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 had forced them to renounce Uniatism; and Jews were Jews, the largest Jewry in the world and the only significant body of non-Christians in the country, for the most part not assimilated into Polish culture and destined to pose a singularly delicate and difficult challenge of coexistence both for the secular and sacred authorities of interwar Poland. As a corollary, religious identity prompted inevitable and sometimes accurate inferences concerning political loyalty to the Polish state, or its lack. Protestant Poles labored mightily to combat the impression that their membership in a denomination so closely associated with Germanic persecution was somehow outlandish and unpatriotic. In the east, Orthodoxy inescapably carried the taint of Russophilia, while the Greek Catholic sect functioned virtually as a national church of west Ukraine.
Looked at from the other angle, the demographic arithmetic also demonstrated that, for practical purposes, the old saw was true, after all: that in Poland, indeed, the Poles were Catholic, and the Catholics—at any rate, the Roman Catholics—were Poles. Exceptions to both generalizations could be found easily enough. Measurable fragments of the Polish nation adhered to Protestant groups or to Orthodoxy or, more often, to Judaism as “Poles of Mosaic faith.” By the same token, national minorities accounted for about two hundred thousand of the western Catholics of the country, Germans making up a little more than half the total, with the remnant filled out by the small but overwhelmingly Roman contingent of Lithuanians plus odds and ends of the Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Czech populace. These were the anomalies that proved the rule. None of this changed the blunt facts that all but 2 percent of the 17.4 million Latin Catholics resident in Poland were Poles, and that 91 percent of Poles declared themselves Catholics. In other words, like many stereotypes, the doctrine of polak-katolik and the related idea of Catholicism as the Polish national religion contained a semblance of validity, quite enough to satisfy those inclined to defend such propositions.
Rooted in the soil of a historically agrarian society, Polish Catholicism exhibited many of the attributes of its rural origins and upbringing. The peasant masses supplied the base of its constituency and gave their church its definitive earthy qualities: sturdy if unlettered piety, an emphasis on outward devotion, a conspicuous Marian streak, and—so said its critics—a blinkered, bigoted, and stultifying provinciality. Aside from filling the pews of the churches, the folk of the countryside peopled its sanctuaries as well, furnishing the bulk of the more than ten thousand clergy and religious. Hewing to timeworn patterns, nearly half of the episcopate sprang from the nobility or landed gentry, while parishes found their priests among the sons of the peasantry. With greater advantages of birth, and usually the possessors of higher education, the bishops as a group reflected the values and abilities of the elite. Whether well born or plebeian, the typical Polish cleric did not enjoy a high reputation. He and his colleagues were frequently described as wanting in aptitude and formation, seldom rising above the prejudices and narrow horizons of their rustic background; collectively, they remained “in knowledge mediocre: in literary and scholarly accomplishment worse than mediocre,” according to Ermenegildo Pellegrinetti, Nuncio Ratti’s chargé d’affaires, betraying the wearied air of one accustomed to dealing with them.41 What Polish churchmen lacked in education and polish, they made up in zeal and readiness to mix in politics, a trait carried over from the partition era, when the priest acted as the grassroots spokesman for Poles against the alien regime. Emerging into the changed conditions of independence, the Catholic clergy retained its instinct for excitable, sometimes crude nationalism and took for granted its right and duty to enter the civic fray in word and deed, rarely subtly, usually on behalf of the parties of the Right, and by no means always in line with the wishes of the Vatican. Such habits, reported Monsignor Pellegrinetti at the end of the Ratti mission in 1921, had caused the Warsaw nunciature no little anxiety and trouble, a diplomatic way of saying that they had cost his chief his job.42
At the pinnacle of its hierarchy, the reassembled Polish Church had inherited a generation of leadership that has inspired few superlatives. Neither of the two archbishops from the German and Russian zones, Edmund Dalbor (b. 1869) and Aleksander Kakowski (b. 1862), owned a strong personality, and both bore the tarnish of unpopularity as relics from the days of national servitude, widely suspected of having kowtowed to foreign masters. Dalbor and Kakowski paid a dear price in public esteem for their grudging wartime bows toward Berlin, for in the light of the changed perspective that prevailed in Poland after 1918, they never entirely shed an undeserved reputation as lukewarm patriots, onetime lapdogs of the Germans insufficiently devoted to the ideal of complete independence. Although few Poles could match these prelates for patriotic convictions, in the glare of hindsight their cautious wartime approach to the Polish question was seen as halfhearted and unduly deferential toward the occupier. Indeed, when Pope Benedict promptly announced his intention to confer a cardinalate on the archbishop of Warsaw in recognition of the renewed
