Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter. Neal Pease
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of Milan, the see of Ratti’s native region, afforded the pontiff the chance to solve his problem and reward his protégé simultaneously. In short order, Ratti received both Milan and a cardinalate, and by June he had exchanged the rigors of Poland for the relative serenity of Lombardy.60
Not content with merely sending Ratti packing back to Italy, Poland pelted him with indignities on his way out to make sure nobody missed the message. Plans to award him an honorary degree from the University of Warsaw were scrapped, and the government took the even more drastic step of refusing to present him with the medal of the Order of the White Eagle, normally given to departing diplomats, despite the warnings of Wierusz-Kowalski that the snub would give great offense to the Vatican. By the time Cardinal Gasparri lodged a complaint with the Polish legation about the ferocity of the vindictive campaign against Ratti, Wierusz-Kowalski was gone, and his replacement gave no ground, coolly answering that the attacks were but an accurate gauge of “the disquiet of the majority of Polish society.”61
The Silesian fiasco took a heavy toll in acrimony and ill will and subjected the relationship between Poland and the papacy to severe, if temporary, strain. On the governmental level, the bruises healed within a few months, with both sides chalking it up to normal diplomatic rough-and-tumble: although they clearly did not see eye to eye on Silesia, other common interests bound them together, and neither could afford to let the partnership dissolve. The Vatican held much keener resentment toward the Polish Church for its behavior in the quarrel. For his part, Achille Ratti never forgot his unhappy last months in Poland and nursed a grudge against his tormentors among the Polish bishops, especially Sapieha and Teodorowicz, until his dying day. In July 1921, in one of his last communications with the Church of Poland, Benedict XV sent the bishops an acerbic, scolding letter that upbraided them for allowing their patriotic sentiments concerning Upper Silesia to lead to words and actions “ill intentioned or . . . disrespectful of the Holy See.” Reminding them of his need to remain impartial, he advised them to show charity toward Catholics of other nationalities and bluntly told them to stay out of politics. Merely bringing up the subject of Poland could make Cardinal Gasparri see red in those days. “Can this be a Catholic episcopate,” he would exclaim, “can this be a Catholic press!”62
A decade later, Cardinal Kakowski wrote that in spite of the bitter unpleasantness of the Silesian affair, the passage of time had shown it to be an act of Providence, for without it the Church would not have gained its “Polish Pope.”63 In January 1922 Benedict XV died in the ninth year of his reign, and the combination of suitable age and prestigious see made plain that the select number of papabili included none other than the freshly minted Cardinal Ratti, not a favorite but a well-positioned dark horse. The prospect of a Ratti papacy unnerved many of the clergy of Poland, but gladdened one of the electors, Kakowski, who had been the main backer of the former nuncio among the Polish episcopate. Much to his agreeable surprise, before his departure for the conclave the new Polish government of Antoni Ponikowski, letting bygones be bygones, informed him that Ratti was its preferred candidate, and upon arriving in Rome he learned that the archbishop of Milan also stood high on the list of France, the principal ally of Warsaw. As the cardinals assembled in the Eternal City and parleyed while awaiting the vote, Kakowski set about lobbying them regarding the sterling qualities of his choice. Countering descriptions of Ratti in the Italian press as a liberal, a term they would have taken as a black mark against him, the Pole assured his colleagues, “Si, he has a liberal heart, but a Catholic head and a holy life.”64
The rise of Ratti’s star prompted Poland to offer some quick amends. Sensing that he stood a decent chance of election as the next pope, the Polish legation to the Vatican recalled one slight he had suffered and put in a rush order for belated conferral of the White Eagle decoration denied him at the end of his nunciature out of pique. Warsaw complied, but as a final comic touch to this complicated story that had begun four years earlier when Benedict XV sent his librarian off to the east, the courier bearing the award to Italy stopped off in Vienna for an unauthorized holiday until almost too late. Once the cargo finally arrived, the Polish minister just managed to dash off and make the hurried presentation to Ratti at literally the last minute before he entered his car to be taken to the conclave.65
Once the voting began, Ratti emerged as a compromise victor in classic fashion. The two leading contenders, Cardinals Gasparri and Merry del Val, representing differing orientations within the Sacred College, canceled each other out in the early balloting while the Polish and French electors worked discreetly to position the archbishop of Milan as a suitable fallback candidate. The deadlock ended when Gasparri threw his votes to the eventual winner, and on February 6, 1922, Achille Ratti became the 256th Vicar of Christ, taking the name Pius out of respect for two recent predecessors.66
The selection of the little-known Ratti as pope startled the world outside the Vatican walls, and much was made of his ties to Poland as observers tried to take his measure. As his identifying feature, they seized on his Polish exposure, exotic by the insular standards of the “captive” papacy of those days, and the Italian press nicknamed him il papa polacco when Karol Wojtyła was but a boy.67 Beaming, his sponsor Cardinal Kakowski declared his nation “delighted” at the news from the Sistine Chapel, and much of it was indeed.68 By and large, Polish opinion turned in favor of the new Pope Ratti just as quickly as it had turned against him over the Silesian question, taking reflected pride in his election and trusting that the country would benefit from it. Most of the press rejoiced that, at last, the Church had a pope who knew Poland, understood its importance to the Catholic world, and would put an end to hostile intrigues in the Vatican.69
Amid the cheers, others were not so sure, and wondered if they were getting more than they bargained for. When a Roman cleric congratulated a Polish colleague on the familiarity of the new pontiff with his country, the Pole answered, “We fear he knows it too well.”70 Along the same lines, no doubt many within the national episcopate worried that they had made an unfortunate choice of enemies by their rough treatment of the former nuncio who now wore the papal ring. The socialist paper Naprzód gloated, “the election of Cardinal Ratti is a disaster for our bishops.”71 As if to ease their fears, two months after his accession to Peter’s throne Pius XI received several Polish hierarchs and demonstratively kissed Archbishop Teodorowicz as a gesture of perdono for the buffets he had suffered at their hands.72 Still, time gave clear evidence that if the pope had forgiven, he had not forgotten, and his two chief Polish clerical antagonists paid a price in thwarted ambitions. Teodorowicz never gained the cardinalate he coveted, and Sapieha had to outlive Ratti to win the red hat that normally accompanied the see of Kraków, and no one had to wonder why.73
Biographers of Pius XI routinely assert that his dramatic experiences as nuncio to Poland impressed him profoundly, set the tone for his subsequent pontificate, and may have persuaded the Sacred College that he was the right man to lead the Church at that moment in history.74 Certainly all of these claims are true to some degree. After all, Poland was Achille Ratti’s introduction to the world outside the cloistered confines of ecclesiastical scholarship, and to the issues that gripped Europe in the years between the wars. At the same time, Pius never strayed far from the agenda of the papacy that had been carved out by his immediate predecessors, and the Polish influence served to emphasize or confirm particular aspects of his policy, not to inspire or originate new departures. For example, commentators never fail to point out his fascination with the possible conversion of the Orthodox east, or his unyielding conviction of the danger posed by Communism, and to chalk these up to his adventures in Poland. In fact, Ratti was scarcely the first pope to feel the strong tug of Russia, and had been sent to Warsaw in the first place largely owing to the lively interest of Benedict XV in opening the Orient to Rome. As for Communism, any pope during the era of Lenin and Stalin would have decried it as satanic anathema, but it is readily understandable that the menace of Bolshevism would have seemed more viscerally urgent to one who had spent August 1920 in the Polish capital awaiting the onslaught of the Red Army. By the same token, popes before Pius XI had urged bishops and clergy to keep their hands out of politics as not in keeping with the priestly office, but he had seen and felt the consequences of clerical partisanship firsthand in Poland, giving him extra incentive to squelch it during his custody over the Church.75