Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter. Neal Pease

other counts, the historians seem to have misread the lessons Poland taught Ratti, or to have overlooked them. One common, disapproving claim is that the pope’s admiration and fondness for Józef Piłsudski made him an easy mark for charismatic strongmen, blinded him to the true nature of the Fascist regime, and contributed to his willingness to strike a deal with the Duce to settle the Roman question. The argument, in essence, is that when Ratti looked at Piłsudski, he saw Garibaldi, and that when he looked at Mussolini, he saw Piłsudski. There is less in this proposition than meets the eye. Superficial comparisons of Piłsudski and Mussolini were a staple of European journalism in the 1920s, but beneath their swaggering, uniformed exteriors they had little in common, and there is no good reason to suppose that Pius XI, who knew them both, was not smart enough to tell the difference. For what it is worth, the pope paid countless tributes to Piłsudski, public and private, and comparisons of his Polish friend with Mussolini are notable for their absence. In the end, the decision of Pius to establish a wary working relationship with the Fascisti was the result of hardheaded calculation with a certain logical basis in Italian politics, not the fault of the fatal charm of Józef Piłsudski. At the same time, the standard lives of Ratti tend to ignore the influence of his Polish sojourn on the gradual evolution of Catholic teaching on the Jewish question in the twentieth century. In the course of his papacy, Pius XI made a number of comments expressing sympathy for Jews and acknowledging a spiritual debt owed by Christians to the people of Abraham and Moses. While grudging and incomplete by later standards, in their time these small gestures played a measurable part in nudging the Church away from its traditional condemnation of Jews as deicides and along the path toward Nostra aetate. The pope himself credited his time in Poland with having given a human face to his stereotyped and abstract image of Jewry, and we may safely take him at his word.

      To the surprise of those who had not paid attention during the Silesian plebiscite, the Polish credentials of Pius XI did not prevent him from continuing his predecessor’s criticism of the Versailles order and related keenness to shield Germany from excessive loss of land on its eastern frontier. Not for the first time, many presumed that he would favor Poland in any such dispute, but before long he gave notice that his Polish education had bred in him a strong dash of skepticism toward the territorial ambitions of Warsaw. As secretary of state, he retained Cardinal Gasparri, whose low opinion of Polish foreign policy was well known. Speaking to a Polish diplomat about Upper Silesia, the pope warned, as had Benedict before him, “Believe me, you will absorb too many Germans.” The Vatican counted as merely a cipher in the equation of European international power, and could do little more than irk the Poles, but Pius faithfully hewed to the line of Gasparri and Benedict XV that the greater good for Poland was to cooperate with Germany for protection against Soviet Russia, and if need be, pay the price of making concessions to its aggrieved western neighbor.⁷⁶

      Pius XI encouraged his reputation as the “Polish pope,” and sincerely cherished the reminiscences of his nunciature that did not cause him pain. Shortly after his election, he sent to his favorite Pole, Józef Piłsudski, a signed portrait inscribed with personal greetings to his friend and his nation.⁷⁷ Settling into his job, he had his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo decorated with scenes from the history of Poland and an icon of the Holy Mother of Częstochowa.⁷⁸ He could be grateful even for his Polish tribulations, he claimed, which had prepared him to be a better pope. “I did not know how to be patient,” he told Cardinal Kakowski, “I learned patience in Poland. . . . I love Poland, as always.”⁷⁹ He meant these words, after his fashion, but his was the stern, paternalistic love of a father convinced he knew what was best for an immature child even though, and especially when, the child might disagree. Two months into his pontificate, 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