Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter. Neal Pease
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reached with the Holy See as part of a comprehensive settlement of church-state matters, a concordat, in so many words. In effect, round one had gone to the Church, as most of the rounds would.5
In the meantime, the Constituent Assembly spent two years carrying out its primary responsibility, the drafting and approving of a republican constitution, which was passed in March 1921. By its nature, the debate over the religious clauses to be written into the document opened the parliamentary floor to expression of the most fundamental and emotional opinions, pro and con, regarding the role and legacy of Catholicism in Poland. For all the spirited give-and-take of the exchanges, the outcome was predictable. The Center-Right bloc in the chamber was sufficient to have its way and fend off the impassioned calls of the anticlerical Left for the separation of church and state. In an era when separation smacked of irreligion and war against the Church, such a prospect struck the majority as contrary to national tradition and unthinkable.6 With the option of the secular state removed from the table, the meaningful discussion focused on working out the nuances of the inevitable official recognition of the Roman confession. The Church opened the bidding with hopes for establishment or, barring that, for acknowledgment as the “predominant religion” of Poland, but ended by having to settle for a compromise formula borrowed from the Napoleonic concordat of 1801.7 In its final wording, the key Article 114 declared that the Catholic faith, “being the religion of the overwhelming majority of the nation, occupies in the state a leading position among religions endowed with equal rights.” This first-among-equals language disappointed some within the clerical camp, but the fine print of the measure secured several crucial privileges for the Church that made plain that if all religions in Poland were equal, then one was more equal than the others. In the first place, by singling out Catholicism for specific mention, the document automatically set it apart from other creeds. Second, the state conceded that the Church, and the Church alone, “govern[ed] itself by its own laws” (własnymi prawami), whereas all other churches would be subject to the dictates of civil law. This provision was meant to safeguard the autonomy of the Church and to limit the scope of governmental interference in its activity. Finally, the constitution obliged the republic to reach a concordat with the Holy See to provide the basis of the coexistence of church and state. While the concordat might well have turned out much as it did in any event, by thus committing itself in advance to conclude a treaty, Warsaw yielded a certain edge in the haggling of negotiation to the Vatican, which could afford to drive a hard bargain in the knowledge that at some point Poland would have to make a deal.8 In sum, although the Church had not gained all it sought from the “March constitution,” it still had done well for itself. While necessarily vague, the basic law of the Second Republic treated the Church with dignity and respect, did nothing to foreclose or impede any of its aspirations to prominence in the country, and encouraged it to press forward to put flesh on the constitutional bones by completing the legal and political agenda that had been successfully begun.
Since the constitution had been regarded as the necessary precondition of a concordat, its adoption temporarily revived the topic of the treaty that would represent the next, and presumably final, stage of the normalization of church-state relations. Out of different motives, both Warsaw and the Vatican were impatient for the speedy and definitive resolution of these matters that only a concordat could provide. So far as the republic was concerned, the constitution had raised more questions than it had answered by continuing a pattern that had emerged of putting off hard decisions on ecclesiastical issues until a concordat settled them for good, and the time had come to pin down the Church on its rights and obligations. For its part, Rome would stay nervous so long as Poland stayed theoretically free to deal with the Church as it pleased, so the bond of a treaty could come none too soon for its liking. In 1921 the Polish Ministry of Religious Confessions and Public Education began a series of meetings and consultations aimed at resuming talks toward a concordat, but the project made little progress over the next three years, stalled by frequent cabinet changes and, perhaps, intermittent pique with this or that element of Vatican policy.9 The delays and snags made both the Polish bishops and the government testy. On several occasions in 1922, Primate Dalbor and the episcopate peppered Warsaw with sharp protests against its handling of the Church, accusing it of dragging its feet in undoing the inherited discriminatory legislation that left the status of Catholicism the “worst of all confessions” in the land.10 Cardinal Dalbor went so far as to complain improbably that so long as these statutes remained on the books, the legal standing of the Church in Poland was worse than in any other country save Soviet Russia. These hyperbolic tactics tried the patience of the Polish Foreign Ministry, which laid blame for the lack of headway toward a concordat on the demanding and contrary stance of the episcopate itself.11
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