Even so, the reflexive predisposition to equate Poland with the Roman church was not a mistaken judgment, but merely one that meant less in political terms than met the eye. It often proceeded from, or led to, an exaggerated appraisal of the collaboration of throne and altar throughout the history of Poland as well as a lack of understanding that, in fact, Catholicism occupied a somewhat ambiguous place in Polish political culture. True, the vast majority of Poles proclaimed themselves Catholics of the Latin rite, and the link between Catholicism and Polish identity was manifestly real, hallowed by time, accentuated by adjacency to peoples of other creeds, and starkly defined by the recent dominion of Protestant and Orthodox sovereigns over most of the Polish lands. Adherence to the Roman faith resoundingly supported the Polish ethos, then, and in Poland Catholicism bore no taint of association with foreign rule or of conflict with patriotic ideals, as in the Czech lands or in Hungary. However, these facts had exerted less influence on the behavior or inclinations of the former Polish Respublica than might have been expected, and less still on the creators of its interwar reincarnation. To put it mildly, old Poland had scarcely qualified as a crusader or inquisitorial realm, a Spain of the east. Indeed, its tradition had been to approach religion in moderate and latitudinarian fashion. More often than not, the commonwealth preferred to apply a cautious pragmatism in managing its multiconfessional populace, and Poland-Lithuania’s lack of zeal in enforcing religious uniformity had earned it occasional reproaches as a paradise for heretics and Jews. In other words, Catholicism acted as a salient indicator of Polish identity, but not as an element of great political significance or priority in statecraft. The pattern held during the era of partition, when the Church and its representatives played at most a secondary role in the struggle for independence, and the Polish political and intellectual elites that would later emerge into leadership of the interwar republic came to cultivate attitudes of indifference or outright hostility to Catholicism as a dubious force in national affairs.8
So as Poland entered a new phase of statehood in 1918, its Church occupied a formidable but awkward and undefined position in the country, looming as an imposing presence but by no means an uncontested or irresistible civic colossus. In truth, perhaps no other institution could lay so plausible a claim to the right and duty to speak for Poles on matters of governmental as well as private conduct; certainly the Church thought so, and did not shrink from attempting to exercise that prerogative. Too much a fixture in national life to be content with less than a commanding voice in public concerns and official recognition of its moral authority, and far too big to be ignored or underestimated as a political factor even by its most determined antagonists, it nevertheless fell short of the ability to translate its will into law or policy by persuading or overawing the combination of factions and constituencies that regarded the Church as an agent of clericalism, reaction, and bigotry and saw the shadow of black dictatorship lurking behind its every move. Nor did the dispute over the proper role of Polish Catholicism confine itself within the boundaries of the republic, for the Church of Poland did not exist as an isolated or fully autonomous entity, after all, but as an integral part of an avowedly universal religious body with sweeping worldly—and, literally, otherworldly—interests and aspirations. The popes of the day and their ministers in the Roman Curia considered the twentieth century a time of both frightful dangers and extraordinary opportunities, requiring prudence and daring alike, and the course on which they chose to steer the bark of Peter and its implications for Poland brought them into repeated disagreement with not only the secular rulers of that country, but also with the leaders of the Polish Church and the faithful. Such questions resisted easy solution because sooner or later debates over the proper place of the Church within Poland, and of Poland within the Catholic world, became emotive arguments over the fundamental character of the Second Republic and contrasting visions of Polish history. The argument went on unabated and unresolved right up to the day in October 1939 when Pope Pius XII called on Catholics around the world to mourn the martyrdom of Poland by invasion and conquest yet once more.
The argument had begun in earnest roughly a century earlier, during the decades of tripartite Russian, German, and Austrian sway over the lands of the once and future Poland. The conditions of captivity produced the paradoxical dual result of transforming the Church into a far more visible and powerful symbol of Polish identity, on the one hand, while on the other steadily alienating it from those elements within society who saw themselves as the true keepers of the national flame and formed the vanguard of the independence movement. Although during this time a “Polish Church” existed in none but the sentimental sense, having been apportioned among the ecclesiastical jurisdictions of the partitioners, the bond of Catholicity helped to maintain an indelible consciousness of nationhood that transcended the boundary lines of the moment. Apart from the example of the Habsburg Empire, where a common religion contributed to generally milder and more tolerable terms of confinement for Poles in Austrian Galicia, Catholicism and the Church also functioned as an obvious focus of Polish differentiation from their foreign masters and a national rallying point of solidarity and refuge. Especially during the latter half of the century, official anti-Catholic campaigns in Protestant Germany and Orthodox Russia had 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