A Proper Love of One’s Country: What the Church Asks After 6 Die in Kraków’s Market Square

On Saturday afternoon, a gunman drove into the Main Market Square in Kraków, the heart of the city where St. John Paul II was once archbishop, and opened fire on whoever was there. Six people died in the square, and 3 more were later found dead in his home. Poland’s government calls it terrorism and says the man held “ultranationalistic” views. Underneath the casualty counts and the police video sits a question the Church has thought about for a long time: what does it actually mean to love your country, and how does a man who claims to love his end up killing its people?

The News Story

A 25-year-old Polish man drove into the Main Market Square in Kraków on Saturday afternoon, November 7, and opened fire on people at random, killing 6 and wounding at least 15 before police shot and arrested him. Hours later, counter-terrorism officers searching his home in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski found the bodies of 3 more people, a man and 2 women. Prime Minister Donald Tusk said there were “strong indications” they were members of the suspect’s immediate family, and a deputy national police inspector told reporters they are believed to be his parents and sister.¹

The attack began shortly before 3 p.m. local time in the historic square at the center of Kraków’s Old Town. Kraków is Poland’s second-largest city and a popular tourist destination. Police said the gunman fired from his car as he drove to several points around the square, which is why victims were found in different places. Kraków police spokesperson Katarzyna Cisło told the broadcaster TVN24 that he wore military-style fatigues and a bulletproof vest and carried a military-type long gun, and that more weapons and ammunition were found in his car. Police said the shooting lasted about 3 minutes. A bullet struck a tram and shattered the driver’s window, though no one aboard was hurt.²

Four women and 2 men were killed. Authorities said 3 of the dead were Polish and 1 was a British citizen; 2 had not been identified as of Saturday night. Five foreign nationals, from Austria, Germany, Portugal, Russia and Britain, were among the injured. The U.S. State Department said it knew of no Americans harmed.³

Two police officers were seriously wounded in the exchange of fire, one of them shot 3 times. Tusk named them as Senior Constable Jakub Kulik and Senior Constable Artur Morański and said they “likely saved lots of lives.” Video verified by the BBC shows a wounded officer firing at the suspect on the ground before collapsing. Police said the suspect kept firing after he was hit. He underwent surgery and remains hospitalized under arrest. Police said he acted alone, and they have not released his name.⁴

Interior Minister Marcin Kierwiński said “everything indicates that he was fascinated by far-right ideologies” and described the man’s views as “very radical” and “ultranationalistic,” adding that the motive will be investigated. Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz called the shooting an act of terror and said the man had never served in the armed forces. “Until now in Poland we haven’t had such drastic cases of terrorism,” Tusk said. He promised that any possible supporters of the attacker would be detained and asked politicians “of all stripes” not to exploit the tragedy.⁵

Al Jazeera reported that it was Poland’s deadliest shooting since the fall of communism in 1989. Poland has strict gun laws, but police figures show about 411,000 permit holders, a number that has been rising. Authorities have not said whether the weapons used were legally held.⁶

Kraków declared a period of mourning through November 11, and Warsaw put up road barriers along main streets in its Old Town. President Karol Nawrocki sent the head of the National Security Bureau to Kraków. Condolences came from EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the U.S. ambassador to Poland, Tom Rose.⁷

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

Three Minutes on the Rynek

Shortly before 3 o’clock on Saturday afternoon, a 25-year-old man in military fatigues and a bulletproof vest drove onto the Main Market Square in Kraków and started shooting at whoever happened to be there. Police say it lasted about 3 minutes. When it was over, 4 women and 2 men were dead, at least 15 people were wounded, and 2 police officers who had confronted him were headed into surgery.⁸ That evening, counter-terrorism officers searched his home in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski and found 3 more bodies. Officials believe they are his parents and his sister.⁹

Poland’s interior minister says “everything indicates that he was fascinated by far-right ideologies,” and he calls the man’s views “ultranationalistic.”¹⁰ The investigation is one day old, and I won’t say more about him than the authorities have. But if their early reading holds, a man who imagined himself a defender of his nation spent the afternoon killing its people, and three of the dead were found under his own roof.

That contradiction is where the Church’s teaching begins. She has plenty to say about terrorism, and I’ll get there. The principle this story turns on is older and quieter, though: what it actually means to love your country.

In the Land Where He Was Born

Kraków has a particular claim on this question. From 1958 until 1978, Karol Wojtyła was one of its bishops, and from 1964, its archbishop. In 1995, as Pope St. John Paul II, he stood before the United Nations General Assembly and gave a speech on nations. He mentioned the scholars of the Academy of Kraków who had defended the rights of smaller peoples at the Council of Constance in the fifteenth century. He spoke of “the land where I was born,” a nation that had outlived the loss of its independence by holding on to its culture.¹¹ Then he drew a line that reads as though it were written for this past Saturday.

“We need to clarify the essential difference between an unhealthy form of nationalism, which teaches contempt for other nations or cultures, and patriotism, which is a proper love of one’s country. True patriotism never seeks to advance the well-being of one’s own nation at the expense of others. For in the end this would harm one’s own nation as well: doing wrong damages both aggressor and victim. Nationalism, particularly in its most radical forms, is thus the antithesis of true patriotism.”¹²

Antithesis is a strong word, and Pope John Paul chose it on purpose. For John Paul, radical nationalism sits at the opposite pole from true love of country. One paragraph earlier, he had described where it leads. The fear of “difference,” he said, “especially when it expresses itself in a narrow and exclusive nationalism which denies any rights to ‘the other’, can lead to a true nightmare of violence and terror.”¹³

Piety Toward Country

So what is the proper love of one’s country? St. Thomas Aquinas answered with a word we usually reserve for discussions around church: piety. After God, he wrote, “the principles of our being and government are our parents and our country, that have given us birth and nourishment. Consequently, man is debtor chiefly to his parents and his country, after God.” Saint Thomas spells out what the debt to country includes: “The worship given to our country includes homage to all our fellow-citizens and to all the friends of our country.”¹⁴

Look at who was on the square. Three of the dead were Polish. One was British, a citizen of one of Poland’s allies. Among the wounded were visitors from Austria, Germany, Portugal, Russia and Britain.¹⁵ In Thomas’s terms, a man who truly loved Poland owed every one of them homage: the Poles as his fellow citizens, the guests as friends of his country who had come to see its most famous square. And notice that Thomas puts parents and country under the same virtue, in the same breath. The love he describes starts at the kitchen table and widens outward to the whole people. It has no room for malice aimed at either group.

The Catechism keeps this teaching and gives it a home under the fourth commandment, the commandment to honor your father and mother. “The love and service of one’s country follow from the duty of gratitude and belong to the order of charity.”¹⁶ Patriotism, in the Church’s account, is a form of charity. It is gratitude for what your country has given you, paid back in service to the people who make it up. A love of country that breeds contempt for any of them has stopped being love at all.

Contempt Wearing a Flag

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church names what blocks the unity of the human family: “obstacles originating in materialistic and nationalistic ideologies that contradict the values of the person integrally considered.” It adds that “any theory or form whatsoever of racism and racial discrimination is morally unacceptable.”¹⁷

An ideology like that sorts human beings before it ever meets them. It decides in advance who counts. When it turns violent, it produces exactly what the Compendium describes in its section on terrorism: attacks “striking completely innocent people who become chance victims,” aimed at “places of daily life and not military objectives.”¹⁸ A market square on a Saturday afternoon is about as pure a place of daily life as exists in Europe. Tables were left overturned and belongings scattered. A bullet shattered the window of a passing tram.¹⁹

The Church’s judgment on that is absolute. “Terrorism is to be condemned in the most absolute terms. It shows complete contempt for human life and can never be justified, since the human person is always an end and never a means.”²⁰ The Catechism says it in one line: terrorism “threatens, wounds, and kills indiscriminately; it is gravely against justice and charity.”²¹ Notice that last word. Charity is the same virtue the Catechism uses for love of country. A man who kills in his nation’s name sins against the very virtue he imagines he is practicing.

Responsibility Is Personal

A week like this carries a second temptation, and Poland’s prime minister saw it coming. Within hours, Donald Tusk made “a heartfelt appeal to politicians of all stripes: do not exploit this tragedy.”²² That is wise, and the Compendium supplies the principle behind such an appeal. In the same paragraph that condemns terrorism without reservation, it insists that “criminal responsibility is always personal, and therefore cannot be extended to the religions, nations or ethnic groups to which the terrorists belong.”²³

That cuts in more than one direction. Poland has a long and honorable patriotic tradition, much of it bound up with the Catholic faith. The people who kept Polish language and worship alive under partition and occupation were patriots in exactly Thomas’s sense. Nothing about Saturday indicts them, and nothing about it indicts the ordinary Poles who vote for parties of the right or fly the white and red on their balconies. The guilt belongs to the man who pulled the trigger and to anyone the investigation shows helped him. That is as far as the guilt may run.

What the Compendium asks of the rest of us is harder than condemnation. “The fight against terrorism presupposes the moral duty to help create those conditions that will prevent it from arising or developing.”²⁴ A researcher at the International Center for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague said the gunman’s gear and look resembled those of other “extreme right lone actors” around Europe.²⁵ Men like this are formed somewhere, usually alone, by voices that teach them which neighbors to despise. The Church’s answer is a better love, taught early: a patriotism that learns homage to its fellow citizens before it learns anything else about the flag.

What I’d Watch

Watch whether prosecutors name the suspect and bring charges, and whether they confirm what happened inside his home. Watch whether investigators find anyone who helped him or cheered him on, and whether they explain how he came to have a military-style rifle in a country with strict gun laws.²⁶ And watch November 11. Kraków’s period of mourning runs through that day, which is also Poland’s Independence Day. How Poland marks it will say a good deal about which kind of love of country it chooses.

And, as always, pray. Pray for the 6 who died on the square, for the 3 found in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, and for everyone who loved them. Pray for the wounded, and for Senior Constables Jakub Kulik and Artur Morański, who stood their ground while the shooting went on. Pray for the people of Kraków, who will walk past St. Mary’s this week and remember. And pray for the man in the hospital bed, that the mercy of God reaches even him. St. John put the whole matter in one sentence: “If any one says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar” (1 John 4:20).

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This story turns on true patriotism: love of country is a duty of piety and charity that owes homage to every fellow citizen, and a nationalism that teaches contempt is its opposite.

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Notes

1. ↑ “Polish Gunman Who Killed 6 People in Krakow Has ‘Ultranationalistic’ Views, Authorities Say,” Associated Press via NPR, November 7, 2026, npr.org; “Six Killed in Krakow ‘Far-Right’ Shooting, as Three More Bodies Found in Suspect’s Home,” BBC News, November 7, 2026, bbc.com; “Gunman Kills 6 in ‘Terror Attack’ in Krakow, Poland, Officials Say; 3 Others Found Dead in His Home,” NBC News, November 7, 2026, nbcnews.com.
2. ↑ Associated Press, “Polish Gunman Who Killed 6 People”; BBC News, “Six Killed in Krakow ‘Far-Right’ Shooting”; “Gunman Opens Fire from Moving Car in European Tourist Hot Spot, Leaving 6 Dead and at Least 15 Wounded,” Fox News, November 7, 2026, foxnews.com; “Poland: After Kraków Rampage Leaves 6 Dead, 3 More Bodies Found at Suspect’s Home,” CNN, November 7, 2026, cnn.com.
3. ↑ BBC News, “Six Killed in Krakow ‘Far-Right’ Shooting”; NBC News, “Gunman Kills 6 in ‘Terror Attack’”; Associated Press, “Polish Gunman Who Killed 6 People.”
4. ↑ BBC News, “Six Killed in Krakow ‘Far-Right’ Shooting”; NBC News, “Gunman Kills 6 in ‘Terror Attack’”; Associated Press, “Polish Gunman Who Killed 6 People”; CNN, “After Kraków Rampage Leaves 6 Dead.”
5. ↑ Associated Press, “Polish Gunman Who Killed 6 People”; BBC News, “Six Killed in Krakow ‘Far-Right’ Shooting”; CNN, “After Kraków Rampage Leaves 6 Dead”; Fox News, “Gunman Opens Fire from Moving Car.”
6. ↑ “At Least Six People Killed in Shooting in Poland’s Krakow Main Square,” Al Jazeera, November 7, 2026, aljazeera.com; Associated Press, “Polish Gunman Who Killed 6 People.”
7. ↑ Associated Press, “Polish Gunman Who Killed 6 People”; CNN, “After Kraków Rampage Leaves 6 Dead”; Al Jazeera, “At Least Six People Killed”; BBC News, “Six Killed in Krakow ‘Far-Right’ Shooting.”
8. ↑ BBC News, “Six Killed in Krakow ‘Far-Right’ Shooting”; Associated Press, “Polish Gunman Who Killed 6 People.”
9. ↑ BBC News, “Six Killed in Krakow ‘Far-Right’ Shooting”; NBC News, “Gunman Kills 6 in ‘Terror Attack’.”
10. ↑ Associated Press, “Polish Gunman Who Killed 6 People”; CNN, “After Kraków Rampage Leaves 6 Dead.”
11. ↑ Pope John Paul II, Address to the United Nations Organization (New York, October 5, 1995), nos. 6, 8, vatican.va.
12. ↑ Pope John Paul II, Address to the United Nations Organization, no. 11.
13. ↑ Pope John Paul II, Address to the United Nations Organization, no. 9.
14. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 101, a. 1, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, in New Advent, newadvent.org.
15. ↑ BBC News, “Six Killed in Krakow ‘Far-Right’ Shooting”; Associated Press, “Polish Gunman Who Killed 6 People.”
16. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2239, vatican.va.
17. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 433, vatican.va.
18. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 513.
19. ↑ BBC News, “Six Killed in Krakow ‘Far-Right’ Shooting”; CNN, “After Kraków Rampage Leaves 6 Dead.”
20. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 514.
21. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2297.
22. ↑ Fox News, “Gunman Opens Fire from Moving Car.”
23. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 514.
24. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 513.
25. ↑ Associated Press, “Polish Gunman Who Killed 6 People.”
26. ↑ Associated Press, “Polish Gunman Who Killed 6 People”; CNN, “After Kraków Rampage Leaves 6 Dead.”

Books Cited

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• St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin-English edition, Complete Set (Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2012)
• Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (Doubleday / Image, 2003)