Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter. Neal Pease
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metropolitan of Halicz-Lwów, was not “the most remarkable of living Slavs,” as some contended, then he was at the least one of the most striking and fascinating figures of modern Christendom.47 Born Roman Aleksander Maria Count Szeptycki in 1865, the son of Polish nobility of the Galician kresy and the grandson of the famed playwright Aleksander Fredro, he adopted Ukrainian identity and the Greek Catholic rite in adulthood, reversing the adage “gente Ruthenus, natione Polonus.” Since 1900 the “Bishop of St. George,” the head of the Uniates of Galicia, he tirelessly presented his church as a foundation for the reconciliation of western and eastern Christianity and did not discourage the opinion that his own personal metamorphosis incarnated the ecumenical spirit: “I am like St. Paul, who became . . . all things to all men so as to save all.”48 Physically imposing and full-bearded, Sheptyts’kyi possessed the visage and thundering moral certitude of an Old Testament prophet, and he fiercely guarded his Ukrainian and Greek Catholic flock against the pretensions of the Latin Poles. He had championed the cause of west Ukrainian independence at the end of the world war, and after Poland captured eastern Galicia by force of arms in 1919 he held himself aloof from the Polish episcopate and frequently challenged the government in Warsaw, acting virtually as the chaplain of a church and a people under foreign occupation. A complex blend of sweeping vision, iron will, and inexhaustible self-righteousness, Sheptyts’kyi had a genius for exasperating all the various rulers of his metropolitanate from the Habsburgs to Stalin and Hitler, and the Polish Second Republic would prove no exception.
Aside from the shortage of brilliance at its top, the Polish Church faced the same daunting task that challenged Poland in every facet of its existence: that of welding itself into a coherent whole out of the disjointed fragments of the partitioning empires. Superimposed upon the intersection of three national episcopates, the rebuilt country was bequeathed a hodgepodge of ecclesiastical structures and laws that had been designed to meet the requirements of the obliterated prewar world and now made no sense. Diocesan boundaries no longer agreed with the radically altered state frontiers, stranding millions of Catholics on both sides of the Polish borders under the unwanted jurisdiction of suddenly “foreign” bishops, and leaving absurd disparities of territory and population in the residual organization of the Church on Polish soil. The confusion extended even to the residence of the primacy, claimed alike by Gniezno-Poznań on the grounds of tradition and by Warsaw by virtue of the status of its incumbent as primate of antebellum Russian Poland. This argument dragged on until 1925, debated by canon lawyers and historians, until the Vatican settled the matter by splitting the difference: both archbishops kept their primatial dignity, and Dalbor of Gniezno-Poznań retained his honorific title as primate of Poland, but without any real authority over Kakowski of Warsaw. However, no curial decree could so easily undo the legacy of twelve decades of tripartite separation that had produced significant disparities of ecclesiastical circumstances and culture in the various sectors of the Polish lands. Catholicism and the clergy enjoyed high prestige and influence in the former German and Russian zones for their role in the nationality wars of the previous century, but Berlin had not plundered the wealth or landholdings of the Church, while tsarist repression and expropriations had depleted the eastern dioceses. In political terms, western Poland was the heart of Endecja country, known as home to legions of rightist Catholic laymen and pugnacious priests like Fr. Adamski, battle-hardened in the forge of the Kulturkampf and the resistance against Germanification. Spared the lash of persecution, the Church in the Austrian south had changed the least since the partitions, its noble, conservative hierarchs reigning over an intact collection of extensive, though hardscrabble, Galician lands. Not even the passage of the twenty coming years of independence would suffice to complete the integration of the reunited branches of the Polish Church, or to efface entirely its acquired regional differences of custom and psychology.49
The political transformation also thrust Polish Catholicism into legal limbo. In the absence of a concordat, what rules defined the relationship of Poland with the Holy See, or guaranteed the rights of the Church within the republic? Until Warsaw crafted its own constitution and laws, did the religious legislation of the old regimes remain in force in their respective jurisdictions, including the German and Russian statutes Catholics regarded as inimical and discriminatory? Or did the Church simply stand extra legem, hostage to the goodwill and arbitrary whim of each rotating cabinet and every petty local functionary? Such uncertainties nagged at Catholic opinion, especially in light of the prominence of Piłsudskiites and the Left in the initial interwar governments.
MAP 1. Diocesan organization of Poland, 1918–25. Map by Donna G. Genzmer, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Copyright © 2009 Board of Regents of University of Wisconsin System
While Poland might be semper fidelis, its Catholics saw reasons for worry on all sides. Already damaged by nineteenth-century confiscations, the material condition of the Church had suffered further buffeting by wholesale wartime destruction of its buildings and properties. Perhaps most of the faithful and their clergy believed, with varying degrees of urgency and intonation, in the mounting threat posed by Communism, Freemasonry, and the Jews, possibly joined in unholy alliance. Others focused on corrosive shortcomings found within their own ranks. Thinkers fretted over a growing religious indifference among males and the embarrassing intellectual poverty of Polish Catholicism; from the pulpits, priests chastised their parishioners for a host of moral failings attributed to the degrading influence of foreign rule and the iniquities of modern life: drunkenness, petty dishonesty, impiety.50 Some went so far as to dismiss the famed Polish devotion as little more than a national tic, a communal display of obligatory sanctimoniousness. When a Pole removed his hat when passing a church, sniffed one of the pope’s men at the Warsaw nunciature, “it is not a sign of respect for the house of the Lord, but a way of saying: see, I am Polish.”51
Still, the formidable list of troubles and burdens did not overshadow the greater sense of satisfaction that the deliverance of Poland, the unexpected prize of a terrible war, had fulfilled one of the fondest longings of the Catholic world, offering hope for an anxious age and proof of the workings of Providence in human history. As the new year 1920 dawned, Benedict XV fulfilled a promise made by his predecessor twice removed, sending to Warsaw a candle once set aside by Pius IX to await the return of a free Poland.52 To those who believed, faith and perseverance had won their reward, and God had redeemed his people out of bondage once again.
2
Il Papa Polacco
The Making of Pius XI, 1918–1922
AS THE FIRST WORLD WAR ENTERED its last months in 1918, the Vatican knew only two things for certain regarding the future of the Catholic Church in central and eastern Europe: that the antebellum order would be transformed beyond recognition, and that some sort of sovereign Poland would return to the map after its lengthy absence. Indeed, thanks to the initiative of the German and Habsburg emperors, a Polish kingdom already existed on paper, even if its independence was largely a fiction. Even at that late date, everything else concerning the prospects for the Roman mission in that zone of the continent remained shrouded in confusion. Above all, the widening revolution in Russia and the incipient breakup of the farflung realm of the tsars both freed and threatened several Catholic peoples while holding out the dazzling promise of a historic expansion of the Church into the Orthodox east. Unsure of its best approach to this combination of danger and opportunity, the papal state counted on the new Poland as its natural base of activity in that turbulent region. So when the Polish bishops requested the posting of an apostolic visitor to their theoretically restored country after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk certified the Russian surrender, the Holy See happily obliged: not only was the suggestion a useful idea on its own merits, but the new man could also serve as the eyes and ears of the pope in the European borderlands. The Vatican functionaries took the appointment seriously as an important decision bearing on the development of the Church in Poland and other formerly Russian territories, although few could have suspected just how important it would turn out to be; surely none divined that the choice would identify the eventual successor to Benedict XV and forcefully alter the destiny of Catholicism in the twentieth century.