but as a final comic touch to this complicated story that had begun four years earlier when Benedict XV sent his librarian off to the east, the courier bearing the award to Italy stopped off in Vienna for an unauthorized holiday until almost too late. Once the cargo finally arrived, the Polish minister just managed to dash off and make the hurried presentation to Ratti at literally the last minute before he entered his car to be taken to the conclave.65
Once the voting began, Ratti emerged as a compromise victor in classic fashion. The two leading contenders, Cardinals Gasparri and Merry del Val, representing differing orientations within the Sacred College, canceled each other out in the early balloting while the Polish and French electors worked discreetly to position the archbishop of Milan as a suitable fallback candidate. The deadlock ended when Gasparri threw his votes to the eventual winner, and on February 6, 1922, Achille Ratti became the 256th Vicar of Christ, taking the name Pius out of respect for two recent predecessors.66
The selection of the little-known Ratti as pope startled the world outside the Vatican walls, and much was made of his ties to Poland as observers tried to take his measure. As his identifying feature, they seized on his Polish exposure, exotic by the insular standards of the “captive” papacy of those days, and the Italian press nicknamed him il papa polacco when Karol Wojtyła was but a boy.67 Beaming, his sponsor Cardinal Kakowski declared his nation “delighted” at the news from the Sistine Chapel, and much of it was indeed.68 By and large, Polish opinion turned in favor of the new Pope Ratti just as quickly as it had turned against him over the Silesian question, taking reflected pride in his election and trusting that the country would benefit from it. Most of the press rejoiced that, at last, the Church had a pope who knew Poland, understood its importance to the Catholic world, and would put an end to hostile intrigues in the Vatican.69
Amid the cheers, others were not so sure, and wondered if they were getting more than they bargained for. When a Roman cleric congratulated a Polish colleague on the familiarity of the new pontiff with his country, the Pole answered, “We fear he knows it too well.”70 Along the same lines, no doubt many within the national episcopate worried that they had made an unfortunate choice of enemies by their rough treatment of the former nuncio who now wore the papal ring. The socialist paper Naprzód gloated, “the election of Cardinal Ratti is a disaster for our bishops.”71 As if to ease their fears, two months after his accession to Peter’s throne Pius XI received several Polish hierarchs and demonstratively kissed Archbishop Teodorowicz as a gesture of perdono for the buffets he had suffered at their hands.72 Still, time gave clear evidence that if the pope had forgiven, he had not forgotten, and his two chief Polish clerical antagonists paid a price in thwarted ambitions. Teodorowicz never gained the cardinalate he coveted, and Sapieha had to outlive Ratti to win the red hat that normally accompanied the see of Kraków, and no one had to wonder why.73
Biographers of Pius XI routinely assert that his dramatic experiences as nuncio to Poland impressed him profoundly, set the tone for his subsequent pontificate, and may have persuaded the Sacred College that he was the right man to lead the Church at that moment in history.74 Certainly all of these claims are true to some degree. After all, Poland was Achille Ratti’s introduction to the world outside the cloistered confines of ecclesiastical scholarship, and to the issues that gripped Europe in the years between the wars. At the same time, Pius never strayed far from the agenda of the papacy that had been carved out by his immediate predecessors, and the Polish influence served to emphasize or confirm particular aspects of his policy, not to inspire or originate new departures. For example, commentators never fail to point out his fascination with the possible conversion of the Orthodox east, or his unyielding conviction of the danger posed by Communism, and to chalk these up to his adventures in Poland. In fact, Ratti was scarcely the first pope to feel the strong tug of Russia, and had been sent to Warsaw in the first place largely owing to the lively interest of Benedict XV in opening the Orient to Rome. As for Communism, any pope during the era of Lenin and Stalin would have decried it as satanic anathema, but it is readily understandable that the menace of Bolshevism would have seemed more viscerally urgent to one who had spent August 1920 in the Polish capital awaiting the onslaught of the Red Army. By the same token, popes before Pius XI had urged bishops and clergy to keep their hands out of politics as not in keeping with the priestly office, but he had seen and felt the consequences of clerical partisanship firsthand in Poland, giving him extra incentive to squelch it during his custody over the Church.75
On other counts, the historians seem to have misread the lessons Poland taught Ratti, or to have overlooked them. One common, disapproving claim is that the pope’s admiration and fondness for Józef Piłsudski made him an easy mark for charismatic strongmen, blinded him to the true nature of the Fascist regime, and contributed to his willingness to strike a deal with the Duce to settle the Roman question. The argument, in essence, is that when Ratti looked at Piłsudski, he saw Garibaldi, and that when he looked at Mussolini, he saw Piłsudski. There is less in this proposition than meets the eye. Superficial comparisons of Piłsudski and Mussolini were a staple of European journalism in the 1920s, but beneath their swaggering, uniformed exteriors they had little in common, and there is no good reason to suppose that Pius XI, who knew them both, was not smart enough to tell the difference. For what it is worth, the pope paid countless tributes to Piłsudski, public and private, and comparisons of his Polish friend with Mussolini are notable for their absence. In the end, the decision of Pius to establish a wary working relationship with the Fascisti was the result of hardheaded calculation with a certain logical basis in Italian politics, not the fault of the fatal charm of Józef Piłsudski. At the same time, the standard lives of Ratti tend to ignore the influence of his Polish sojourn on the gradual evolution of Catholic teaching on the Jewish question in the twentieth century. In the course of his papacy, Pius XI made a number of comments expressing sympathy for Jews and acknowledging a spiritual debt owed by Christians to the people of Abraham and Moses. While grudging and incomplete by later standards, in their time these small gestures played a measurable part in nudging the Church away from its traditional condemnation of Jews as deicides and along the path toward Nostra aetate. The pope himself credited his time in Poland with having given a human face to his stereotyped and abstract image of Jewry, and we may safely take him at his word.
To the surprise of those who had not paid attention during the Silesian plebiscite, the Polish credentials of Pius XI did not prevent him from continuing his predecessor’s criticism of the Versailles order and related keenness to shield Germany from excessive loss of land on its eastern frontier. Not for the first time, many presumed that he would favor Poland in any such dispute, but before long he gave notice that his Polish education had bred in him a strong dash of skepticism toward the territorial ambitions of Warsaw. As secretary of state, he retained Cardinal Gasparri, whose low opinion of Polish foreign policy was well known. Speaking to a Polish diplomat about Upper Silesia, the pope warned, as had Benedict before him, “Believe me, you will absorb too many Germans.” The Vatican counted as merely a cipher in the equation of European international power, and could do little more than irk the Poles, but Pius faithfully hewed to the line of Gasparri and Benedict XV that the greater good for Poland was to cooperate with Germany for protection against Soviet Russia, and if need be, pay the price of making concessions to its aggrieved western neighbor.76
Pius XI encouraged his reputation as the “Polish pope,” and sincerely cherished the reminiscences of his nunciature that did not cause him pain. Shortly after his election, he sent to his favorite Pole, Józef Piłsudski, a signed portrait inscribed with personal greetings to his friend and his nation.77 Settling into his job, he had his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo decorated with scenes from the history of Poland and an icon of the Holy Mother of Częstochowa.78 He could be grateful even for his Polish tribulations, he claimed, which had prepared him to be a better pope. “I did not know how to be patient,” he told Cardinal Kakowski, “I learned patience in Poland. . . . I love Poland, as always.”79 He meant these words, after his fashion, but his was the stern, paternalistic love of a father convinced he knew what was best for an immature child even though, and especially when, the child might disagree. Two
