Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter. Neal Pease
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part, to the extent that they had a unified policy, the bishops demanded that their reborn republic grant honored status to the Church and enshrine its precepts in law, while hoping that Rome would leave management of Polish affairs to those who knew what they were doing, namely themselves. Meanwhile, the government, as governments will, sought to stay on good terms with the Church without paying too high a price in obligations or inconvenience, trying to strike the balance of mollifying the faithful without alienating the various constituencies that saw clericalism as a menace.
In fact, the Polish political order contained a surprisingly abundant number of adversaries of the Church, and the highly segmented multiparty systemadopted by the republic accentuated their importance by giving them representation and making them eligible for membership in a series of shaky, revolving-door ruling coalitions. Broadly speaking, the Left and the national minorities combated the country’s predominant religious body, and the Center and Right supported it in roughly equal proportions, with the peasant clubs occupying the middle and acting as makeweights. If, as the saying went, the government of Poland in those days was less Catholic than the Polish nation as a whole, the explanations were that the Polish political class was less pious than other Poles, and that Poland consisted of more than just the Poles. The third of the population made up of peoples not Polish and, for the most part, not Catholic had their own parties that normally voted against the interests of the Church, although for reasons of discretion they tended to let the Polish anticlericals take the lead in such debates. The hostility of the Polish Left toward Catholicism was neither unanimous nor unrestrained. All but the most extreme factions included at least nominal Catholics within their ranks and leadership, or felt the need to mute their attacks on the Church to some degree out of deference to a national institution and reluctance to offend potential Catholic supporters. The main home of political anticlericalism was the benches of the Polish Socialist Party and its breakaway wing that rallied around Józef Piłsudski. Generally suspicious of the Church, these groups favored its separation from the state and the reduction of its influence in society and education, in accord with the standard European Left and liberal agenda. A goodly share of peasant legislators ended up on the same side of the argument as the socialists, usually for different reasons. Subdivided along ideological lines, the peasants gave top priority to land reform and looked hungrily at the ecclesiastical domains. Many of them saw the Church as a villain in this litmus-test issue, and the radical Wyzwolenie (Emancipation) faction produced much of the shrillest clergybaiting of the era. The larger and more moderate Piast Party, the customary bellwether of Polish politics, furnished the key swing votes in disputes over church and state. This scarcely comforted Catholics, for the Piast outlook contained a strong streak of mistrust of the clergy as potential manipulators of the common folk. It favored lay control over education and marriage law, and many of its leading personalities qualified as unbelievers or disgruntled Catholics. Even the devout Wincenty Witos, the Piast chieftain, drew his share of attacks from Church spokesmen over the course of his career.
This left a near-majority Center-Right bloc of reliable political allies of Catholicism in Poland, anchored by the National Democrats. A declared confessional party, the Christian Democracy (Chadecja), which drew inspiration from the landmark encyclical Rerum novarum, never amounted to much in size or mass appeal. Founded only in 1919, the Chadecja struggled to pry adherents away from their habitual affiliation with more established rivals. Furthermore, the Christian Democrats encountered the same obstacles that frustrated their Italian counterparts, the Popolari. In a country where Catholicism was the norm and had at least a foothold in most political camps, the point of an avowedly Catholic party was unclear. Partly for that reason, the Church in Poland, as in Italy, saw no reason to put its eggs in one partisan basket and gave no special blessing to the Chadeks, who were relegated to the status of junior partners of the National Democrats, already identified in the public mind as the main defenders of the Polish faith.3 By default, then, the rightist Endecja of Dmowski assumed the role of standardbearer of the Catholic cause in the early years of the Second Republic despite its heritage of dubious attachment to Christian beliefs and principle. Whatever their other differences, this assortment of conservatives, nationalists, and social Catholics agreed that the Church played an essential role in Polish life and deserved a privileged place within the state.
Just as the Center and Right backed the Church, so the Church backed the Center and Right, out of both philosophical sympathy and the realistic understanding that it would find political friends in those quarters or not at all. Simultaneously flushed by liberation and unnerved by the complexion of a provisional government dominated by Piłsudskiites and socialist anticlericals, the Polish bishops urged voters in the first parliamentary elections of 1919 to elect candidates committed to defense of Christian values, a recommendation that needed no spelling out. The results were only partly successful: the Right gained a plurality, but not sufficient to form a stable cabinet. After that episode, the episcopate reverted to a stance of official non-partisanship, but there was no mistaking the political leanings of the Church and its clergy. The unicameral Constituent Assembly included thirty-two clerics, headed by Archbishop Teodorowicz, nearly all of them dependable supporters of the Right. Outside the confines of the legislature, Bishop Sapieha and Cardinal Dalbor, among other hierarchs, were well known for their inclinations toward the National Democrats, while parish priests tended, if anything, to exceed their superiors in outspoken fealty to the Dmowski party.
The belligerently rightist posture of the interwar Polish Church in the early stages of independence stemmed from a deep sense of embattled vulnerability, in sharp contrast to the imposing national reputation for Catholicity. In part, this reflected the defensiveness in the face of an increasingly secular modern culture that was common to European political Catholicism in those days, but it was also a response to conditions specific to the newly reassembled Poland. From the vantage point of the Church, its legal standing in the country at the dawn of statehood presented a dilemma of unpalatable alternatives. If the laws left over from the partitioning empires remained in force, then they preserved a network of statutes and regulations largely inimical to Catholic teachings and interests. For example, the districts of Poland formerly ruled by Protestant Germany had permitted civil marriage and divorce, and as late as 1922 the Polish bishops felt compelled to issue a pastoral letter condemning the admission of these practices in a Catholic land. On the other hand, if the law of the ancien régime did not apply, then there was no law at all, and the Church forced to depend on the goodwill of the government of the moment. At best, this meant a lack of continuity in official policy toward the Church, as each successive short-lived coalition reinvented the wheel and improvised its own ad hoc approach, in practice leaving much authority in the hands of lackluster, capricious, or corruptible local bureaucrats. At worst, the precariousness of the political balance in Poland lent credence to the fear that the anticlerical Left might gain the upper hand and that its loose talk of a secular state and confiscation of ecclesiastical lands might become reality. The Church was naturally eager to settle the fundamental questions regarding its status on the best terms possible, and as quickly as possible, before the window of opportunity afforded by a Center-Right parliament might close. These anxieties were magnified by a prevalent mentality of persecution, a habit of mistrust of state power carried over from the days of foreign rule. As a result, the political voice of Polish Catholicism and its sympathizers in this interlude was noisy, impatient, unyielding in defense of the rights and prerogatives of the Church, and caustic toward its enemies.4
The first serious test of strength and will concerning the Catholic Church in the civic affairs of the Second Republic arose out of the contentious agrarian question, in the course of horse trading and voting that produced a modest land reform in 1920, during the tenure of a Piast ministry. The peasant deputies who sponsored the measure naturally sought access to a fraction of Church properties for parceling out by the state, but when they pleaded their case to their colleague Archbishop Teodorowicz, they went away empty-handed. Responding for the clerical delegation, Teodorowicz expressed approval of reform in principle, but reminded his petitioners that Church holdings had been diminished sharply over the past century through expropriation and war damage and now made up less than 1 percent of the total area of the country. These professions of poverty failed to impress the peasant politicians, but they reflected the genuine concerns of an institution responsible for the support of forty thousand clergy and lay employees and sensitive to its own economic straits. So far as the Church was concerned, it was entitled to recover