Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter. Neal Pease
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have missed the cautionary hint that the national fate had passed into unreliable hands.11 In fact, the whole country knew that most of the clergy turned up their noses at Piłsudski, sometimes on grounds of policy, more often on a more visceral level as the embodiment, so they imagined, of all they found intolerable. In keeping with his status as foremost episcopal irreconcilable, Archbishop Teodorowicz above all flaunted his loathing for Piłsudski, who repaid the sentiment with interest and made sure that army intelligence kept the Armenian-rite pastor under close watch.12 On this count too, Cardinal Kakowski stood out as the exception among Polish archprelates for his ability to find redeeming qualities in the chief of state that remained well hidden from most of his colleagues in holy orders.13
For his part, once he got his bearings Nuncio Ratti had little difficulty deciding that he much preferred Piłsudski to Teodorowicz and his Endek coterie among the bishops. In the first place, the papal envoy concluded, somewhat to his surprise, that the Polish strongman did not deserve his reputation for irreligiosity. Piłsudski kept to himself his spiritual and philosophical convictions, such as they were, inviting all manner of speculation, and his grasp of theology and Catholic doctrine lacked sophistication, to put it gently. Once asked by a priest about the persistent rumor that he was a Freemason, he emphatically avowed his refusal on principle to have anything to do with the secret brotherhood, not for the reasons a catechist would have approved, but on the less-than-categorical grounds that he could not belong in good conscience to an international fraternity that might expose the interests of Poland to foreign manipulation—a description that, after all, might just as easily have applied to the Church.14 Still, some spied within Piłsudski, beneath his wayward and lax exterior, a sort of noble savage of untutored piety. The battle-hardened chief of state had a soft spot for Church spectacle and lore that touched on national themes or his Lithuanian boyhood, and Ratti and his lieutenants took careful note when Piłsudski shed tears at the shrine of Ostrabrama in Vilna, or received the nuncio’s blessing “with a lovely, even devout demeanor,” or attributed the revival of Poland to the intervention of the saints.15 All in all, the Warsaw nunciature reported to Rome, despite his notoriety, Piłsudski at heart was a religious man whose heterodoxy had been exaggerated by his enemies and magnified by the reflected real sins of his entourage, written off as an unsavory crew of flunkies, atheists, Freemasons, anticlericals, and apostates, for the most part rogues of easy virtue.16 However, they took an indulgent view of Piłsudski’s own marital peccadilloes, treating them as the indiscretions of an errant but well-meaning soul. Upon the death of his estranged uncanonical wife in 1921, the nunciature did no more than whisper to the Vatican the hope that the chief of state might use the occasion to “mend the condition of his private life,” as Chargé Pellegrinetti delicately phrased it, and when Piłsudski wed his mistress two months later, Cardinal Kakowski was on hand to assist in the nuptials.17
In addition, Piłsudski satisfied Ratti that he meant no harm to the Church. By this time he had already turned his back on the Left, having ridden the red streetcar of socialism only as far as the independence stop, in the trenchant image attributed to him. Furthermore, he served notice that he lacked enthusiasm for the agenda of the anticlerical wing of his constituency. In March 1919, speaking with an interviewer in his chambers, a reproduction of a Raphael Madonna hanging on the wall, Piłsudski dwelt on the need to respect the power and prestige of Catholicism in his country and declared that “we cannot think in Poland, as yet, of a separation of the State and Church—as in France.”18 Taking the cue, the Piłsudskiite press echoed the call for good relations with the Vatican and peace with the Church at home. No matter that this policy was largely motivated by a pragmatic concern not to drive the Catholic faithful into the arms of the National Democrats, the practical effect remained the same: Piłsudski wanted a modus vivendi with the Roman confession, and would restrain the militant anticlericals within his camp.19 Indeed, in certain crucial respects his politics suited Rome far better than those of Endecja and its ecclesiastical claque, above all his more expansive notion of the nature of the Polish state and its mission in the kresy of Belorussia and Ukraine.
Not least, Ratti and Piłsudski simply liked each other. According to Ratti, the improbable friendship between the future pope and the man the Polish clergy loved to hate dated from an official reception in 1919, when he deftly rescued Piłsudski from an awkward interlude prompted by the tactless remark of a foreign diplomat. Touched by the gesture, Piłsudski took the Italian monsignor into his confidence, and over time the cordiality ripened into a lifelong mutual esteem.20 This was a case of like attracting like, for each recognized in the other a kindred spirit, a similar mix of temper, bullheadedness, and autocratic spirit. “Ha un carattere difficile, come il mio,” Ratti said of the Polish strongman, and Piłsudski is supposed to have returned the wry compliment in almost the same words.21 When Ratti and his lieutenants looked at Piłsudski, they saw a Polish Garibaldi, a flawed but charismatic man of qualities, capable of broad vision and great deeds.22
Out of this tangled knot of clashing politics and personalities emerged two distinct factions that vied for control over the direction of the interwar Polish Church in its formative years. On one side stood Ratti and, by extension, Benedict XV, determined to press the agenda of the Holy See. Usually they could count on the support of Cardinal Kakowski, deferential to the papacy, well disposed toward the nuncio and not at all offended by his bet on Piłsudski, and somewhat at odds with the prevailing rightward sentiment within the national episcopate. At every step this alliance ran into stubborn opposition from the circle of Endecja partisans who dominated their fellow bishops, especially the Galician duo of Teodorowicz and Sapieha, who held sway over the primate, Cardinal Dalbor. These balky prelates resisted Ratti as the agent of an unwanted degree of Roman influence over their Church. Apart from a natural concern for turf, they possessed a certain skepticism of the intentions of the Vatican, magnified by lingering suspicions that the Curia nursed a special solicitude for Germany, the most dangerous enemy of Poland in National Democratic eyes. The evident willingness of the nuncio to make common cause with Piłsudski only confirmed their worries that he was up to no good.23 The fact that this struggle between the Vatican and the nationalist leadership of the Polish hierarchy took place under the obligatory cover of discretion and courtesy—at least until its very public final stages—did not reduce the intensity of the contest that defined and ultimately undid the Ratti mission to Poland.
Among other points, the two contending ecclesiastical parties disagreed on the need for a Polish concordat, the centerpiece of papal policy in the country. Following his instructions from Rome, Ratti lost no time in attempting to prepare the ground for a treaty between Warsaw and the Holy See, prodding the preoccupied ministers of the Second Republic to pay attention to the project and move it higher up their crowded list of priorities. Cardinal Kakowski dutifully went along.24 However, Teodorowicz and Sapieha flatly rejected the line of the nunciature, arguing that any concordat would entail burdensome concessions to the civil power, that the Church stood a good chance of having its essential desiderata written into the forthcoming state constitution free of cost, and that—in so many words—the Vatican should leave these matters to the Polish bishops and mind its own business. In 1919 they prevailed on a number of their episcopal brethren to draft a letter to Pope Benedict in this very spirit, forcing the nuncio to squelch the initiative as directly contrary to the will of the pontiff. This combination of governmental distraction and dissent within the ranks of the hierarchy itself prevented any meaningful progress. By 1920 the pope had accepted the bishops’ advice to await passage of the constitution, and Ratti departed Poland with the concordat still in embryo.25
The nuncio also parted company with the Polish bishops on matters of foreign policy relating to differing visions of the proper role of Poland in the eastern marches. Because Ratti continued to function as the Vatican’s man in all reaches of the former Russia, not just Poland, he retained the Roman tendency to regard the Second Republic as certainly the foundation of east European Catholicism, but by no means the whole edifice. He took seriously his responsibilities as papal legate to the emerging polities of the area, although Lithuania kept him at arm’s length out of fear that he might harbor a bias toward rival Warsaw, while the unfolding revolution in Russia—the most cherished target of Vatican missionary ambition—thwarted his aim of visiting that country and forced him to grapple at long distance