organization of Poland, 1918–25. Map by Donna G. Genzmer, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Copyright © 2009 Board of Regents of University of Wisconsin System
While Poland might be semper fidelis, its Catholics saw reasons for worry on all sides. Already damaged by nineteenth-century confiscations, the material condition of the Church had suffered further buffeting by wholesale wartime destruction of its buildings and properties. Perhaps most of the faithful and their clergy believed, with varying degrees of urgency and intonation, in the mounting threat posed by Communism, Freemasonry, and the Jews, possibly joined in unholy alliance. Others focused on corrosive shortcomings found within their own ranks. Thinkers fretted over a growing religious indifference among males and the embarrassing intellectual poverty of Polish Catholicism; from the pulpits, priests chastised their parishioners for a host of moral failings attributed to the degrading influence of foreign rule and the iniquities of modern life: drunkenness, petty dishonesty, impiety.50 Some went so far as to dismiss the famed Polish devotion as little more than a national tic, a communal display of obligatory sanctimoniousness. When a Pole removed his hat when passing a church, sniffed one of the pope’s men at the Warsaw nunciature, “it is not a sign of respect for the house of the Lord, but a way of saying: see, I am Polish.”51
Still, the formidable list of troubles and burdens did not overshadow the greater sense of satisfaction that the deliverance of Poland, the unexpected prize of a terrible war, had fulfilled one of the fondest longings of the Catholic world, offering hope for an anxious age and proof of the workings of Providence in human history. As the new year 1920 dawned, Benedict XV fulfilled a promise made by his predecessor twice removed, sending to Warsaw a candle once set aside by Pius IX to await the return of a free Poland.52 To those who believed, faith and perseverance had won their reward, and God had redeemed his people out of bondage once again.
2
Il Papa Polacco
The Making of Pius XI, 1918–1922
AS THE FIRST WORLD WAR ENTERED its last months in 1918, the Vatican knew only two things for certain regarding the future of the Catholic Church in central and eastern Europe: that the antebellum order would be transformed beyond recognition, and that some sort of sovereign Poland would return to the map after its lengthy absence. Indeed, thanks to the initiative of the German and Habsburg emperors, a Polish kingdom already existed on paper, even if its independence was largely a fiction. Even at that late date, everything else concerning the prospects for the Roman mission in that zone of the continent remained shrouded in confusion. Above all, the widening revolution in Russia and the incipient breakup of the farflung realm of the tsars both freed and threatened several Catholic peoples while holding out the dazzling promise of a historic expansion of the Church into the Orthodox east. Unsure of its best approach to this combination of danger and opportunity, the papal state counted on the new Poland as its natural base of activity in that turbulent region. So when the Polish bishops requested the posting of an apostolic visitor to their theoretically restored country after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk certified the Russian surrender, the Holy See happily obliged: not only was the suggestion a useful idea on its own merits, but the new man could also serve as the eyes and ears of the pope in the European borderlands. The Vatican functionaries took the appointment seriously as an important decision bearing on the development of the Church in Poland and other formerly Russian territories, although few could have suspected just how important it would turn out to be; surely none divined that the choice would identify the eventual successor to Benedict XV and forcefully alter the destiny of Catholicism in the twentieth century.
Because the nominee for the Polish errand reached such exalted and surprising heights, the tale of his selection became the stuff of minor legend, often retold in ecclesiastical circles. According to the story, either Cardinal Gasparri, more likely his sostituto within the Secretariat of State, or even a transient Polish cleric suggested the name of the little-known prefect of the Vatican Library as a suitable candidate. This unconventional recommendation intrigued Pope Benedict, who had occasionally consulted his resident scholar on the historical background of the war and its related issues and had formed a good opinion of his judgment and abilities. In April 1918, the pontiff offered the librarian the embassy to Poland. Startled, the designee asked for time to consider, hesitant to accept an assignment so remote from his experience and expertise. The very next day, Benedict summoned the reluctant bibliophile for a second audience. Well, now you have had a chance to think it over, the pope is supposed to have said—“When do you leave for Poland?”1 Thus, according to lore, did Monsignor Achille Ambrogio Damiano Ratti, the bookish sixty-year-old son of a Lombard silk factory manager, take the first tentative step down a remarkable path that led him through an eventful three-year Polish nunciature to the see of St. Peter.
Before its unlikely climax, his career had prospered in obscurity, far removed from the fast track toward the upper reaches of Church government. Following ordination, Ratti had settled into the leisurely routine of academics, making methodical advancement until arriving at the prefecture of the Vatican Library in 1914, seemingly having attained the limit of his ambitions. His learned demeanor and duties masked a steely and imperious temperament, qualities that came to the fore only after the subsequent and ultimate promotion that released him forever from the obligation to play the loyal subordinate. That lay in the future; for the time being, the posting to Poland involved more than enough difficulty and complexity to challenge even the most seasoned papal diplomat, let alone a neophyte. At bottom, the Vatican had no idea what to make of the chaotic picture in the European east, or how best to pursue its own interests. Contending factions within and around the Curia advocated a variety of incompatible policies, ranging from open reliance on the Poles as the flagbearers of the Catholic cause in their vicinity to warnings that precisely this was the surest way to hamper the work of the Church in Russia and the kresy by aggravating old antagonisms and resentments toward Poland. In its initial conception, the Ratti mission had no clearer or more urgent mandate than the vague instruction simply to take stock of the situation and sort through the bewildering alternatives.2 The mediation of Archbishop Eugenio Pacelli, the nuncio in Munich, procured the imprimatur of the German authorities, who still held sway in that theater for the moment, and by the summer of 1918 Ratti had been installed as apostolic visitor to Poland and Lithuania, resident in Warsaw but responsible for all the lands of the crumbling Russian imperium.3
The Ratti sojourn was originally devised as a reconnoitering expedition of a zone in flux possibly lasting only a few months, and the pope had told him to plan on returning home by Christmas.4 His task took on a different, less improvisatory character once the war ended, sweeping away the German sphere of conquest and replacing the puppet Poland with the Second Republic—genuinely independent and presumably there to stay—but answering little else Rome wanted to know. To reflect the changed circumstances, after the official papal recognition of the new Polish state in 1919 Ratti assumed the title of full nuncio to Poland, the first since 1796, and an accompanying elevation to the rank of archbishop. In corresponding fashion, he began to focus the bulk of his attention on Polish affairs while yet keeping a watchful eye on developments in the east. This somewhat narrower definition of his job hardly left Ratti with time on his hands, for the task of rehabilitating the Polish Church and placing its relationship with the Warsaw government on acceptable footing more than sufficed to keep him busy. In the eyes of the Vatican, achievement of these goals required a satisfactory concordat above all, and the Secretariat of State instructed Ratti to regard preparing the groundwork for such a treaty as his top priority. At the same time, he was asked to pull off a tricky political balancing act, on the one hand coaxing the Polish bishops to sacrifice some Church properties to the popular demand for land reform, on the other doing all in his power to protect the economic standing of a Church that had been bled of much of its wealth during the past century of persecution and war.5
After decades spent keeping company with books, Nuncio Ratti eagerly tackled the challenge of his new responsibilities in stimulating and exotic foreign surroundings. His official dispatches and private letters
