observations on Polish customs and conditions and a touristic delight in sights and the odd detail. He found the country endearing and maddening at the same time. He never ceased to laud the simple piety of Poles, although he worried that a national weakness for ostentatious public religiosity did the Church there no credit. At first astonished and made uneasy by the multitudes of Jews he encountered in Polish cities, he adjusted soon enough and in later years drew on the experiences of his nunciature to undergird his relatively enlightened views on the Jewish question. Impatient by nature, he fumed regularly over the proverbial Polish inefficiency that combined with the messy aftermath of war to hamper his communications with Rome and multiply the already considerable frustrations of dealing with the curial bureaucracy. However, from first to last the Polish episcopate itself caused the nuncio his worst headaches. Despite his declarations to the Polish bishops that he thought of himself as one of them, holding the interests of their country close to his heart, the fractious and intensely political inclinations of the Catholic hierarchy of Poland took him by unpleasant surprise, complicated his work until the day he returned to Italy, and smoldered in his memory as long as he lived.6
The nub of the problem Ratti faced was that a solid majority of the Polish episcopate backed the National Democratic brand of rightist politics, putting them at odds with much of the governing establishment of the country and the preference of the Vatican itself. Shortly after the armistice Benedict XV had urged bishops in the new states of Europe to avoid embroiling the Church in partisan controversies, and to see that their priests followed suit;7 undeterred, the Polish clergy had wasted little time confirming the impression that it meant to act as a virtual auxiliary of Endecja. During the parliamentary elections of 1919, much of the Catholic press and priesthood had endorsed the Dmowski party, sometimes directly from the pulpit, and eleven ecclesiastics sat among the Endek delegation in the Sejm, swelling its plurality in the legislature. While technically nonpartisan, the leader of this bloc of rightist cleric-deputies, as well as the loudest, was the fiery Archbishop Teodorowicz, who described politics as a sort of holy war against those he suspected of wishing to turn the Second Republic into a “pagan state.”8 He and his close friend Bishop Sapieha pressed these ideas upon Cardinal Dalbor, the likeminded but less forceful primate. Together this trio exercised what the nunciature disapprovingly called a dittatura over the episcopate, converting their own sympathy for National Democracy into all-but-declared policy of the Polish Church—although, to be sure, the “dictatorship” largely amounted to herding the bishops in the direction most of them already wanted to go.9 This left Cardinal Kakowski as the odd man out among the ranking hierarchs of Poland, in more ways than one. The archbishop of Warsaw declined invitations to stand for election on the Endecja ticket, and before long observers began to note his tendency to hold the Right at arm’s length and to maintain some distance from the politics of the Teodorowicz-Sapieha-Dalbor triumvirate. In fact, the isolation of Kakowski within the episcopate resulted from more than mere differences in partisan allegiance. During the protracted dispute over the primacy of Poland, most of the clergy sided with Dalbor and Gniezno againstWarsaw and closed ranks against the bishop of the capital. Given a cold shoulder by his colleagues, Kakowski still retained the confidence of the Vatican, which clearly preferred him to Dalbor and treated him as the first dignitary of the Polish Church in all but name.10
The rightward leanings of the clergy went hand in hand with its collective distaste for the charismatic Józef Piłsudski, both the most popular and the most reviled public figure in the country, who had assumed the rank of chief of state in the provisional government of the young republic. The dignity of high office failed to persuade Polish churchmen that the man they had grown accustomed to condemn as a leftist highwayman of low morals had suddenly become any more acceptable or respectable. When Cardinal Dalbor, speaking for the Church, addressed Piłsudski directly from the pulpit at a ceremonial mass in 1919, stressing that “we entrust to you the heritage we have safeguarded,” few could have missed the cautionary hint that the national fate had passed into unreliable hands.11 In fact, the whole country knew that most of the clergy turned up their noses at Piłsudski, sometimes on grounds of policy, more often on a more visceral level as the embodiment, so they imagined, of all they found intolerable. In keeping with his status as foremost episcopal irreconcilable, Archbishop Teodorowicz above all flaunted his loathing for Piłsudski, who repaid the sentiment with interest and made sure that army intelligence kept the Armenian-rite pastor under close watch.12 On this count too, Cardinal Kakowski stood out as the exception among Polish archprelates for his ability to find redeeming qualities in the chief of state that remained well hidden from most of his colleagues in holy orders.13
For his part, once he got his bearings Nuncio Ratti had little difficulty deciding that he much preferred Piłsudski to Teodorowicz and his Endek coterie among the bishops. In the first place, the papal envoy concluded, somewhat to his surprise, that the Polish strongman did not deserve his reputation for irreligiosity. Piłsudski kept to himself his spiritual and philosophical convictions, such as they were, inviting all manner of speculation, and his grasp of theology and Catholic doctrine lacked sophistication, to put it gently. Once asked by a priest about the persistent rumor that he was a Freemason, he emphatically avowed his refusal on principle to have anything to do with the secret brotherhood, not for the reasons a catechist would have approved, but on the less-than-categorical grounds that he could not belong in good conscience to an international fraternity that might expose the interests of Poland to foreign manipulation—a description that, after all, might just as easily have applied to the Church.14 Still, some spied within Piłsudski, beneath his wayward and lax exterior, a sort of noble savage of untutored piety. The battle-hardened chief of state had a soft spot for Church spectacle and lore that touched on national themes or his Lithuanian boyhood, and Ratti and his lieutenants took careful note when Piłsudski shed tears at the shrine of Ostrabrama in Vilna, or received the nuncio’s blessing “with a lovely, even devout demeanor,” or attributed the revival of Poland to the intervention of the saints.15 All in all, the Warsaw nunciature reported to Rome, despite his notoriety, Piłsudski at heart was a religious man whose heterodoxy had been exaggerated by his enemies and magnified by the reflected real sins of his entourage, written off as an unsavory crew of flunkies, atheists, Freemasons, anticlericals, and apostates, for the most part rogues of easy virtue.16 However, they took an indulgent view of Piłsudski’s own marital peccadilloes, treating them as the indiscretions of an errant but well-meaning soul. Upon the death of his estranged uncanonical wife in 1921, the nunciature did no more than whisper to the Vatican the hope that the chief of state might use the occasion to “mend the condition of his private life,” as Chargé Pellegrinetti delicately phrased it, and when Piłsudski wed his mistress two months later, Cardinal Kakowski was on hand to assist in the nuptials.17
In addition, Piłsudski satisfied Ratti that he meant no harm to the Church. By this time he had already turned his back on the Left, having ridden the red streetcar of socialism only as far as the independence stop, in the trenchant image attributed to him. Furthermore, he served notice that he lacked enthusiasm for the agenda of the anticlerical wing of his constituency. In March 1919, speaking with an interviewer in his chambers, a reproduction of a Raphael Madonna hanging on the wall, Piłsudski dwelt on the need to respect the power and prestige of Catholicism in his country and declared that “we cannot think in Poland, as yet, of a separation of the State and Church—as in France.”18 Taking the cue, the Piłsudskiite press echoed the call for good relations with the Vatican and peace with the Church at home. No matter that this policy was largely motivated by a pragmatic concern not to drive the Catholic faithful into the arms of the National Democrats, the practical effect remained the same: Piłsudski wanted a modus vivendi with the Roman confession, and would restrain the militant anticlericals within his camp.19 Indeed, in certain crucial respects his politics suited Rome far better than those of Endecja and its ecclesiastical claque, above all his more expansive notion of the nature of the Polish state and its mission in the kresy of Belorussia and Ukraine.
Not least, Ratti and Piłsudski simply liked each other. According to Ratti, the improbable friendship between the future pope and the man the Polish clergy loved to hate dated from an official reception in 1919, when he deftly rescued Piłsudski from
