grumbled mildly on the grounds that the honor might be construed as a reward for Kakowski’s unhappy service in the German Regency Council, which in fact was precisely the idea; the pontiff relented only to the extent of simultaneously elevating Dalbor and Kakowski to the purple in 1919.43 Dalbor assumed the status of primate, the president of the national episcopate, which historically accompanied his see of Gniezno-Poznań, but the post almost might have remained vacant for all the difference it made. Retiring and passive by nature, Dalbor had no taste or gift for politics, and his public demeanor was subdued to the point of invisibility. He ranks as one of the least memorable and least remembered of Polish primates. For his part, Kakowski also shunned the spotlight, but as the ordinary of the capital he could not evade notice so easily as the all-but-faceless Dalbor. By and large, observers were unimpressed by what they saw. Contemporaries tended to describe Kakowski as a goodhearted mediocrity, bright enough, perhaps, but clumsy and erratic, distinguished above all by an invincible capacity for discretion and fencesitting. Kakowski was not cut out for politics, and knew it. His lackluster performance as wartime regent had won him nothing but trouble and opprobrium, and it is scarcely surprising that afterward he reverted to his habit of keeping his cards close to his vestments. No one knew for certain his inner partisan sympathies, but throughout his career he showed himself reliably able to get along with the authority of the day. Despite his reputation as a bumbler, the Holy See appreciated his loyalty to Rome and viewed him as its man within the hierarchy of Poland, but he carried no great influence in the country and seemed content to maintain an unobtrusive profile.44
The reticence of the two cardinals magnified the importance of the Galician bishops, Sapieha of Kraków (b. 1867) and Teodorowicz of Lwów (b. 1864), who possessed in abundance the energy and decisiveness their nominal superiors so obviously lacked. Fast friends and allies of long standing, they shared an enthusiasm for the Dmowski Endecja and diligently worked in tandem to galvanize the Catholic episcopate in support of the nationalist Right. Although not yet an archbishop—he would not receive that designation until 1925—Sapieha stood out as the most naturally impressive figure within the Latin hierarchy, his innate talents enhanced by the prestige of his family name, one of the most illustrious in the rolls of Polish nobility. His lengthy custody of the historic royal cathedral on Kraków’s Wawel Hill began before the First World War and did not end until after the Second, and in his later years he numbered among his protégés the young priest Karol Wojtyła. Fearless, headstrong, and irascible, imbued with aristocratic pride and arrogance, he commanded respect even from his numerous enemies. Teodorowicz was, to borrow the phrase of Evelyn Waugh, Sapieha carved by an Aztec, reproducing in coarser, exaggerated form the features of his patrician colleague. Sapieha was resolute, impatient, and combustible; Teodorowicz obstinate, rash, and combustion itself, a human volcano in constant eruption. He also exerted a strong sway over the bishop of Kraków, his junior in age and rank. Teodorowicz lived and breathed politics and intrigue, and his light load of pastoral duties as curate of Poland’s few Armenian Catholics afforded him ample time to engage in his favorite pastimes, to the despair of the many who conceded his undeniable abilities but thought of him mainly as a reckless troublemaker who also brought out the cantankerous worst in Sapieha.45 As time went on, the Vatican would make a point of warning newly appointed papal nuncios to Warsaw to watch their step around Teodorowicz, based on the unhappy experiences of their predecessors.46
Apart from Sapieha, only one member of the Catholic hierarchy of reborn Poland bore the stamp of true greatness, and as fate would have it he was an outsider generally regarded by Poles as a national and religious enemy. If Andrei Sheptyts’kyi, the Greek Catholic metropolitan of Halicz-Lwów, was not “the most remarkable of living Slavs,” as some contended, then he was at the least one of the most striking and fascinating figures of modern Christendom.47 Born Roman Aleksander Maria Count Szeptycki in 1865, the son of Polish nobility of the Galician kresy and the grandson of the famed playwright Aleksander Fredro, he adopted Ukrainian identity and the Greek Catholic rite in adulthood, reversing the adage “gente Ruthenus, natione Polonus.” Since 1900 the “Bishop of St. George,” the head of the Uniates of Galicia, he tirelessly presented his church as a foundation for the reconciliation of western and eastern Christianity and did not discourage the opinion that his own personal metamorphosis incarnated the ecumenical spirit: “I am like St. Paul, who became . . . all things to all men so as to save all.”48 Physically imposing and full-bearded, Sheptyts’kyi possessed the visage and thundering moral certitude of an Old Testament prophet, and he fiercely guarded his Ukrainian and Greek Catholic flock against the pretensions of the Latin Poles. He had championed the cause of west Ukrainian independence at the end of the world war, and after Poland captured eastern Galicia by force of arms in 1919 he held himself aloof from the Polish episcopate and frequently challenged the government in Warsaw, acting virtually as the chaplain of a church and a people under foreign occupation. A complex blend of sweeping vision, iron will, and inexhaustible self-righteousness, Sheptyts’kyi had a genius for exasperating all the various rulers of his metropolitanate from the Habsburgs to Stalin and Hitler, and the Polish Second Republic would prove no exception.
Aside from the shortage of brilliance at its top, the Polish Church faced the same daunting task that challenged Poland in every facet of its existence: that of welding itself into a coherent whole out of the disjointed fragments of the partitioning empires. Superimposed upon the intersection of three national episcopates, the rebuilt country was bequeathed a hodgepodge of ecclesiastical structures and laws that had been designed to meet the requirements of the obliterated prewar world and now made no sense. Diocesan boundaries no longer agreed with the radically altered state frontiers, stranding millions of Catholics on both sides of the Polish borders under the unwanted jurisdiction of suddenly “foreign” bishops, and leaving absurd disparities of territory and population in the residual organization of the Church on Polish soil. The confusion extended even to the residence of the primacy, claimed alike by Gniezno-Poznań on the grounds of tradition and by Warsaw by virtue of the status of its incumbent as primate of antebellum Russian Poland. This argument dragged on until 1925, debated by canon lawyers and historians, until the Vatican settled the matter by splitting the difference: both archbishops kept their primatial dignity, and Dalbor of Gniezno-Poznań retained his honorific title as primate of Poland, but without any real authority over Kakowski of Warsaw. However, no curial decree could so easily undo the legacy of twelve decades of tripartite separation that had produced significant disparities of ecclesiastical circumstances and culture in the various sectors of the Polish lands. Catholicism and the clergy enjoyed high prestige and influence in the former German and Russian zones for their role in the nationality wars of the previous century, but Berlin had not plundered the wealth or landholdings of the Church, while tsarist repression and expropriations had depleted the eastern dioceses. In political terms, western Poland was the heart of Endecja country, known as home to legions of rightist Catholic laymen and pugnacious priests like Fr. Adamski, battle-hardened in the forge of the Kulturkampf and the resistance against Germanification. Spared the lash of persecution, the Church in the Austrian south had changed the least since the partitions, its noble, conservative hierarchs reigning over an intact collection of extensive, though hardscrabble, Galician lands. Not even the passage of the twenty coming years of independence would suffice to complete the integration of the reunited branches of the Polish Church, or to efface entirely its acquired regional differences of custom and psychology.49
The political transformation also thrust Polish Catholicism into legal limbo. In the absence of a concordat, what rules defined the relationship of Poland with the Holy See, or guaranteed the rights of the Church within the republic? Until Warsaw crafted its own constitution and laws, did the religious legislation of the old regimes remain in force in their respective jurisdictions, including the German and Russian statutes Catholics regarded as inimical and discriminatory? Or did the Church simply stand extra legem, hostage to the goodwill and arbitrary whim of each rotating cabinet and every petty local functionary? Such uncertainties nagged at Catholic opinion, especially in light of the prominence of Piłsudskiites and the Left in the initial interwar governments.
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