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 prospect to be averted, and as handy polemical weapon. Owing to the conflicting reactions it inevitably evoked, the vision of a Catholic Poland could not serve as the unifying principle of the Second Republic, as widely assumed; on the contrary, perhaps no other theme held such power to polarize the country or set its various peoples and constituencies at odds.
Even so, the reflexive predisposition to equate Poland with the Roman church was not a mistaken judgment, but merely one that meant less in political terms than met the eye. It often proceeded from, or led to, an exaggerated appraisal of the collaboration of throne and altar throughout the history of Poland as well as a lack of understanding that, in fact, Catholicism occupied a somewhat ambiguous place in Polish political culture. True, the vast majority of Poles proclaimed themselves Catholics of the Latin rite, and the link between Catholicism and Polish identity was manifestly real, hallowed by time, accentuated by adjacency to peoples of other creeds, and starkly defined by the recent dominion of Protestant and Orthodox sovereigns over most of the Polish lands. Adherence to the Roman faith resoundingly supported the Polish ethos, then, and in Poland Catholicism bore no taint of association with foreign rule or of conflict with patriotic ideals, as in the Czech lands or in Hungary. However, these facts had exerted less influence on the behavior or inclinations of the former Polish Respublica than might have been expected, and less still on the creators of its interwar reincarnation. To put it mildly, old Poland had scarcely qualified as a crusader or inquisitorial realm, a Spain of the east. Indeed, its tradition had been to approach religion in moderate and latitudinarian fashion. More often than not, the commonwealth preferred to apply a cautious pragmatism in managing its multiconfessional populace, and Poland-Lithuania’s lack of zeal in enforcing religious uniformity had earned it occasional reproaches as a paradise for heretics and Jews. In other words, Catholicism acted as a salient indicator of Polish identity, but not as an element of great political significance or priority in statecraft. The pattern held during the era of partition, when the Church and its representatives played at most a secondary role in the struggle for independence, and the Polish political and intellectual elites that would later emerge into leadership of the interwar republic came to cultivate attitudes of indifference or outright hostility to Catholicism as a dubious force in national affairs.8
So as Poland entered a new phase of statehood in 1918, its Church occupied a formidable but awkward and undefined position in the country, looming as an imposing presence but by no means an uncontested or irresistible civic colossus. In truth, perhaps no other institution could lay so plausible a claim to the right and duty to speak for Poles on matters of governmental as well as private conduct; certainly the Church thought so, and did not shrink from attempting to exercise that prerogative. Too much a fixture in national life to be content with less than a commanding voice in public concerns and official recognition of its moral authority, and far too big to be ignored or underestimated as a political factor even by its most determined antagonists, it nevertheless fell short of the ability to translate its will into law or policy by persuading or overawing the combination of factions and constituencies that regarded the Church as an agent of clericalism, reaction, and bigotry and saw the shadow of black dictatorship lurking behind its every move. Nor did the dispute over the proper role of Polish Catholicism confine itself within the boundaries of the republic, for the Church of Poland did not exist as an isolated or fully autonomous entity, after all, but as an integral part of an avowedly universal religious body with sweeping worldly—and, literally, otherworldly—interests and aspirations. The popes of the day and their ministers in the Roman Curia considered the twentieth century a time of both frightful dangers and extraordinary opportunities, requiring prudence and daring alike, and the course on which they chose to steer the bark of Peter and its implications for Poland brought them into repeated disagreement with not only the secular rulers of that country, but also with the leaders of the Polish Church and the faithful. Such questions resisted easy solution because sooner or later debates over the proper place of the Church within Poland, and of Poland within the Catholic world, became emotive arguments over the fundamental character of the Second Republic and contrasting visions of Polish history. The argument went on unabated and unresolved right up to the day in October 1939 when Pope Pius XII called on Catholics around the world to mourn the martyrdom of Poland by invasion and conquest yet once more.
The argument had begun in earnest roughly a century earlier, during the decades of tripartite Russian, German, and Austrian sway over the lands of the once and future Poland. The conditions of captivity produced the paradoxical dual result of transforming the Church into a far more visible and powerful symbol of Polish identity, on the one hand, while on the other steadily alienating it from those elements within society who saw themselves as the true keepers of the national flame and formed the vanguard of the independence movement. Although during this time a “Polish Church” existed in none but the sentimental sense, having been apportioned among the ecclesiastical jurisdictions of the partitioners, the bond of Catholicity helped to maintain an indelible consciousness of nationhood that transcended the boundary lines of the moment. Apart from the example of the Habsburg Empire, where a common religion contributed to generally milder and more tolerable terms of confinement for Poles in Austrian Galicia, Catholicism and the Church also functioned as an obvious focus of Polish differentiation from their foreign masters and a national rallying point of solidarity and refuge. Especially during the latter half of the century, official anti-Catholic campaigns in Protestant
