Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter. Neal Pease
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breakdown of the Central Powers approached, Catholic spokesmen at last sensed the drift of things and took up the cry for the unconditional restoration of the Rzeczpospolita. As the unthinkable became the inevitable, and a renewed Poland emerged from the ruins of the shattered empires, the Church lent its institutional imprimatur to full Polish independence. The bishops of Russian Poland went on record in favor of ecclesiastical and political reunification with the more westerly Polish provinces. In mid-month, Pope Benedict announced to the Polish faithful his joy that “at last the dawn of the resurrection of Poland has broken,” adding his “most ardent prayer” that the emancipated country might soon “resume her career as a civilizing and Christian force.”34 On November 1, on the feast of All Saints, which was dear to Polish Catholic culture, the bishops of Galicia called on all churches to celebrate the national rebirth by singing the Te Deum followed by “Boże coś Polskę.”35
The implosion of the Central Powers also brought down their satellite Poland with them and put the faltering and now abruptly vestigial Regency Council out of its misery. Over the preceding weeks, mounting enthusiasm for liberation had turned Polish opinion decisively against the occupation regime as well as the harried regent, Archbishop Kakowski, its most prominent figurehead. Only too glad to be rid of his unwanted political burdens, the exhausted prelate made haste to dissolve what remained of his government. In the anarchic last days of the war, Kakowski coaxed the Regency Council into abdication and acquiescence in the transfer of power as interim dictator to none other than Józef Piłsudski, the bane of the clergy, persuaded that the renegade socialist might best supply the strong leadership that would shield the infant state from the greater dangers of chaos.36
With independence an accomplished fact, the Polish Church promptly struck a newly assertive and confident note, hurrying to identify itself with the revived republic and fill the void of leadership left by the German debacle while the new government in Warsaw attempted to gain its footing. This increased ecclesiastical visibility during the first heady weeks of statehood had various motives: genuine enthusiasm for the national deliverance; the need of the Church to burnish its patriotic credentials and dispel the impression that it had cast its lot with the Central Powers; above all the natural prestige of the cloth, which introduced an element of familiarity and stability into the prevalent atmosphere of civic confusion. No doubt aware of their vulnerability to criticism as compromised holdovers from the partition era, Archbishops Dalbor and Kakowski hastened to scold Berlin for having dealt with the Poles in bad faith, demanding the speedy evacuation of the remaining German occupation forces.37 As they withdrew, hundreds of priests assisted in the reorganization of former German Poland, most conspicuously the young Fr. Stanisław Adamski, who would become one of the more notable cleric-politicians of the Second Republic and survive to endure the persecutions of the Polish People’s Republic. In Galicia, many Poles looked to the imperious figure of Bishop Sapieha of Kraków as the sole figure of recognizable authority amid the shambles of the defunct Habsburg monarchy.38
For its part, the papal state welcomed the reappearance of Poland on the map of Europe with unfeigned satisfaction as one of the few redeeming features of an otherwise deplorable postwar continental order. From its own distinctive vantage point, the Vatican would have preferred to see the fighting end with Russia defeated and the Central Powers intact; instead, in Roman eyes the war had raged on to the death, demolished the crucial elements of European stability, and purchased the downfall of the Orthodox colossus—in itself an agreeable development—at the high cost of unleashing Bolshevism, opening the gates to atheistic revolution. As for the victorious Allies, so the analysis continued, their triumph cemented the hegemony of a liberal and anticlerical worldview inherently hostile to the Church, a conviction hardened by the unceremonious exclusion of the Holy See from the peace councils of Paris. Within this unpromising constellation of powers, Warsaw appeared as likely a friend as the popes were going to find, the natural successor to the Habsburg Empire as the mainstay of Catholicism in Central Europe. In fact, the Curia had accepted the demise of the Dual Monarchy with a brisk absence of fuss or sentimentality. Even before Austria-Hungary had breathed its last, Benedict ordered his nuncio in Vienna to leave the deathbed and shift his attention to cultivating good contacts with the insurgent nationalities of the dying kingdom, “which, at the present hour, are reconstituting themselves as independent states.”39 Of these, the Poles seemed the most suitable candidates to inherit the mantle of the Habsburgs. Aside from his genuine personal warmth for a people so axiomatically devout, Pope Della Chiesa trusted that the erection of a Catholic Poland on the western flank of Russia might advance the interests of the faith and serve as a partial remedy for the deranged condition of Europe. The Apostolic See bestowed formal recognition upon the country in March 1919, lauding it in terms calculated to suggest parental affection for a favored child.
More than most newborns, Poland went through considerable growing pains before attaining its final dimensions. Over the course of three turbulent years, a combination of uprising, plebiscite, and Allied diplomatic fiat had drawn frontiers with Germany and Czechoslovakia that only partially fulfilled Polish objectives and left Berlin immovably unreconciled. Toward the east, Polish arms secured a broad swath of the Lithuanian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian kresy, the marchlands historically linked with the Rzeczpospolita where Poles made up a minority clustered within such ancient citadels of Polish culture as Vilna and Lwów, standing amid a hinterland of different ethnic complexion. By 1921, these exertions had defined the extent of the population and territory of the Second Republic and left it a country of medium size with most of its boundaries in dispute, ominously squeezed between Germany and the Soviet Union, hostile and irredentist great powers in sulky temporary eclipse. The new Poland emerged as a hybrid polity, recognizably Polish and Roman Catholic at its core yet not quite an incontestably national state of compact religious makeup. The government reported this fact with reasonable frankness in its first census, issued in 1921 (see table 1.1).
TABLE 1.1. Population of Poland by religion and nationality, 1921
Source: Figures from official Polish census of 1921.
While the official figures must be taken with a dose of salt—no doubt the ethnicity count was fudged somewhat to Polish advantage, and the confessional table misleads by omitting unbelievers—they correspond roughly with the estimates of other contemporary surveys40 and may be trusted sufficiently to yield several general conclusions of importance to the interplay of religion and politics in the Second Republic.
In the first place, three of every four Polish subjects proclaimed themselves in communion with Rome in some fashion, the main body of Latin Catholics—the “real” Catholics, in the minds of many—supplemented by some three million adherents of two Eastern rites. Of these, the handful of Armenian Catholics, the fold of Archbishop Teodorowicz, scarcely dented the statistical ledgers. A vestige of the polyglot Respublica of old, these five thousand souls clustered in the Lwów region had become thoroughly polonized over time and felt strong kinship with their Latin brethren. In almost every respect, the Ukrainian Greek Catholics of formerly Austrian eastern Galicia, the second-largest religious congregation in the land, represented a different case altogether. Founded by the Union of Brest in 1596 as a means to convert the Orthodox of the kresy, the “Uniate” Church incorporated much of the trappings and tradition of the east, including its Church Slavonic liturgy and married parish clergy, while acknowledging the supremacy of the pope. Despised as apostates by the Orthodox and subjected to tsarist repression over the centuries, commonly patronized as religious inferiors and mistrusted as Ukrainian separatists by the Latin Poles, the Greek Catholics retained a proud sense of their unique ecumenical mission and regarded their Polish counterparts with a prickly wariness amply repaid by their western half brothers in Christ.
Moreover, confessional affiliation in reconstituted Poland closely followed lines of ethnicity, and dissent from the Roman Catholic religious norm qualified as one of the most reliable indicators of national minority status. So, then, Germans were mainly Protestants of Lutheran persuasion, and vice versa; Belorussians were Orthodox; Ukrainians were solidly Greek Catholic in Galicia and heavily Orthodox in the provinces once Russian, where official pressure