Over - And Understatements In Bishop Czaja’s Pastoral Letter To His Diocesans.

The Catholic Church is the largest religious faction in Poland, the country being organisationally divided into church dioceses governed by bishops. The letter by the bishop of Opole, Andrzej Czaja may be read in more than one way. One of them is the bona fide (i.e., good faith) one, the reading which assumes his sincerity, presumably the one that had been intended by the author for his diocesans to use. The other is less cooperative and sees some cases of over- and understatements in the text. This can be linguistically studied using the pragmatic theories of H.P. Grice and G.N. Leech. The present paper addresses both these readings as they fit into a global picture. Every lay person is to choose which facts to consider and the way he or she will read them. The darker general version was presented recently by Rev. Adam Boniecki MI and by Andrzej K. Sidorski. In the interview he gave to Tygodnik Powszechny1, Boniecki speaks about events he witnessed in the Vatican and in Poland, concerning the last three Popes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]