magnified the burdens of Poles in those domains. For all the famous rigor of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, the repression of the Church in the Russian zone typically surpassed it in harshness by far, magnified by reprisal against ecclesiastical sympathy or support for the Polish rebellions of 1830–31 and 1863–64. Hundreds of Polish clergy, and even some hierarchs, suffered execution, banishment, or katorga (penal servitude) at the hands of Petersburg for real or suspected transgressions of this sort. By 1870, all but one Catholic bishopric in Russian Poland stood vacant, and the archbishop of Warsaw was consigned to an internal exile that would last twenty years. Even so unoffending a holy man as Fr. Honorat Koźmiński, the founder of twenty-six religious congregations, spent much of his life confined to a monastery at Russian behest. In such circumstances, the natural struggles of the Polish Church to withstand these assaults and shelter its faithful from religious persecution inevitably strengthened the tie between the Roman confession and Polishness. The apparent merging of faith and ethnicity that occurred in these times gave rise to the doctrine of polak-katolik—the conviction that to be Polish was to be Catholic, and, just as important, not to be Catholic was not to be genuinely Polish—a formula that would leave a deep and enduring impression on the mentality of subsequent generations of Poles. In short, the patriotic devout would not have hesitated to accord their Church much credit for having kept alive the Polish spirit throughout the ordeal of statelessness: Catholicism had sustained Poles in adversity and enabled them to preserve their cultural integrity, while the Church had shared and helped to shoulder the misfortunes of its flock and acted as a comforting and uniquely authentic Polish institution, an irreplaceable example and moral guide to the nation under siege.
All the same, the Church in the Polish lands found itself in an uncomfortably equivocal position, as suggested in the aphorism that it functioned much like a prison chaplain—a solace to the inmate, to be sure, but also an accessory to the jailer.9 While reluctant to endorse the dismemberment of Poland, Rome consistently preferred to swallow it as a necessary evil rather than incur the risks of disturbing the status quo. Nineteenth-century popes sympathized with the Poles in bondage but condemned their occasional resort to insurrection and advised them to accept their lot and obey their foreign monarchs. This guarded Vatican policy stemmed from doctrinal abhorrence of violence, mistrust of nationalism, ingrained aversion to political and social disorder, and, not least, the larger worldly imperatives of the Holy See. Pope Gregory XVI first made this bluntly plain in 1832, when his encyclical Cum primum upbraided the bishops of Russian Poland for their support of the recently suppressed “November Revolt” in their precincts. Cum primum came as a shock to Poles, and the document inflicted lasting damage to the prestige of the papacy in the eyes of Polish patriots. Never one to mince words, his successor Pius IX sought to redress the balance by tending more to speak up for the Poles and chide their masters, but the diplomatic Leo XIII paid little heed to the Polish issue throughout his long pontificate. For one thing, the Vatican saw little choice but to maintain at least correct relations with the partitioning empires in the era of the Roman question, the Kulturkampf, and harsh repression of Poles in the tsarist domain. Craving international support for its disputed sovereignty after the liquidation of the Papal State by Italy in 1870, and beset by recurrent waves of governmental attacks against the Church throughout Europe, Rome took care to keep its customary rapport with the Habsburg kingdom in good repair and attempted to restrain German and Russian hostility toward Catholic interests by conciliation, and part of the price was to mute its complaints about the oppression of Poland. Furthermore, the Vatican feared that pressing the Polish matter might only make a bad situation worse, especially in Russia, provoking the standardbearer of Orthodoxy to impose still harsher measures on Ukrainian or Polish Catholics, or even to mandate a schism. As a result, the pontiffs of the day confined themselves to offering comfort to the Poles in affliction and urging their rulers to show magnanimity, persuaded that any more assertive course would only invite retribution and endanger higher priorities to no purpose.
For their part, the Polish bishops as a body gradually fell into line with this strategy over the decades, both out of duty and inclination. Following the lead of Rome, the predominantly aristocratic and conservative hierarchs of the later nineteenth century by and large kept their distance from the national movement, having been systematically vetted for caution and acceptability to Vienna, Berlin, or Petersburg. Drawn from lower social strata, more attuned to the mood of their parishioners, and less burdened by visibility, the weight of responsibility, and pressure to conform, lesser clergy participated in political action far more frequently, but often in opposition to the recommendations of their superiors. It was both characteristic and ironic that the most celebrated Polish clerical martyr of the day, Archbishop Mieczysław Halka Ledóchowski of Gniezno-Poznań, had been a loyal subject of the German Kaiser who had discouraged his priests against identification with the Polish cause only to run afoul of the persecutions of the Kulturkampf.
While shying away from dabbling overtly in politics or endorsing separatist aspirations, the Polish Church in no way meant to default its obligation to the nation, according to its lights. Indeed, ecclesiastical life in the former Poland was so saturated in the Polish question in all its various forms that it scarcely had any capacity to absorb the debates over modernism and the social issue that gripped the Church elsewhere in Europe. In many ways, the approach of the Polish Church matched that of the advocates of “Organic Work”: to better the lot of Poles by quotidian, legal efforts within the given political framework, assigning greater value to the defense of culture than the dream of liberation. At bottom, the Church best contributed to resistance against the foreign yoke not by any bold or conscious action, but simply by being itself, its very existence underscoring and reinforcing the traits of Polish identity that the German and Russian assimilationists had tried to obliterate. In so doing, the Church indeed donated vital service to the eventual restoration of an independent Poland, but did so almost by accident and even in spite of the counsel of its most prominent and authoritative spokesmen to the contrary, so that it might be extolled as a national paragon or censured as a collaborationist element with equal ease, according to taste.
At any rate, the rising generation of Polish political activists that came to the fore at the turn of the century, espousing novel doctrines and bolder agendas, came to regard the Church with attitudes ranging from reserve to outright disdain. The Polish intelligentsia, the traditional custodians of national values who supplied the ideas and leaders of the new movements, had drunk deeply from the same wells of skepticism and anticlericalism then fashionable among their counterparts in other Catholic lands. To the Left, the Roman Church signified reaction, obscurantism, and bigotry, the synthesis of all they despised and wished to change, although the moderate socialists who sought self-rule as well as social transformation tempered their hostility toward the cloth out of respect for the centrality of Catholicism in Polish life. While the peasantry constituted the bedrock of the Catholic following among Poles, the chieftains of the budding agrarian parties had learned their catechisms instead from the age-old undercurrent of rustic grumbling about the village priest as the freeloading martinet of the countryside.
Of the modern orientations, the National Democracy, the standard bearer of the patriotic right, maintained the most complex and ambivalent relationship with the Church. Taking its cue from its preeminent theorist and spokesman, Roman Dmowski, the Endecja offered a program of integral nationalism, social conservatism, and lack of sympathy for Jews and other minorities residing in Polish territories. Much of the National Democratic platform appealed to Catholic sentiment. The party recognized the Church as a pillar of the social order and by its nature tended to advocate the supremacy of Catholic Poles over peoples of other faiths, and its opposition to socialism nicely coincided with the views of the clergy and many of the faithful. However, much about the philosophical underpinnings of National Democracy contradicted Church teaching, and neither the movement nor its champion made a comfortable fit with Roman belief and ethos. As a disciple of positivist materialism, Dmowski denied the supernatural essence of the Church and remained outside its fold until late in life. Above all, his enshrinement of the nation as the highest good and paramount object of devotion, and his insistence that national issues lay “outside the realm of Christian ethics,” baldly flouted fundamental tenets of Catholic dogma.10 Although Endecja had gradually toned down the blatant anticlericalism of its formative days, it still took
