Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter. Neal Pease
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the nominee for the Polish errand reached such exalted and surprising heights, the tale of his selection became the stuff of minor legend, often retold in ecclesiastical circles. According to the story, either Cardinal Gasparri, more likely his sostituto within the Secretariat of State, or even a transient Polish cleric suggested the name of the little-known prefect of the Vatican Library as a suitable candidate. This unconventional recommendation intrigued Pope Benedict, who had occasionally consulted his resident scholar on the historical background of the war and its related issues and had formed a good opinion of his judgment and abilities. In April 1918, the pontiff offered the librarian the embassy to Poland. Startled, the designee asked for time to consider, hesitant to accept an assignment so remote from his experience and expertise. The very next day, Benedict summoned the reluctant bibliophile for a second audience. Well, now you have had a chance to think it over, the pope is supposed to have said—“When do you leave for Poland?”1 Thus, according to lore, did Monsignor Achille Ambrogio Damiano Ratti, the bookish sixty-year-old son of a Lombard silk factory manager, take the first tentative step down a remarkable path that led him through an eventful three-year Polish nunciature to the see of St. Peter.
Before its unlikely climax, his career had prospered in obscurity, far removed from the fast track toward the upper reaches of Church government. Following ordination, Ratti had settled into the leisurely routine of academics, making methodical advancement until arriving at the prefecture of the Vatican Library in 1914, seemingly having attained the limit of his ambitions. His learned demeanor and duties masked a steely and imperious temperament, qualities that came to the fore only after the subsequent and ultimate promotion that released him forever from the obligation to play the loyal subordinate. That lay in the future; for the time being, the posting to Poland involved more than enough difficulty and complexity to challenge even the most seasoned papal diplomat, let alone a neophyte. At bottom, the Vatican had no idea what to make of the chaotic picture in the European east, or how best to pursue its own interests. Contending factions within and around the Curia advocated a variety of incompatible policies, ranging from open reliance on the Poles as the flagbearers of the Catholic cause in their vicinity to warnings that precisely this was the surest way to hamper the work of the Church in Russia and the kresy by aggravating old antagonisms and resentments toward Poland. In its initial conception, the Ratti mission had no clearer or more urgent mandate than the vague instruction simply to take stock of the situation and sort through the bewildering alternatives.2 The mediation of Archbishop Eugenio Pacelli, the nuncio in Munich, procured the imprimatur of the German authorities, who still held sway in that theater for the moment, and by the summer of 1918 Ratti had been installed as apostolic visitor to Poland and Lithuania, resident in Warsaw but responsible for all the lands of the crumbling Russian imperium.3
The Ratti sojourn was originally devised as a reconnoitering expedition of a zone in flux possibly lasting only a few months, and the pope had told him to plan on returning home by Christmas.4 His task took on a different, less improvisatory character once the war ended, sweeping away the German sphere of conquest and replacing the puppet Poland with the Second Republic—genuinely independent and presumably there to stay—but answering little else Rome wanted to know. To reflect the changed circumstances, after the official papal recognition of the new Polish state in 1919 Ratti assumed the title of full nuncio to Poland, the first since 1796, and an accompanying elevation to the rank of archbishop. In corresponding fashion, he began to focus the bulk of his attention on Polish affairs while yet keeping a watchful eye on developments in the east. This somewhat narrower definition of his job hardly left Ratti with time on his hands, for the task of rehabilitating the Polish Church and placing its relationship with the Warsaw government on acceptable footing more than sufficed to keep him busy. In the eyes of the Vatican, achievement of these goals required a satisfactory concordat above all, and the Secretariat of State instructed Ratti to regard preparing the groundwork for such a treaty as his top priority. At the same time, he was asked to pull off a tricky political balancing act, on the one hand coaxing the Polish bishops to sacrifice some Church properties to the popular demand for land reform, on the other doing all in his power to protect the economic standing of a Church that had been bled of much of its wealth during the past century of persecution and war.5
After decades spent keeping company with books, Nuncio Ratti eagerly tackled the challenge of his new responsibilities in stimulating and exotic foreign surroundings. His official dispatches and private letters to friends and family mixed matters official with chatty observations on Polish customs and conditions and a touristic delight in sights and the odd detail. He found the country endearing and maddening at the same time. He never ceased to laud the simple piety of Poles, although he worried that a national weakness for ostentatious public religiosity did the Church there no credit. At first astonished and made uneasy by the multitudes of Jews he encountered in Polish cities, he adjusted soon enough and in later years drew on the experiences of his nunciature to undergird his relatively enlightened views on the Jewish question. Impatient by nature, he fumed regularly over the proverbial Polish inefficiency that combined with the messy aftermath of war to hamper his communications with Rome and multiply the already considerable frustrations of dealing with the curial bureaucracy. However, from first to last the Polish episcopate itself caused the nuncio his worst headaches. Despite his declarations to the Polish bishops that he thought of himself as one of them, holding the interests of their country close to his heart, the fractious and intensely political inclinations of the Catholic hierarchy of Poland took him by unpleasant surprise, complicated his work until the day he returned to Italy, and smoldered in his memory as long as he lived.6
The nub of the problem Ratti faced was that a solid majority of the Polish episcopate backed the National Democratic brand of rightist politics, putting them at odds with much of the governing establishment of the country and the preference of the Vatican itself. Shortly after the armistice Benedict XV had urged bishops in the new states of Europe to avoid embroiling the Church in partisan controversies, and to see that their priests followed suit;7 undeterred, the Polish clergy had wasted little time confirming the impression that it meant to act as a virtual auxiliary of Endecja. During the parliamentary elections of 1919, much of the Catholic press and priesthood had endorsed the Dmowski party, sometimes directly from the pulpit, and eleven ecclesiastics sat among the Endek delegation in the Sejm, swelling its plurality in the legislature. While technically nonpartisan, the leader of this bloc of rightist cleric-deputies, as well as the loudest, was the fiery Archbishop Teodorowicz, who described politics as a sort of holy war against those he suspected of wishing to turn the Second Republic into a “pagan state.”8 He and his close friend Bishop Sapieha pressed these ideas upon Cardinal Dalbor, the likeminded but less forceful primate. Together this trio exercised what the nunciature disapprovingly called a dittatura over the episcopate, converting their own sympathy for National Democracy into all-but-declared policy of the Polish Church—although, to be sure, the “dictatorship” largely amounted to herding the bishops in the direction most of them already wanted to go.9 This left Cardinal Kakowski as the odd man out among the ranking hierarchs of Poland, in more ways than one. The archbishop of Warsaw declined invitations to stand for election on the Endecja ticket, and before long observers began to note his tendency to hold the Right at arm’s length and to maintain some distance from the politics of the Teodorowicz-Sapieha-Dalbor triumvirate. In fact, the isolation of Kakowski within the episcopate resulted from more than mere differences in partisan allegiance. During the protracted dispute over the primacy of Poland, most of the clergy sided with Dalbor and Gniezno againstWarsaw and closed ranks against the bishop of the capital. Given a cold shoulder by his colleagues, Kakowski still retained the confidence of the Vatican, which clearly preferred him to Dalbor and treated him as the first dignitary of the Polish Church in all but name.10
The rightward leanings of the clergy went hand in hand with its collective distaste for the charismatic Józef Piłsudski, both the most popular and the most reviled public figure in the country, who had assumed the rank of chief of state in the provisional government of the young republic. The dignity of high office failed to persuade Polish churchmen that the man they had grown accustomed to condemn as a leftist highwayman of low morals had suddenly become any more acceptable or respectable. When Cardinal Dalbor, speaking for the Church, addressed Piłsudski directly from the pulpit at a ceremonial mass in 1919, stressing