Under Pressure from its dominant Catholic Church, Poland will end shopping on Sundays by 2020. The nation intends to protect Sunday as a day of rest, and promote family time. 

Poland’s religious makeup is 87% Catholic. In addition, there are about 507,000 Polish Orthodox Christians and 150,000 Protestants.

Poland’s lower house of Parliament, the Sejm, passed the shopping day proposal last week by a vote of 254 to 156. The legislation would “restrict Sunday shopping to the first and last Sunday of the month until the end of 2018, only on the last Sunday in the month in 2019, and to ban it totally starting in 2020,” reported the Catholic Herald. However, the legislation would allow shopping on those Sundays that fall before a major holiday. 

The bill now goes to the Polish Senate, where it is expected to pass, and then to President Andzrej Duda, who is expected to sign it into law. 

The Catholic Herald further reported that the Polish Bishops’ Conference was not entirely happy because it would like to see all people free from work on Sundays. 

According to Catholic teaching, “Just as God ‘rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done,’ human life has a rhythm of work and rest. The institution of the Lord’s Day helps everyone enjoy adequate rest and leisure to cultivate their familial, cultural, social, and religious lives.

“On Sundays and other holy days of obligation, the faithful are to refrain from engaging in work or activities that hinder the worship owed to God, the joy proper to the Lord’s Day, the performance of the works of mercy, and the appropriate relaxation of mind and body.”

Most Protestants and Orthodox Christians believe the same teaching, misappropriating the direct command of the Lord to observe the seventh day in Exodus 20 to the first day of the week. 

The intentions of the religious authorities in pushing for such legislation is obviously to institute Sunday as a day of rest. They will eventually legislate that everyone must attend church on Sundays as well. 

The Catholic Church changed the Sabbath of the seventh-day to the first day of the week back in the first couple of centuries after the end of the apostolic era with no evidence whatsoever from scripture, or from the apostles or from the life of Christ indicating that this should be done. Protestants and Orthodox have followed her lead, which suggests that they will also eventually bow to her authority in other areas as well. 

“And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” Revelation 13:8.