diplomat. Touched by the gesture, Piłsudski took the Italian monsignor into his confidence, and over time the cordiality ripened into a lifelong mutual esteem.20 This was a case of like attracting like, for each recognized in the other a kindred spirit, a similar mix of temper, bullheadedness, and autocratic spirit. “Ha un carattere difficile, come il mio,” Ratti said of the Polish strongman, and Piłsudski is supposed to have returned the wry compliment in almost the same words.21 When Ratti and his lieutenants looked at Piłsudski, they saw a Polish Garibaldi, a flawed but charismatic man of qualities, capable of broad vision and great deeds.22
Out of this tangled knot of clashing politics and personalities emerged two distinct factions that vied for control over the direction of the interwar Polish Church in its formative years. On one side stood Ratti and, by extension, Benedict XV, determined to press the agenda of the Holy See. Usually they could count on the support of Cardinal Kakowski, deferential to the papacy, well disposed toward the nuncio and not at all offended by his bet on Piłsudski, and somewhat at odds with the prevailing rightward sentiment within the national episcopate. At every step this alliance ran into stubborn opposition from the circle of Endecja partisans who dominated their fellow bishops, especially the Galician duo of Teodorowicz and Sapieha, who held sway over the primate, Cardinal Dalbor. These balky prelates resisted Ratti as the agent of an unwanted degree of Roman influence over their Church. Apart from a natural concern for turf, they possessed a certain skepticism of the intentions of the Vatican, magnified by lingering suspicions that the Curia nursed a special solicitude for Germany, the most dangerous enemy of Poland in National Democratic eyes. The evident willingness of the nuncio to make common cause with Piłsudski only confirmed their worries that he was up to no good.23 The fact that this struggle between the Vatican and the nationalist leadership of the Polish hierarchy took place under the obligatory cover of discretion and courtesy—at least until its very public final stages—did not reduce the intensity of the contest that defined and ultimately undid the Ratti mission to Poland.
Among other points, the two contending ecclesiastical parties disagreed on the need for a Polish concordat, the centerpiece of papal policy in the country. Following his instructions from Rome, Ratti lost no time in attempting to prepare the ground for a treaty between Warsaw and the Holy See, prodding the preoccupied ministers of the Second Republic to pay attention to the project and move it higher up their crowded list of priorities. Cardinal Kakowski dutifully went along.24 However, Teodorowicz and Sapieha flatly rejected the line of the nunciature, arguing that any concordat would entail burdensome concessions to the civil power, that the Church stood a good chance of having its essential desiderata written into the forthcoming state constitution free of cost, and that—in so many words—the Vatican should leave these matters to the Polish bishops and mind its own business. In 1919 they prevailed on a number of their episcopal brethren to draft a letter to Pope Benedict in this very spirit, forcing the nuncio to squelch the initiative as directly contrary to the will of the pontiff. This combination of governmental distraction and dissent within the ranks of the hierarchy itself prevented any meaningful progress. By 1920 the pope had accepted the bishops’ advice to await passage of the constitution, and Ratti departed Poland with the concordat still in embryo.25
The nuncio also parted company with the Polish bishops on matters of foreign policy relating to differing visions of the proper role of Poland in the eastern marches. Because Ratti continued to function as the Vatican’s man in all reaches of the former Russia, not just Poland, he retained the Roman tendency to regard the Second Republic as certainly the foundation of east European Catholicism, but by no means the whole edifice. He took seriously his responsibilities as papal legate to the emerging polities of the area, although Lithuania kept him at arm’s length out of fear that he might harbor a bias toward rival Warsaw, while the unfolding revolution in Russia—the most cherished target of Vatican missionary ambition—thwarted his aim of visiting that country and forced him to grapple at long distance with the myriad trials of a church in Bolshevist hands. At the same time, he took care to maintain scrupulous neutrality in the inevitable territorial disputes that erupted between the Poles and the other peoples of the kresy, favoring neither Poland nor Lithuania in their quarrel over Vilna and urging restraint in the Polish-Ukrainian war for title to eastern Galicia. Despite these poor auguries of concord in the borderlands—indeed, more likely in part on their account—and in keeping with his inclination to think of Poland within its broader regional setting, Ratti saw much to recommend in Piłsudski’s vision of a reconstituted Polish republic as a confederation embracing the lands of old Lithuania, a latter-day incarnation of the Jagiellonian Respublica that would shove the Russian frontiers far away from central Europe. While Piłsudski embraced the project for historic and strategic reasons, the papal ambassador hoped that the collection of these expanses under the presumably benign rule of Catholic Poland might facilitate the conversion of Belorussia and Ukraine, quarantine the fever of revolution, and contract the political reach of Orthodoxy once the Bolshevik moment had passed.26 This put him, as usual, on the wrong side of the Teodorowicz wing of the Polish episcopate, which preferred the National Democratic ideal of a more compact, westerly, and homogeneous Poland.27
In the meantime, just as Ratti found himself on unexpectedly tricky political terrain in Warsaw, so did his Polish counterparts in the Eternal City get off to a rocky start in their work at the hub of Church government. First, the habitual prickly insistence of the popes that their diplomatic friends should accord them precedence over the upstart Italian kingdom on the other bank of the Tiber made the task of staying on good terms with both the Vatican and the Quirinale a trying exercise in hairsplitting protocol. Moreover, the appointment of an obscure academic, Józef Wierusz-Kowalski, as the first minister of free Poland to the Holy See disappointed Benedict XV, who had expected the Poles to do him the honor of choosing a nobleman of distinguished pedigree. “What professor are they sending to Us?” snapped the pontiff upon hearing the news. Besides lacking the respect of his hosts, Wierusz-Kowalski won few plaudits for competence or professionalism. Behind his back his legation staff grumbled that their chief tiptoed into the chambers of the Curia as a penitent entered a confessional, overcome with awe, piety, and reverence for the cloth. Worse, they complained, he grossly underestimated the potential for discord between Poland and the Vatican, blandly assuming that religious solidarity guaranteed that nothing could disturb the relationship despite a gathering of warning signs to the contrary.28
In truth, apart from the obvious bond of Catholicism—and even that impressed Polish officialdom less than the pope and his men thought it should—Poland and the Holy See shared little in common in matters of international politics. Before long, grasping for explanations of a growing papal impatience with Polish foreign policies, Wierusz-Kowalski trotted out the theory that the Vatican bureaucracy sheltered a pro-German cabal that had managed to corrode the goodwill of the Holy Father toward the Polish cause.29 The remarkable aspect of this argument was not the thesis itself—just a new twist on a well-worn theme of wartime gossip—but that its adherents should have felt the need to seek answers in shadowy intrigues when more compelling reasons were plain to see. Although the process of peacemaking had not entirely satisfied its territorial and security goals, the Second Republic naturally regarded the European order established by the world war and symbolized by the Treaty of Versailles as the charter and sine qua non of its existence, to be defended at all costs. On the other hand, Rome held the jaundiced conviction that—as a French publicist of the day put it—“the peace of Versailles is not the peace of the Vatican, but rather an Anglosaxon [sic], puritan, and secularist peace,” reflecting the values and interests of a dubious collection of regimes and worldviews. More to the point, in the hardheaded and freely advertised opinion of Cardinal Secretary of State Gasparri, the postwar settlement was simply unworkable and stupidly vengeful, bound to result “not in one but in ten wars.”30 Benedict XV made his disapproval of the Versailles order sharply explicit in his encyclical Pacem Dei munus, issued on May 23, 1920. Trying to soften the blow, the pope went out of his way that same day to assure Warsaw that he was “completely satisfied” with their mutual relations, but in fact the Curia found little to like in Polish foreign policy.31 In particular, Gasparri belonged emphatically to the large camp of diplomats who thought freedom had intoxicated
