he gave an audience to the Polish minister to the Vatican, assuring the diplomat that on matters touching the welfare of his second homeland he thought “not as a foreigner, but as the best Pole.” The envoy reported to his superiors that Pius was obviously fond of Poland, but added the uneasy note that “he has returned . . . with settled ideas concerning . . . [it], and as an expert on that country he is prepared eventually to take very fundamental actions that undoubtedly will be animated by a spirit of good intentions toward us but more than once might present us with an unwelcome surprise.”80 For the next seventeen years, the great majority of its free existence as the Second Republic, Catholic Poland would enjoy the benefits and bear the trials of living with a pope who carried intense memories, good and bad, of the days he had spent in the lands of the Vistula.
3
From Constitution to Concordat, 1921–1925
THE BEGINNINGS OF NORMAL POLITICAL CONDITIONS in interwar Poland, or at least their approximation, had to await the end of the chaotic formative phase of independence, and so it was with the relationship of the Second Republic with the Roman Catholic Church at home and abroad. Not until the restored Rzeczpospolita had ensured its survival and more or less fixed its boundaries could it afford the luxury of attempting to decide the chief issues of church and state: the status of Catholicism within Poland, and of Poland within the Catholic world. Resolution of the first question required a constitution, while the second implied a concordat. These projects were separate but linked to a considerable degree. The constitution would fix the place of the Church in the country, define the state as confessional or secular or something in between, and provide the basis for subsequent legislation. While the constitution was, in theory, solely a Polish domestic matter, the concordat would consist of a treaty between the Holy See and the civil government of Poland devoted to religious affairs and policies of mutual concern.1 Strictly speaking, the concordat was dispensable, but the Vatican coveted such agreements in that era. For one thing, signing a concordat amounted to a de facto recognition of the sovereignty of the papacy—no small matter in those days before the Lateran Accords—and Rome much preferred the bond of an international compact as a guarantee of Catholic interests in a given land to the unilateral laws of a government that might be changed on a whim. Upon the conclusion of these two documents, the constitution in 1921 and the concordat in 1925, the legal and diplomatic foundations of the relations of church and state in the Second Republic came into being.
Tentative, previous efforts had been made to speed the process or settle the debate at a stroke, but these had failed. In the dawn of independence, the Polish episcopate called for the establishment of the Church as the official national religion in keeping with the precedent of the Constitution of 1791, but this proposal elicited such spirited opposition from the Left and the sizable non-Catholic minority that Nuncio Ratti predicted that the famous motto Polonia semper fidelis soon might become “merely a historical memory.”2 Feelers for a Polish concordat had gone out as early as 1918, but had come to nothing owing to the resistance of an unlikely tacit coalition of anticlerical politicians and a faction among the bishops of Poland. Both camps disliked the idea on principle out of hostility toward each other, fearing that any deal would mean intolerable concessions to their foes. The unfinished business of the constitution also contributed to the postponement of a concordat. The dissident bishops hoped that a favorable constitution could take the place of the concordat, granting the Church benefits without strings attached. In any event, no matter what one thought of a concordat on its own merits, common sense suggested that it should follow, not precede, a constitution that would determine the nature of the state and its fundamental stance toward Catholicism, and before long the Vatican and the Polish episcopate agreed to that order of priority.
The regulation of the ties of church and state in interwar Poland depended on the interplay of three entities: the Holy See, the country’s Roman Catholic hierarchy, and the government of the Second Republic. This was largely a dialogue of elites, as only the Warsaw regime was answerable to public opinion in any meaningful way. None of these parties saw the other members of the trio as enemies. To the contrary, all of them understood that Polish tradition and religious sentiment, and pragmatic calculations of shared interests, dictated that they maintain at least a decent working relationship. Still, each partner wanted different things out of the association, and these variations of outlook and goals made their collaboration bumpy and tense, perhaps all the more so since none could afford to let it break down. The Vatican expected the new Poland to serve the mission of Catholicism in central and eastern Europe, and expected the sometimes refractory Polish episcopate to fall into line with the agenda of the papacy. For their part, to the extent that they had a unified policy, the bishops demanded that their reborn republic grant honored status to the Church and enshrine its precepts in law, while hoping that Rome would leave management of Polish affairs to those who knew what they were doing, namely themselves. Meanwhile, the government, as governments will, sought to stay on good terms with the Church without paying too high a price in obligations or inconvenience, trying to strike the balance of mollifying the faithful without alienating the various constituencies that saw clericalism as a menace.
In fact, the Polish political order contained a surprisingly abundant number of adversaries of the Church, and the highly segmented multiparty systemadopted by the republic accentuated their importance by giving them representation and making them eligible for membership in a series of shaky, revolving-door ruling coalitions. Broadly speaking, the Left and the national minorities combated the country’s predominant religious body, and the Center and Right supported it in roughly equal proportions, with the peasant clubs occupying the middle and acting as makeweights. If, as the saying went, the government of Poland in those days was less Catholic than the Polish nation as a whole, the explanations were that the Polish political class was less pious than other Poles, and that Poland consisted of more than just the Poles. The third of the population made up of peoples not Polish and, for the most part, not Catholic had their own parties that normally voted against the interests of the Church, although for reasons of discretion they tended to let the Polish anticlericals take the lead in such debates. The hostility of the Polish Left toward Catholicism was neither unanimous nor unrestrained. All but the most extreme factions included at least nominal Catholics within their ranks and leadership, or felt the need to mute their attacks on the Church to some degree out of deference to a national institution and reluctance to offend potential Catholic supporters. The main home of political anticlericalism was the benches of the Polish Socialist Party and its breakaway wing that rallied around Józef Piłsudski. Generally suspicious of the Church, these groups favored its separation from the state and the reduction of its influence in society and education, in accord with the standard European Left and liberal agenda. A goodly share of peasant legislators ended up on the same side of the argument as the socialists, usually for different reasons. Subdivided along ideological lines, the peasants gave top priority to land reform and looked hungrily at the ecclesiastical domains. Many of them saw the Church as a villain in this litmus-test issue, and the radical Wyzwolenie (Emancipation) faction produced much of the shrillest clergybaiting of the era. The larger and more moderate Piast Party, the customary bellwether of Polish politics, furnished the key swing votes in disputes over church and state. This scarcely comforted Catholics, for the Piast outlook contained a strong streak of mistrust of the clergy as potential manipulators of the common folk. It favored lay control over education and marriage law, and many of its leading personalities qualified as unbelievers or disgruntled Catholics. Even the devout Wincenty Witos, the Piast chieftain, drew his share of attacks from Church spokesmen over the course of his career.
This left a near-majority Center-Right bloc of reliable political allies of Catholicism in Poland, anchored by the National Democrats. A declared confessional party, the Christian Democracy (Chadecja), which drew inspiration from the landmark encyclical Rerum novarum, never amounted to much in size or mass appeal. Founded only in 1919, the Chadecja struggled to pry adherents away from their habitual affiliation with more established rivals. Furthermore, the Christian Democrats encountered the same obstacles that frustrated their Italian counterparts, the Popolari. In a country where Catholicism was the norm and had at least a foothold in most political camps, the point of
