A mixture of equal parts genius, magnetism, and eccentricity, Piłsudski maintained an affiliation with Catholicism that was inconstant and peculiar, to say the least. Raised in the faith, he converted superficially to the Evangelical Augsburg confession in 1899 to circumvent Russian restrictions against political activity by Catholics and, incidentally, to wed a divorcée; by the time he returned to Rome in 1916, he had formed another liaison that produced a child well before its legitimation by marriage upon the death of his estranged spouse. Aside from Piłsudski’s personal meanderings from the straight and narrow, many Catholics mistrusted him for the company he kept. His socialist pedigree and growing stature as the main hope of the Polish Left made him the natural favorite of those elements in society most inclined to anticlericalism and skepticism, a fact underscored by the conspicuous irreligiosity of his inner circle of fiercely loyal associates, veteran comrades of his conspiratorial and legionary days who made careers as retainers of the man they revered as their commandant. Yet despite his nonchalance, the scandal of his private life, and the in-devotion of his entourage, Piłsudski never shook off a lifelong sentimental attachment to the traditional Marian piety of his native Lithuania. “I, an old socialist,” he confided to a colleague in 1912, “when I have an important decision to make, I pray first to the Holy Mother of Ostrabrama,” and on journeys he carried a medallion of this famous Virgin of Vilna.17 More than once Piłsudski inspired witticisms along the lines of the timeworn tale of the man who professes that there is no God, and that Our Lady is surely His mother.18
While most Polish churchmen, true to established form, continued to shy away from identification with either of the two strategies for independence, those who did plainly regarded Dmowski and his line as the more palatable alternative. Very few ecclesiastics expressed solidarity with Piłsudski and his legions; manymore rejected him as a radical who consorted with forces inimical to the Church. Sermons reviled Piłsudski as a common bandit, and the combative Bishop Sapieha of Kraków, linking two staple priestly bugbears, accused him of wishing to construct “a socialist and Jewish Poland.”19 On the other hand, Dmowski and his nationalist party attracted considerable clerical support. The two most prominent Polish hierarchs of Austrian Galicia, Sapieha and Archbishop Teodorowicz, were both staunch proponents of the Endecja, although they stopped short of backing its wager on the Entente, the enemy of the Habsburg kingdom.
The crucial weakness of the National Democratic plan lay in its reliance on a Russian victory on the eastern front, where the Central Powers seized the initiative in short order. By 1915, nearly all the Polish territories had fallen into German and Austrian hands, and the Vatican showed no signs of unease at this development or its implications for the destiny of the Poles. In June 1916 the British Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc obtained an audience with Benedict XV and used the occasion to deliver an impassioned plea for the reconstruction of Poland—“that is the key after the war.” The English pilgrim based his argument on the patriotic assumption that the Allies would prevail; the pope parried, “But do you think they will, Mr. Belloc?”20 In fact, by that time the Vatican had settled on the advantages of an “Austro-Polish” approach, foreseeing the creation of a Polish kingdom connected to the Habsburg monarchy by personal rule, much in the manner of dualist Hungary. Such notions appealed especially to Fr. Włodzimierz Ledóchowski, the Polish Galician aristocrat who became general superior of the Society of Jesus in 1915. Routinely described as the last of the formidable Jesuit commanders of the old school, Ledóchowski had a knack for gaining the ear of his pontiffs, and he acted as the leader of a small but active “Polish lobby” within the Vatican during the war and thereafter exerted no little influence on the shaping of curial policy toward his native land over the next quarter century.21 A Poland under Habsburg tutelage also seemed the best solution to Pope Della Chiesa and his secretary of state, Pietro Cardinal Gasparri, a bluff canon lawyer who impressed many as a living confirmation of the stereotype of slippery Italian diplomacy.22 Making the rounds of the Vatican in February 1916 to sound out Benedict and his lieutenants, Dmowski found no takers for his Allied strategy. While the pope confined himself to vague assurances of his paternal solicitude, Gasparri was blunt, asking the Pole the scolding, incredulous question “Why are you going with Russia? . . . You truly believe that a united Poland will be contented under the scepter of the Russian monarch?” When Dmowski spoke of full Polish independence, Gasparri broke into laughter and protested that the idea was no more than “a dream, an impossible goal! . . . Your future is with Austria.”23
Although Gasparri had failed to take into account the steady relegation of Austria-Hungary to the status of a satellite of Germany, his prediction appeared borne out the following November when Berlin and Vienna announced the creation of a nebulous Polish kingdom carved out of districts captured from Russia. Fanfare notwithstanding, the enterprise amounted to scarcely more than a glorified garrison of the Central Powers, and it drew a skeptical initial response from Rome and the Polish hierarchy. The scheme failed to satisfy Gasparri on the grounds that it granted the Hohenzollerns, not the Habsburgs, a de facto trusteeship over a still-partitioned Poland, and even though many of the Polish clergy of the new “kingdom” inwardly welcomed the Germans and Austrians as liberators of the devout from the more onerous yoke of Petersburg, they thought better of saying so, hedging their bets against a possible Russian recovery.24 Furthermore, this rump state fell far short of the ideal of national reunification. For his part, Bishop Sapieha pointedly refused requests to have the Te Deum sung in honor of the creation of a “Poland” that implausibly excluded his Diocese of Kraków, the queen of Polish cities.25 Nor had the Polish Church forgotten its decades of persecution at the hands of Germany, the primary sponsor of the initiative. To overcome this legacy of ill will, German policy during wartime had made a calculated appeal to Polish Catholics in hopes of securing their loyalty. In the opening weeks of the conflict Berlin hurriedly had withdrawn its objections to the nomination of Edward Likowski to fill the long-vacant archbishopric of Gniezno-Poznań, the traditional primatial see of Poland, and then followed this opening concession with a consistent pattern of scrupulous treatment of the Church in its own Polish provinces and those wrested from Russia. Despite these encouraging signs, Likowski’s successor, Archbishop Edmund Dalbor, did no more than to extend public but pro forma gratitude to the German Kaiser upon the creation of his puppet Poland.
In the oracular custom of its diplomacy, the Vatican never made an unequivocal statement of its Polish policy during the war, despite all manner of hints of the pope’s kind regard for that loyally Catholic nation. Even so, by its own reckoning Rome thought it had made its stance clear enough and in later years showed little patience with Polish critics who contended otherwise. In 1921, stung by one too many accusations of his wartime indifference to the Polish cause, Benedict hotly objected that “only the Apostolic See” had declared plainly “that Poland needed full and complete freedom, that is to say independence.”26 Strictly speaking, this was an exaggeration born of pique; still, he legitimately might have claimed credit as the first head of state to call publicly for an authentic, if ill-defined, Polish self-rule that went beyond the tentative proposals of belligerents that would have tethered the Poles fast to Russia or the Germanic powers. Benedict’s definitive statement on the war, his famous “Peace Note” of August 1, 1917, among other points urged the world to apply the principles of “equity and justice” to the resolution of the Polish question. On its face, this pontification could mean anything, or nothing, but those attuned to the delphic ways of Rome construed it to suggest the fashioning of a fully united Poland with at least autonomous standing. The pope received little recognition or applause for his recommendation. Although his initiative preceded Wilson’s corresponding reference to Poland in his Fourteen Points by several months, it was more vaguely framed and gingerly worded than the American document and evoked no more than a tepid reaction from Polish opinion. It made such a poor impression on the Poles of Galicia that the bishops of the region quietly undertook efforts in damage control to persuade their flock that the pope had not turned his back on them.27
Meanwhile, the Church gradually shed many of its hesitations regarding the kingdom of Poland the Central Powers had patched together. For all its limitations, the protectorate of the Germanic emperors seemed an irrevocable step toward eventual Polish sovereignty, and at any rate it plainly surpassed any offer the Allies
