The rise of right-wing populism, which followed the 2010 Smolensk catastrophe and laid the groundwork for the country’s recent shift towards illiberal democracy, coincided with a surge in the use of religious imagery. Catholic symbols thus came to dominate mainstream expressions of national pride and belonging. The conflict around the so-called “Smolensk cross” planted in front of the Presidential Palace in Warsaw and for six months fiercely defended by a group of the late President Kaczyński’s supporters provides an entry point to investigate the populist instrumentalization of Catholic symbols. The Smolensk cross defenders, protesting against the new, democratically elected, liberal president, Bronisław Komorowski, harnessed the symbol to frame an essentially partisan conflict in terms of a Manichean fight between good and evil. At the same time, pro-secularists, who opposed the presence of the cross at the seat of the country’s executive power, subversively hijacked the symbol to unsettle and provoke, enabling a carnivalesque “rite of reversal.”