Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter. Neal Pease
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prevailed at the time, and lingers to this day, that Benedict’s statements of evenhandedness thinly masked his true preference for Germany and Austria. The case for papal partiality is often crudely put, and evidence to the contrary may be adduced. Striving to act as mediator, Benedict scrupulously avoided endorsement of either side or its aims, to the dissatisfaction of all parties: Germans complained of him as the Franzosenpapst just as the French maligned him as the “Boche pope.” Nevertheless, the Central Powers cardinals had voted as a bloc for his election at the conclave of 1914, backing him as the candidate most likely to show sympathy for the cause of their governments in the great struggle just begun.13 For that matter, any pope would have had ample reason to look askance at an alliance consisting of Orthodox Russia, anticlerical France, and Protestant England, the dominator of Ireland, with the subsequent addition of usurpatory Italy to boot. Moreover, the Vatican regarded Austria-Hungary as the only reliably Catholic power in Europe and lost little sleep over Germany with the “war for culture” long over. All in all, the Apostolic See had stronger grounds on principle to favor one side over the other than nearly all the combatants themselves, and most observers of the time simply took for granted that the neutrality of Pope Della Chiesa amounted to a neutrality for Vienna and Berlin.
Because in the end Poland regained independence under the banner of the Allies, the pope’s presumed tilt toward their opponents, and particularly his barely disguised protectiveness toward Austria-Hungary, are sometimes assumed to explain his supposed tardiness to back the restoration of Polish statehood. At best this qualifies as an ahistorical half truth that obscures the fact that many contemporaries could consider the Central Powers as the more likely liberators of Poland with good reason, and regard the welfare of the Poles and the Habsburgs as not only compatible but inextricably linked. If nothing else, the Holy See could not have deemed the westward expansion of the Russian sphere of influence—the natural outcome of the victory of the Entente in its original constellation—as anything but a catastrophe for the Poles and other central European Catholics. In fact, one of the founding premises of Vatican wartime diplomacy concerning the region was precisely the calculation that what was good for Russia was bad for Poland.14
At any rate, the powers paid little attention to the fate of Poland in the early stages of the war, nor did the Curia force the matter, but by the time the conflict entered its first spring, Benedict decided to drop a none-too-subtle hint that the peace to come should alter the status of the Polish lands. After the bishop of Kraków, Prince Adam Stefan Sapieha, organized a campaign to carry out charitable and relief work in all three zones of partition, the Vatican bestowed official blessings on his initiative in April 1915; what is more, the letter employed the occasion to convey papal greetings to “Polonia tutta intera,” Poland as a whole. Furthermore, from that point Rome began to address messages and instructions to the Polish episcopate as a united, separate entity. Later that November, Catholics throughout the world issued prayers for Poland at Sunday mass at papal behest. While these small gestures hardly resembled a clarion call for the reconstitution of the quondam republic, they still plainly implied the artificiality of its division and suggested the readiness of the pope to see the topic of Poland placed more prominently on the international agenda.15
The pope got his way, for although belligerents of all stripes routinely ignored the recommendations of the Vatican after making a show of a respectful hearing, as the war protracted and intensified, the Polish question inevitably returned to center stage. The ultimate, improbable result was the restoration of Polish independence for two decades, and much of what occupies the pages to come stems from the striking fact that of the two figures who emerged during the war years to become the great rival protagonists of the history of the proverbially Catholic nation of Poland in the first half of the twentieth century, neither could have been described as a Catholic in particularly good standing, and neither bothered much to pretend otherwise. Inmost respects, Roman Dmowski (b. 1864), the standardbearer ofNational Democracy, and his counterpart, the erstwhile socialist Józef Piłsudski (b. 1867), were as opposite as north and south, unlike in personality as well as program. Icy and theoretical, Dmowski envisaged a national Poland that excluded, assimilated, or disfranchised minority peoples to the extent possible, while the more colorful Piłsudski upheld the old “Jagiellonian” ideal of the polyglot and tolerant Respublica. Regarding Germany as the primary enemy of Poles, Dmowski waged a diplomatic campaign from abroad to link Polish fortunes with the Entente, viewing the unification of Poland under Russian protection as a decisive step toward selfrule. On the other hand, Piłsudski led his own Polish legions into battle against Russia in conjunction with the Central Powers, apparently in prophetic anticipation of an eventual debacle of all three partitioners that would permit the creation of a fully independent Poland. However, these two present and future antagonists agreed in their secular conception of politics: neither appealed to religious conviction or tradition to win adherents to his cause, or promised any special role for the Church in the Poland he sought to fashion.16
Had the guardians of Polish catholicity known that no one would exert so much influence on the politics of reborn Poland as Józef Piłsudski, or more affect the relationship of church and state, few would have relished the prospect. A mixture of equal parts genius, magnetism, and eccentricity, Piłsudski maintained an affiliation with Catholicism that was inconstant and peculiar, to say the least. Raised in the faith, he converted superficially to the Evangelical Augsburg confession in 1899 to circumvent Russian restrictions against political activity by Catholics and, incidentally, to wed a divorcée; by the time he returned to Rome in 1916, he had formed another liaison that produced a child well before its legitimation by marriage upon the death of his estranged spouse. Aside from Piłsudski’s personal meanderings from the straight and narrow, many Catholics mistrusted him for the company he kept. His socialist pedigree and growing stature as the main hope of the Polish Left made him the natural favorite of those elements in society most inclined to anticlericalism and skepticism, a fact underscored by the conspicuous irreligiosity of his inner circle of fiercely loyal associates, veteran comrades of his conspiratorial and legionary days who made careers as retainers of the man they revered as their commandant. Yet despite his nonchalance, the scandal of his private life, and the in-devotion of his entourage, Piłsudski never shook off a lifelong sentimental attachment to the traditional Marian piety of his native Lithuania. “I, an old socialist,” he confided to a colleague in 1912, “when I have an important decision to make, I pray first to the Holy Mother of Ostrabrama,” and on journeys he carried a medallion of this famous Virgin of Vilna.17 More than once Piłsudski inspired witticisms along the lines of the timeworn tale of the man who professes that there is no God, and that Our Lady is surely His mother.18
While most Polish churchmen, true to established form, continued to shy away from identification with either of the two strategies for independence, those who did plainly regarded Dmowski and his line as the more palatable alternative. Very few ecclesiastics expressed solidarity with Piłsudski and his legions; manymore rejected him as a radical who consorted with forces inimical to the Church. Sermons reviled Piłsudski as a common bandit, and the combative Bishop Sapieha of Kraków, linking two staple priestly bugbears, accused him of wishing to construct “a socialist and Jewish Poland.”19 On the other hand, Dmowski and his nationalist party attracted considerable clerical support. The two most prominent Polish hierarchs of Austrian Galicia, Sapieha and Archbishop Teodorowicz, were both staunch proponents of the Endecja, although they stopped short of backing its wager on the Entente, the enemy of the Habsburg kingdom.
The crucial weakness of the National Democratic plan lay in its reliance on a Russian victory on the eastern front, where the Central Powers seized the initiative in short order. By 1915, nearly all the Polish territories had fallen into German and Austrian hands, and the Vatican showed no signs of unease at this development or its implications for the destiny of the Poles. In June 1916 the British Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc obtained an audience with Benedict XV and used the occasion to deliver an impassioned plea for the reconstruction of Poland—“that is the key after the war.” The English pilgrim based his argument on the patriotic assumption that the Allies would prevail; the pope parried, “But do you think they will, Mr. Belloc?”20 In fact, by that time the Vatican had settled on the advantages of an “Austro-Polish” approach, foreseeing the creation of a Polish kingdom connected to the Habsburg monarchy by personal rule, much in the