it as a useful political ally rather than for any intrinsic value. In the eyes of the Church, then, National Democracy posed a dilemma: it was often right, but for all the wrong reasons, a virtual Polish twin of the Action Française of Charles Maurras, which for decades walked a thin line between papal applause and condemnation. Despite these ambiguities, many clergy and laymen joined or promoted National Democracy as the most promising political haven for Polish Catholics, and more than a few hierarchs looked upon Endecja with a kindly eye.
When the First World War erupted in Europe in 1914, splitting the ranks of the partitioning emperors, the separate branches of the Polish Church responded according to established form, attempting to carry off the difficult trick of balancing respect for the existing political order with the call of duty to the divided nation. As the guns commenced firing, few Poles foresaw independence as an outcome of the fighting, and of those, fewer wore the collar. In addition, at the time the situation of the Church in all three zones of former Poland seemed more satisfactory than ever in long memory: Austria was Austria, Catholic and unexacting; the severity of German administration had eased perceptibly of late; and even in Russia the ukase of toleration of 1905 had permitted the resumption of something resembling normal ecclesiastical operation. Just as clerics in all lands rallied to the flag at the opening of hostilities, Polish Catholic leaders warily followed suit, issuing proclamations of loyalty to respective king and country in exchange for the vague promises of their rulers that the Poles would share the fruits of victory. Loyalism appeared most plausible in Austria-Hungary, where Polish ecclesiastics could embrace it with honest conviction; in August 1914 the archbishop of Lwów, and future saint, Józef Bilczewski, pronounced a blessing on the arms of the Dual Monarchy, a Catholic realm that had “allowed us to be Poles.”11 Already in the opening phase of the conflict, some Galician clergy thought in terms of an Austrian triumph that might reunify the Polish lands under the mild Habsburg scepter. In the German and Russian districts, on the other hand, unhappy experience had taught Polish churchmen to expect little from their monarchs and to lie low, and for the most part they restricted their commentaries on the war at this early date to safe, bromidic prayers for its speedy and successful conclusion.
In reacting to the outbreak of the European conflict in a tentative and equivocal manner, the Polish clergy matched the example set by their superiors at the seat of Church government. Few topics in the modern history of the papacy have generated so much heat as the wartime policy of Benedict XV, the former cardinal-archbishop Giacomo Della Chiesa of Bologna who took the tiara in September 1914, on the same day Russian troops captured Galician Lwów and three days before the Battle of the Marne. Throughout the next four years the pope issued urgent appeals for an immediate end to the fighting as a savage and pointless folly—a “horrible butchery,” he called it, the “suicide of civilized Europe”—and assured the world of the fatherly disinterest of the vicar of Christ. This stance made worldly as well as moral sense for a church that preached nonviolence, claimed universal jurisdiction, and harbored profoundly cautious political instincts; content with the antebellum European balance, the Vatican feared the consequences of its overthrow by the decisive victory of either coalition.12 Still, suspicion 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,
