Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter. Neal Pease
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is both yes and no. The announcement apparently came as a complete and unwelcome surprise to Nuncio-Commissioner Ratti, who politely but firmly remonstrated with the cardinal for having handed down his edict without consultation or warning, as did Gasparri.47 On the other hand, Bertram had sent a number of signals to the Secretariat of State that he meant to assert his prerogatives as ordinary to pacify the turmoil in his churches, and Rome had voiced no objection, not realizing that he would act in such high-handed and one-sided fashion. Although Bertram had done the Curia no favor by exposing it to this unexpected embarrassment, the Vatican chose to put the best face on the matter, loath to undercut the archbishop of Breslau in the normal exercise of his valid authority. While privately conveying his reservations to the German prelate, Gasparri defended his right to enact the edict and allowed it to stand, doggedly insisting that Bertram had conducted himself as the “Priest-Pastor of all.”48
The Bertram decree stirred a hornet’s nest of protest in Poland, directed above all at the offending German archbishop, but also against Ratti and the Holy See as having been either complicit in the outrage or negligent in failing to prevent it. The incident swiftly reawakened all of the old Polish grievances against the Vatican, and even the pillars of Catholicism in the country gave way to expressions of shock and dismay. The press of all parties raised such a furor that the foreign minister made apologies to Benedict XV.49 However, the Warsaw government could barely contain its own wrath and sense of betrayal. Poland implored the pope to countermand Bertram, while official circles buzzed in private with rumors of spies, collusion, payoffs, and Germanophilia in Rome.50 The liveliest and most ominous reaction arose in the Sejm, where nationalists and anticlericals joined in denouncing the deed. The chamber echoed with calls to expel Ratti or break off relations with the Holy See before settling for demanding the separation of Upper Silesia from the Archdiocese of Breslau. The temper of the body was such that the highest ranking deputy-cleric, Archbishop Teodorowicz, stood not to defend the Vatican, but to pin the blame for the injustice squarely on Ratti, and to announce that the Polish episcopate had called on Pope Benedict to undo the offending order.51
From the midst of the storm, Ratti alerted Rome to the urgent need “to calm the Poles and restore their trust in the Holy See and the nuncio,” but already he had lost the ability to do any of those things.52 He no longer enjoyed the confidence of the Second Republic or of Polish public opinion, despite his celebrated valor at the Battle of Warsaw only three months earlier. Crowds staged hostile demonstrations outside his residence in the capital, where he went into virtual hiding. Among the prelates of the Polish Church the balance now swung in favor of the nationalist bishops, who, like Teodorowicz, never had much use for Ratti, his policies, or his alignment with Piłsudski. Rome stood by its beleaguered emissary, insisting that he had acted properly, but soon began a diplomatic retreat to extricate him from an impossible situation. Assuring Ratti that he had done no wrong, Gasparri relieved him of his Silesian assignment and quickly sent a substitute, Fr. Giovanni Ogno Serra, to take his place.53 These reverses stunned and wounded the nuncio, who felt illused and misunderstood. The pope tried to console him with words that revealed his own exasperation with Ratti’s newly inhospitable hosts: the Poles, he wrote, were “fickle” and “suspicious to excess,” guilty of ingratitude to the Holy See, “which has done so much for them.” Approached at the time by a Polish spokesman about Silesia, Benedict fixed him with a wintry smile and sighed, “Yes, I know, you want the coal.”54
Scrambling to salvage something from the wreckage, Cardinal Gasparri and the Polish minister to the Vatican, Wierusz-Kowalski, tried to repair the damage, but their efforts managed only to compound the predicament. The cardinal secretary of state agreed that Bertram had stepped out of line and that his decree should be tactfully annulled, and suggested a compromise: all Silesian clergy were to refrain from participating in the plebiscite campaign, and churches were to be off limits to political activity of any sort. Out of his depth, Wierusz-Kowalski somehow convinced himself that the deal served his country’s interest.55 Accordingly, in late December Fr. Ogno Serra, Ratti’s freshly installed replacement in Silesia, issued the new formula. Of course, from the Polish standpoint, this simply made a bad situation worse. As evidently every Pole besides Wierusz-Kowalski readily grasped, they needed fewer restrictions on priestly political agitation, not more, so the hasty revision merely deepened their dissatisfaction with the Vatican.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Wincenty Witos asked the Polish Church to intercede with the pope, and in early December the bishops dispatched their colleagues Sapieha and Teodorowicz as a delegation to the Vatican to vent the displeasure of the episcopate and, apparently, to seek the recall of Nuncio Ratti. Sapieha was a logical choice, well connected in Rome and seasoned in its ways dating from his youthful service as chamberlain to Pius X. However, sending Teodorowicz on a delicate diplomatic errand was like sending gasoline to put out a fire. His blood up, the Armenian-rite pastor barged through the Vatican like a maddened bull, leaving a trail of disarray and hard feelings that hurt the standing of Poland with the Curia more than helped it.56 Granted an audience with Benedict shortly after the new year, the Polish bishops explained their country’s objection to the Ogno-Serra declaration, much to the surprise of the pontiff, who informed his equally startled visitors that Minister Wierusz-Kowalski had happily assented to that very plan. After the confusion was sorted out, the pope relented to the extent of permitting Silesian clergy to take part in public political meetings not on church grounds. Sapieha and Teodorowicz returned to Poland believing they had attained at least some of the goals of their mission, but unsettled by the prevalent mood of sympathy for Germany and skepticism toward Poland they had encountered in Rome. Their qualms deepened a few days later when Cardinal Gasparri, after consulting with Ratti’s replacement in Silesia, instructed them that the new policy would go into effect only insofar as it was consistent with the original Ogno-Serra design, which was to say not at all.57 The Sapieha-Teodorowicz embassy had come to nothing, the latest casualty of a series of snafus within the Curia or, as the latter feared, of a deliberate attempt to help Germany win the Silesian plebiscite.
Both bishops shot off letters of protest to Benedict XV, and Teodorowicz’s epistle trespassed outside the bounds of expected courtesy. Furious, he flatly accused Gasparri of dealing in deception and bad faith on the Silesian question, citing as evidence fragments of internal Polish foreign ministry correspondence shown him by Wierusz-Kowalski while in Rome. These charges scarcely endeared Teodorowicz or his case for Silesia to the Vatican, and especially the cardinal secretary of state. After pointed delay, Gasparri delivered a cold response to Sapieha, tersely defending the conduct and good intentions of the Holy See and adding that he would not deign to reply to the Armenian archbishop who had impugned his integrity.58
As it happened, fortune or judicious leak provided Gasparri with a measure of revenge that embarrassed Teodorowicz and ended the Roman tenure of Wierusz-Kowalski. Within weeks, the news got out that the Polish envoy to the Vatican had divulged confidential state documents to a private citizen, the archbishop, who in turn had passed on the contents to a foreign power, according to one way of looking at it. These revelations touched off yet another uproar in the Sejm, where both men came under fire for their indiscretions. As a consequence, the hapless Wierusz-Kowalski got the sack and a ticket to a less demanding post, while deputy Teodorowicz had to endure a very public hazing from the benches of the anticlerical Left, a sport encouraged by the Piłsudski camp, which saw a chance to score points at the expense of their adversary. In retort, the excitable Fr. Adamski asked how anyone could expect the Vatican to want to see Upper Silesia “toss[ed] . . . into the jaws of the Jewish-socialist Polish government.” This farcical affair was, as one of Ratti’s staff noted, a tempest in a teapot, for neither Wierusz-Kowalski nor Teodorowicz had meant or done real harm to Polish interests; still, he admitted, he did not grieve unduly to see the turbulent archbishop get a taste of comeuppance, deserved in this instance or not.59
When Poland lost the Upper Silesian plebiscite in March 1921, as prelude to a distasteful eventual partition of the province, Ratti made a handy scapegoat for the disappointment, and public opinion and officialdom alike called for his head. Convinced that his scholar-turned-diplomat had performed well in a difficult and sensitive assignment, Pope Benedict at first resisted the demands for his ouster, warning the Poles that if they forced him to bring the embattled nuncio home, he would refuse to