pool) is mixed here, although quantitatively it loses out to moral outrage and gender associations. So this is the ‘Biedronia headquarters’ dedicated to ‘Our Lady of Tolerance’, whose ‘parish priest is probably Krystian Legierski’. Someone asks, ‘Isn’t it a sin to have a rainbow at the entrance?’ Someone else doubts, ‘It’s not a church, is it?’ I like the one that cleverly combines aesthetic, technical and moral themes: ‘When it’s lit up, it will even be RGB.’ I also like the church (I even like the Zajazd pod Zamkiem inn in Rytro) and I hope that it will adhere to the architectural interpretation of parish priest Bienkiewicz, rather than the simplicity of the option ‘everything and everywhere reminds me of one thing’.

PM