the point, as Sapieha noted, so long as London and Paris counted on Russia, the Entente would not dare to raise the bid on the Polish card.28 Even so, a full year elapsed before the Polish Church and the Vatican decided to put their money on the German-Austrian horse, not without misgivings, and only after the firm nudge given them in that direction by the onset of revolution in Russia. In autumn of 1917, Berlin got around to forming a government for its satellite Poland, and invited the archbishop of Warsaw, Aleksander Kakowski, to lend the authority of the Church by serving as one of three members of the Regency Council it established as the nominal ruling authority of its fiefdom. The gesture inspired mutual distaste, for Kakowski bore no love for the Germans, and they knew it. Still, the collapse of the tsardom the previous March and the subsequent advent of Bolshevism had sufficed to convince even the invincibly circumspect Kakowski that the perils of inaction outweighed those of decision: Russia looked finished, and the promised kingdom under German sponsorship appeared to him and the predominantly conservative and monarchist Polish clergy as the only possible shelter against Russian disorder, social upheaval, and the rise of republican sentiment among their own people. Shortly before the Bolshevik coup in Russia, having first obtained permission from the pope, Kakowski agreed to enter the Regency Council—against his will, so he privately insisted, and out of a sense of sacrificial duty to his nation and Church.29 Once in office, Kakowski quickly showed that he had not erred in choosing a priestly vocation instead of politics, and his earnest but inept struggles to manage his new civic chores drove his Vatican superiors to distraction.30
Once having made up its mind, the Church at home and abroad showed an increasing commitment to the Polish kingdom cobbled up by the German and Austrian emperors. In January 1918 the pope pronounced a blessing on the Regency Council, whose composition and policies reflected a strongly clerical streak. Polish clergymen made up a substantial share of the administrative apparatus of the protectorate, and its foreign ministry urged the speedy conclusion of a concordat.31 Responding to the appeal of the Polish bishops, Benedict also dispatched to the embryonic state an apostolic visitor, his house librarian, who would become the next pope within months of returning to Italy.
In any case, the dynamic course of the last year of the war nullified all previous calculations regarding Poland, as the collapse of the Central Powers coupled with the widening revolution in Russia produced Polish independence under the banner of the victorious Allies. The addition of the United States to its ranks permitted the Entente to gain a decisive advantage, while the subtraction of Bolshevist Petrograd released the invigorated coalition from the need to cater to Russian sensibilities concerning Poland and enabled it to outbid Berlin and Vienna for the allegiance of the subject peoples of the heart of Europe. Given their innate caution, both Rome and the Polish Church struggled to keep up with the dizzying rush of events, and neither saw the Allied triumph coming until it was practically upon them. Some Polish hierarchs remained loyal to the old regime virtually to its last gasp, while on the other extreme, Archbishop Teodorowicz addressed the Austrian parliament as early as October 1917 to demand the liberation of Poland.32 Until very late in the game, however, the Vatican and most of the Polish bishops continued to pin their hopes on the Austro-Polish conception of a reconstituted Poland under nominal sovereignty of the Habsburgs, and Gasparri was still defending the merits of the project well into the autumn of 1918.33 By October, however, as the imminent breakdown of the Central Powers approached, Catholic spokesmen at last sensed the drift of things and took up the cry for the unconditional restoration of the Rzeczpospolita. As the unthinkable became the inevitable, and a renewed Poland emerged from the ruins of the shattered empires, the Church lent its institutional imprimatur to full Polish independence. The bishops of Russian Poland went on record in favor of ecclesiastical and political reunification with the more westerly Polish provinces. In mid-month, Pope Benedict announced to the Polish faithful his joy that “at last the dawn of the resurrection of Poland has broken,” adding his “most ardent prayer” that the emancipated country might soon “resume her career as a civilizing and Christian force.”34 On November 1, on the feast of All Saints, which was dear to Polish Catholic culture, the bishops of Galicia called on all churches to celebrate the national rebirth by singing the Te Deum followed by “Boże coś Polskę.”35
The implosion of the Central Powers also brought down their satellite Poland with them and put the faltering and now abruptly vestigial Regency Council out of its misery. Over the preceding weeks, mounting enthusiasm for liberation had turned Polish opinion decisively against the occupation regime as well as the harried regent, Archbishop Kakowski, its most prominent figurehead. Only too glad to be rid of his unwanted political burdens, the exhausted prelate made haste to dissolve what remained of his government. In the anarchic last days of the war, Kakowski coaxed the Regency Council into abdication and acquiescence in the transfer of power as interim dictator to none other than Józef Piłsudski, the bane of the clergy, persuaded that the renegade socialist might best supply the strong leadership that would shield the infant state from the greater dangers of chaos.36
With independence an accomplished fact, the Polish Church promptly struck a newly assertive and confident note, hurrying to identify itself with the revived republic and fill the void of leadership left by the German debacle while the new government in Warsaw attempted to gain its footing. This increased ecclesiastical visibility during the first heady weeks of statehood had various motives: genuine enthusiasm for the national deliverance; the need of the Church to burnish its patriotic credentials and dispel the impression that it had cast its lot with the Central Powers; above all the natural prestige of the cloth, which introduced an element of familiarity and stability into the prevalent atmosphere of civic confusion. No doubt aware of their vulnerability to criticism as compromised holdovers from the partition era, Archbishops Dalbor and Kakowski hastened to scold Berlin for having dealt with the Poles in bad faith, demanding the speedy evacuation of the remaining German occupation forces.37 As they withdrew, hundreds of priests assisted in the reorganization of former German Poland, most conspicuously the young Fr. Stanisław Adamski, who would become one of the more notable cleric-politicians of the Second Republic and survive to endure the persecutions of the Polish People’s Republic. In Galicia, many Poles looked to the imperious figure of Bishop Sapieha of Kraków as the sole figure of recognizable authority amid the shambles of the defunct Habsburg monarchy.38
For its part, the papal state welcomed the reappearance of Poland on the map of Europe with unfeigned satisfaction as one of the few redeeming features of an otherwise deplorable postwar continental order. From its own distinctive vantage point, the Vatican would have preferred to see the fighting end with Russia defeated and the Central Powers intact; instead, in Roman eyes the war had raged on to the death, demolished the crucial elements of European stability, and purchased the downfall of the Orthodox colossus—in itself an agreeable development—at the high cost of unleashing Bolshevism, opening the gates to atheistic revolution. As for the victorious Allies, so the analysis continued, their triumph cemented the hegemony of a liberal and anticlerical worldview inherently hostile to the Church, a conviction hardened by the unceremonious exclusion of the Holy See from the peace councils of Paris. Within this unpromising constellation of powers, Warsaw appeared as likely a friend as the popes were going to find, the natural successor to the Habsburg Empire as the mainstay of Catholicism in Central Europe. In fact, the Curia had accepted the demise of the Dual Monarchy with a brisk absence of fuss or sentimentality. Even before Austria-Hungary had breathed its last, Benedict ordered his nuncio in Vienna to leave the deathbed and shift his attention to cultivating good contacts with the insurgent nationalities of the dying kingdom, “which, at the present hour, are reconstituting themselves as independent states.”39 Of these, the Poles seemed the most suitable candidates to inherit the mantle of the Habsburgs. Aside from his genuine personal warmth for a people so axiomatically devout, Pope Della Chiesa trusted that the erection of a Catholic Poland on the western flank of Russia might advance the interests of the faith and serve as a partial remedy for the deranged condition of Europe. The Apostolic See bestowed formal recognition upon the country in March 1919, lauding it in terms calculated to suggest parental affection for a favored child.
More than most newborns, Poland went through considerable growing pains before attaining
