Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter. Neal Pease
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with the temporal power. At the hour of eleven that Sunday morning, Chief of State Józef Piłsudski entered the crowded nave of St. John Cathedral, thus sparing himself the sight of the incongruous nineteenth-century facade that defaced the Gothic antiquity of this oldest church of the capital. He began a procession down the aisle toward the altar, followed in turn by the prime minister, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, and his cabinet; the papal emissary to the country, Monsignor Achille Ratti, who would become pope himself three years later almost to the day; the assembled Catholic hierarchs of restored Poland; and finally the celebrant, the archbishop of Warsaw, Aleksander Kakowski. The solemnities reached their emotional peak when the lawmakers heard a patriotic sermon from one of their own, the Armenian-rite archbishop of Lwów Józef Teodorowicz, the most senior of thirty-two deputies who wore the collar, one-twelfth of the membership of the body. A noted homilist of the hellfire school and never a man given to understatement, to put it delicately, Teodorowicz reminded his audience of their duty to God and country with characteristic vehemence, his words laden with gravity and drama. On this momentous occasion, the speaker surpassed even his own impressive standards of fiery rhetoric, and sympathetic listeners afterwards described the prelate’s oratory as magnificent, divinely inspired. Even some political foes paid grudging tribute to his eloquence, barbed with not altogether complimentary comparisons with Piotr Skarga, the legendary Jesuit royal preacher who had harangued a previous Sejm in the heyday of Poland-Lithuania. As a final flourish, at the close of his exhortation Teodorowicz administered to the legislators their oaths of office in unison. When the liturgy ended, the congregation sang the national hymn “Boże coś Polskę”—“God, protector of Poland”—and then the freshly minted deputies emptied out of the cathedral to walk the length of Krakowskie Przedmieście and New World streets, amid cheering throngs, to the parliament building off of Three Crosses Square. There, later in the day, the primate of Poland, Archbishop Edmund Dalbor of Gniezno-Poznań, consecrated the chamber in the presence of the same collection of ranking worldly dignitaries.1
In its symbolic union of church and state, this set piece of official pageantry neatly echoed the litany of historical axioms that commentators habitually cited—and cite to this day, for that matter—to prove the indomitable Catholicity of the Poles throughout the ages and the natural affinity of Catholicism with Polish patriotism: the conventional dating of the origins of Poland from its baptism in 966, the status of the Catholic primate as interrex in Poland-Lithuania, the miracles of the icon of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, the veneration of the Blessed Virgin as perpetual queen and patroness of Poland, the reputation of the old republic as the easternmost rampart of western Christendom against Turk, Tatar, and schismatic. Indeed, the famous Roman religiosity of Poland was the main thing—in not a few cases, practically the only thing—that many foreigners knew of the country or its people, and so they tended not to subject the time-honored legend of Polonia semper fidelis to rigorous examination. In reporting his initial impression from Warsaw to his superiors at the Vatican Secretariat of State, even the scholarly and matter-of-fact Monsignor Ratti intoned the truism “Dire polacco è dire cattolico”—to say Polish is to say Catholic—and plainly meant it, and only closer acquaintance with the subtleties of his new assignment would teach him not to accept the formula at face value.2 Small wonder, then, that observers more distant assumed the truth of the stereotype and took for granted the Catholic nature of the Second Republic and its readiness to serve the aims of the Church at home and abroad, whether they welcomed or rued the prospect. In the same year 1919, for instance, a French Catholic journalist rejoiced at the revival of Poland as “a political miracle,” stressing that in that land of fabled piety “the interests of Church and State not only coincide, but are actually dependent upon each other.”3 Surveying the perils facing Europe in the wake of a ruinous world war, others called on the newly emancipated Poles to take up once more their historic mission as guardians of religion and civilization. Still three years from full reception into the Church, but already Roman at heart, the English literary eminence G. K. Chesterton warned—accurately, after a fashion, if twenty years too soon—that “a flood threatens the West from the meeting of two streams, the revenge of Germany and the anarchy of Russia” and concluded that Europe had “only one possible dyke against such a flood, which is . . . the might and majesty of Poland,” the “Christian and chivalric shield” of the Occident.4 On the other hand, Polish diplomats arriving in Rome encountered brusque greetings from the government of Italy, which suspected them of being little more than agents of its papal rival across the Tiber. While concerned above all with the unresolved Roman question, Italian officials might have spoken for disapproving liberals and anticlericals everywhere when they complained to the Poles that “you are papists, the only ones in Europe nowadays; on you the Vatican pins all its hopes; you are to be a branch of the church-state and a base for the reborn temporal power of the papacy.”5 “The new born Polish republic,” an American newspaper correspondent told his readers in 1932, not reporting news so much as reinforcing an adage, “is Rome’s most faithful daughter.”6
Proclamations of this sort, celebratory and alarmist alike, proceeded from a common impression of Poland as a Catholic monolith and ultramontane bastion, the idea symbolically expressed and reinforced in the parliamentary mass in St. John’s Cathedral. Yet closer scrutiny of the participants in that ritual might have suggested a more guarded estimate of the influence of Catholicism in the councils of state in the Second Republic. Prime Minister Paderewski was rumored to be a Freemason, an affiliation forbidden by the Church. Chief of State Piłsudski, acclaimed by millions as the hero of the struggle for independence and destined to become the dominant figure of interwar Polish history, was at best a wandering and idiosyncratic Catholic openly despised by more than a few of the prelates in attendance that morning, and his retinue of cronies and devoted associates—the main pool of recruitment for high governmental position in the years to come—was notorious as a hotbed of unbelief and Freemasonry. For his part, within two years Achille Ratti would be hounded from his nunciature in Poland amid a din of furious protests and cries for a rupture of Polish relations with the Holy See; subsequently, as occupant of the throne of St. Peter under the name of Pius XI for the better part of the Second Republic’s free existence, he saw his cherished projects for a historic expansion of Catholicism eastward into the territories of the former Russian empire bitterly opposed and frustrated by the very government in Warsaw that many regarded as the cat’s-paw of the Vatican. To judge from the tenor of their sermons and public statements, the Catholic bishops and clergy of the country saw no grounds for confidence in the future of their Church, but instead saw it as embattled and under siege, even in Poland, beset by inner frailties and vulnerable to powerful foes, including scores of the very men who filled the pews of the cathedral that day. Most of the political parties represented in that first parliament could have been described fairly as anticlerical by instinct or heritage, even without the presence of deputies from the regions largely neither Polish nor Catholic that would be joined to the Second Republic only after prolonged and frequently military dispute. Once the dust settled and boundaries became more or less fixed, if not universally accepted, roughly three-quarters of Poland’s population of twenty-seven million professed themselves Catholics—a lesser percentage than in neighboring Lithuania or Czechoslovakia, and far fewer in number than in Germany, the birthplace of the Reformation and the Kulturkampf—and of those, some three million were Ukrainian Eastern-rite Catholics estranged from their nominal Polish coreligionists by barriers of mutual suspicion and national rivalries. One might well have wondered if this was the same country so often glibly described by supposedly knowledgeable contemporaries as a modern version of the confessional state, republican in form but Catholic in essence.7
In many ways, it was not: the pluralist, polyglot Poland of reality differed from the Poland of pious myth, but the confusion between the two sprang precisely from the fact that the myth held enough truth in it to persuade beholders that it was so. Outsiders were especially prone to this simplifying tendency. Most Poles knew better, but by the same token a great many of them believed that the myth could and should be made so, and thought and acted accordingly, while a great many others feared that attempts might be made to make it so and resolved to take care that it should not, and still others cared little one way or the other but gave the myth lip service to suit their purposes. The potent legend of “Poland ever faithful,” then, operated simultaneously as illusion, as ideal to be approached and possibly realized, as threatening