Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter. Neal Pease

he took care to maintain scrupulous neutrality in the inevitable territorial disputes that erupted between the Poles and the other peoples of the kresy, favoring neither Poland nor Lithuania in their quarrel over Vilna and urging restraint in the Polish-Ukrainian war for title to eastern Galicia. Despite these poor auguries of concord in the borderlands—indeed, more likely in part on their account—and in keeping with his inclination to think of Poland within its broader regional setting, Ratti saw much to recommend in Piłsudski’s vision of a reconstituted Polish republic as a confederation embracing the lands of old Lithuania, a latter-day incarnation of the Jagiellonian Respublica that would shove the Russian frontiers far away from central Europe. While Piłsudski embraced the project for historic and strategic reasons, the papal ambassador hoped that the collection of these expanses under the presumably benign rule of Catholic Poland might facilitate the conversion of Belorussia and Ukraine, quarantine the fever of revolution, and contract the political reach of Orthodoxy once the Bolshevik moment had passed.²⁶ This put him, as usual, on the wrong side of the Teodorowicz wing of the Polish episcopate, which preferred the National Democratic ideal of a more compact, westerly, and homogeneous Poland.²⁷

      In the meantime, just as Ratti found himself on unexpectedly tricky political terrain in Warsaw, so did his Polish counterparts in the Eternal City get off to a rocky start in their work at the hub of Church government. First, the habitual prickly insistence of the popes that their diplomatic friends should accord them precedence over the upstart Italian kingdom on the other bank of the Tiber made the task of staying on good terms with both the Vatican and the Quirinale a trying exercise in hairsplitting protocol. Moreover, the appointment of an obscure academic, Józef Wierusz-Kowalski, as the first minister of free Poland to the Holy See disappointed Benedict XV, who had expected the Poles to do him the honor of choosing a nobleman of distinguished pedigree. “What professor are they sending to Us?” snapped the pontiff upon hearing the news. Besides lacking the respect of his hosts, Wierusz-Kowalski won few plaudits for competence or professionalism. Behind his back his legation staff grumbled that their chief tiptoed into the chambers of the Curia as a penitent entered a confessional, overcome with awe, piety, and reverence for the cloth. Worse, they complained, he grossly underestimated the potential for discord between Poland and the Vatican, blandly assuming that religious solidarity guaranteed that nothing could disturb the relationship despite a gathering of warning signs to the contrary.²⁸

      In truth, apart from the obvious bond of Catholicism—and even that impressed Polish officialdom less than the pope and his men thought it should—Poland and the Holy See shared little in common in matters of international politics. Before long, grasping for explanations of a growing papal impatience with Polish foreign policies, Wierusz-Kowalski trotted out the theory that the Vatican bureaucracy sheltered a pro-German cabal that had managed to corrode the goodwill of the Holy Father toward the Polish cause.²⁹ The remarkable aspect of this argument was not the thesis itself—just a new twist on a well-worn theme of wartime gossip—but that its adherents should have felt the need to seek answers in shadowy intrigues when more compelling reasons were plain to see. Although the process of peacemaking had not entirely satisfied its territorial and security goals, the Second Republic naturally regarded the European order established by the world war and symbolized by the Treaty of Versailles as the charter and sine qua non of its existence, to be defended at all costs. On the other hand, Rome held the jaundiced conviction that—as a French publicist of the day put it—“the peace of Versailles is not the peace of the Vatican, but rather an Anglosaxon [sic], puritan, and secularist peace,” reflecting the values and interests of a dubious collection of regimes and worldviews. More to the point, in the hardheaded and freely advertised opinion of Cardinal Secretary of State Gasparri, the postwar settlement was simply unworkable and stupidly vengeful, bound to result “not in one but in ten wars.”³⁰ Benedict XV made his disapproval of the Versailles order sharply explicit in his encyclical Pacem Dei munus, issued on May 23, 1920. Trying to soften the blow, the pope went out of his way that same day to assure Warsaw that he was “completely satisfied” with their mutual relations, but in fact the Curia found little to like in Polish foreign policy.³¹ In particular, Gasparri belonged emphatically to the large camp of diplomats who thought freedom had intoxicated the Poles and that they should curb their appetite for territory, particularly in the west, before they got themselves, and Europe, in trouble; Poland could not afford to make enemies of both Russia and Germany, and should not burn its bridges to Berlin by pressing excessive claims against its German neighbor in the vicinity of Danzig and Silesia. Sooner or later, he warned, Warsaw would “pay dearly” for its land greed, and might even bring on its own ruin by provoking a disastrous German-Soviet alliance.³²

      Before the year was out, crises erupted on each of Poland’s contested flanks that brought these tensions into the open and led first to the triumph, then rapidly to the inglorious end of the nunciature of Achille Ratti. In the east, where Polish and Soviet military forces had been jockeying for position in the no-man’s-land of the kresy, Piłsudski threw the hostilities into higher gear in spring 1920 by launching an offensive intended to fulfill his goal of securing the borderlands and tilting the regional balance of power decisively toward Poland. The initial success of the drive brought Kiev into Polish hands by May and sparked an outburst of national euphoria. The Polish Church joined in the enthusiasm by celebrating masses to honor these feats of arms, although some prelates could not bear the fact that the accomplishment had made Piłsudski the hero of the hour. When the conquering general received a thunderous welcome in the parliament upon returning to Warsaw, his sworn enemy Archbishop Teodorowicz stood in the hall speechless and visibly agitated, his patriotic pride wrestling with his hatred of Piłsudski.³³ For its part, the Vatican also found itself torn, but for different reasons, pleased by every inch gained by the Poles at Russian expense, but convinced that the Polish advance was a rash venture that was bound to end badly.³⁴

      As if to confirm Cardinal Gasparri’s fears of Polish overreach, the tide of battle shifted quickly in the summer, and a Red Army counteroffensive threatened to engulf Poland and, perhaps, to spill out into war-weary central Europe as well. The swift reversal of Polish fortunes that now jeopardized the existence of the state spurred the local Church into action. Rightist clerical foes of Piłsudski who had bitten their tongues while he was winning now turned their fury on him as the instigator of disaster: at one tempestuous meeting, Father Adamski publicly and loudly branded him a traitor to his face.³⁵ On a more dignified level, as the emergency grew more grave, the Catholic leadership of Poland concentrated on rallying the religious sentiments of their people in defense of nation and faith. In July the episcopate called on Poles to maintain unity and brace themselves to resist the invaders, and simultaneously appealed for the prayers and assistance of believers throughout the world to help them shield Europe against the Bolsheviks, “the living negation of Christianity.” At the end of the month the bishops symbolically underscored their petition by asking the pope to canonize Andrzej Bobola, a seventeenth-century Polish Jesuit missionary who had suffered martyrdom by Cossacks while evangelizing the kresy.³⁶

      While the Catholic friends of Poland abroad had little aid of their own to give, they freely abetted the cause by invoking the greater powers of the Almighty and lending words of encouragement sometimes chilled with the cold comfort of reproachful advice. Churches throughout Europe raised prayers for the Poles. In Rome, the Jesuit chieftain Ledóchowski ordered hundreds of masses said for his endangered countrymen, and in early August Benedict XV urged moral and material help for Poland, once again the rampart of Christianity.³⁷ Even so, on August 14, as the Reds bore down on Warsaw to deal a possibly mortal blow, the Vatican chided the Poles for having brought misfortune upon themselves in a remarkable commentary in L’Osservatore romano. The article had the fingerprints of Cardinal Gasparri all over it. After making the obligatory tributes to the “noble, devoutly Catholic, chivalrous and brave Polish nation,” it went on to say, in effect, we told you so. Declaring the Russian war a “risky adventure,” it took pains to point out that “the Holy See . . . has never ceased to exhort [Poland] to moderation in seeking or even accepting territories inhabited by majorities of other nationalities. These warnings were repeated several times.” The tone of the piece was grim and valedictory, and readers might well have taken it as an editorial bestowal of last rites upon the Second Republic as a favored but errant son of the Church.