Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland

Faith and Fatherland

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Faith and Fatherland Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland

B R I A N P O RT E R- S Z Ű C S

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Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2011 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Porter, Brian (Brian A.) Faith and fatherland : Catholicism, modernity, and Poland / Brian Porter-Szűcs. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 978-0-19-539905-9 1. Catholic Church—Doctrines. 2. Theology. 3. Catholic Church—Poland—History—20th century. I. Title. BX1751.3.P68 2011 282′.4380904—dc22 2010023214

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

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1. The Church 2. Sin

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54

3. Modernity

81

4. The Person and Society 5. Politics

158

6. The Nation Penitent 7. Ecclesia Militans 8. The Jew

118

208

232

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9. Polak-Katolik

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10. Mary, Militant and Maternal Conclusion Notes 397 Bibliography Index 471

449

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I often tell students that the only way to improve one’s work is to share it, and in preparing this book I followed my own advice by imposing drafts on as many people as possible. The advice and criticism I received sharpened my arguments and clarified my thinking, leading to major revisions in every part of this volume. I particularly appreciated the feedback I got when I presented pieces of this work at the University of Michigan’s Center for Russian and East European Studies, Institute for the Humanities, and Religious History Workshop. Equally valuable were the responses I received after presenting my work at other universities, so I want to express my thanks to Robert Blobaum at the University of West Virginia; Victoria De Grazia at Columbia University’s History Department; Sue Marchand at Louisiana State University; David McDonald at the Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia at the University of Wisconsin–Madison; John Micgiel at the East European Studies Center at Columbia University; Astrida Tantillo and Małgorzata Fidelis at the University of Illinois–Chicago; Norman Naimark and Amir Weiner at Stanford University; Teddy Robertson at the University of Michigan–Flint; Bożena Shallcross at the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University; the Miller Center at the University of Virginia; the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies at Georgetown University; the Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies at Hebrew University; and the Yale University Department of History. A number of current and former graduate students have been subjected to draft chapters of this book, either in writing or in the form of tedious long-winded expositions, so I want to thank Luciana Aenasoaie, Wojciech Beltkiewicz, Katie Borden, Paul Brykczyński, Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Danielle Czarnecki, Sylwia Ejmont, Meagan Elliott, Emanuela Grama, Robert Greene, Jodi Greig, Edin Hajdarpasic, Laura Hilburn, Deborah Jones, Emil Kerenji, Trevor Kilgor, Dong Ju Kim, Piotr Kosicki, Alicja Kusiak-Brownstein, Ji Li, Kristin McGuire, Anna Mirkova, Patrick Patterson, Ray Patton, Hadley Renkin, Jessica Robbins, Victoria Rodrigue, Natalie Smolenski, vii

viii

Acknowledg ments

Heather Tidrick, Lenny Ureña, Matthew Vanderwerff, Ryan Voogt, Jeff Wilson, Travis Winter, Katie Wróblewski, and Jessica Żychowicz. My deepest thanks also go to the colleagues (in addition to those already mentioned) who offered me invaluable suggestions and assistance at various stages of this project: Bruce Berglund, Jim Bjork, Charlie Bright, Bogdana Carpenter, John Connelly, Todd Endelman, Halina Filipowicz, Caroline Ford, Elwira Grossman, Paul Hanebrink, Dagmar Herzog, Janine Holc, Paul Johnson, Val Kivelson, Andreas Kossert, Thomas Kselman, Ellen Muehlberger, Antony Polonsky, Ilza Szűcs, Msgr. Robert Trisco, Ernie Young, and Geneviève Zubrzycki. Lidia Jurek deserves special appreciation for both her substantive suggestions and her meticulous proofreading. Finally, I want to thank Susan Ferber of Oxford University Press for her patience, forbearance, and trust. She stuck with me even though this book took longer to write (and was just plain longer) than she had hoped. Given the controversial nature of some of my arguments, it is even more necessary than usual to stress that none of these people is to blame for any errors, exaggerations, overgeneralizations, or sloppy reasoning that remains in this book. Feel free to give them credit for anything useful or innovative, but reserve all the invectives and rotten tomatoes for me. Preliminary versions of some of the research contained in this book appeared in the following articles: “Hetmanka and Mother: Representing the Virgin Mary in Modern Poland,” Contemporary European History 14, no. 2 (2005): 151–70; “Anti-Semitism and the Search for a Catholic Modernity,” in Robert Blobaum, ed., Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 103–23; “Catholicism, Ethno-Catholics, and the Catholic Church in Modern Poland,” NCEEER Working Paper (2004), www.ucis.pitt.edu/ nceeer/2004_818-12_Porter.pdf; “Making a Space for Anti-Semitism: The Catholic Hierarchy and the Jews in the early 1900s,” Polin 16 (2003): 415–29; “Thy Kingdom Come: Patriotism and Prophecy in 19th Century Poland,” Catholic Historical Review 89, no. 2 (2003): 213–38; “Marking the Boundaries of the Faith: Catholic Modernism and the Radical Right in Early Twentieth-Century Poland,” in Elwira M. Grossman, ed., Studies in Language, Literature and Cultural Mythology in Poland: Investigating “the Other” (Lewiston-Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), 261–86; “The Catholic Nation: Religion, Identity, and the Narratives of Polish History,” Slavic and East European Journal 45, no. 2 (2001): 289–99. Support for the research that led to this volume came from the History Department of the University of Michigan, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, and the American Council for Learned Societies. When I began researching this volume, my oldest daughter was starting elementary school and her younger sister had just been born. The manuscript grew alongside them; now Sofia is a college freshman, Alexandra is in middle school,

Acknowledg ments

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and they have been joined by a baby sister, Stefania. I hope the long years of work on this book have never distracted me from appreciating what wonderful daughters I have, or from giving them the love and attention they deserve. My wife, Ildi, has endured countless hours of my rambling monologues about the Catholic Church in Poland and even managed to pretend that what I had to say was interesting. More important, she helped me maintain a precious balance between this book project and real life. For her unwavering support and love, I owe her more than I could ever repay. Ildi, Sofi, Alex, and Stefi have kept me grounded and sane (more or less) throughout these many years, and it is to them that I dedicate this book.

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Faith and Fatherland

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Introduction

Without Christ it is impossible to understand the history of Poland. . . . It is impossible, without Christ, to understand and appraise the contribution of the Polish nation to the development of man and his humanity in the past, and its contribution today. —Pope John Paul II, Return to Poland, 1978

Who are you?

Kto ty jesteś?

A little Pole.

Polak mały.

What is your sign?

Jaki znak twój?

A white eagle.1

Orzeł biały.

Where do you live?

Gdzie ty mieszkasz?

Among my own.

Między swemi.

In what country?

W jakim kraju?

On Polish land.

W polskiej ziemi.

What is that land?

Czem ta ziemia?

My fatherland.

Mą ojczyzną.

How was it won?

Czem zdobyta?

With blood and scars.

Krwią i blizną.

Do you love her?

Czy ją kochasz?

I love her sincerely.

Kocham szczerze.

And in what do you believe?

A w co wierzysz?

I believe in Poland.

W Polskę wierzę.

What are you for her?

Coś ty dla niej?

A grateful child.

Wdzięczne dziecię.

What is your duty to her?

Coś jej winien?

To sacrifice my life.

Oddać życie.

—Władysław Bełza, Katechizm polskiego dziecka, 19002

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Faith and Fatherl and It is not enough to call oneself a Catholic. We must not simply call ourselves Catholics, but be Catholics. . . . We must be Catholics at home and outside of home, every day and every hour, with (so to speak) every inch of our being. —Archbishop Józef Bilczewski, “List pasterski do wiernych archidyecezyi w dniu konsekracyi i intronizacyi,” January 20, 1901, in Listy pasterskie i mowy okolicznościowe, 30.

Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński once observed that “nowhere else is the union of Church and nation as strong as in Poland.”2 This would certainly seem to be the case: 99 percent of all children in Poland are baptized, 92.8 percent of all marriages are accompanied by a church wedding, and between 90 and 98 percent of the population will answer “Roman Catholic” when asked about their religion.3 The rituals of the Church have punctuated the calendars of the Polish peasantry for centuries, the clergy have long enjoyed respect and authority, and Catholic iconography has provided an aesthetic vocabulary for art, music, and popular culture. Poles often evoke Catholicism to describe who they are (“European” or “Western”) and who they are not (Orthodox/Russian, Protestant/German, Jewish, or “Eastern”). While language may tie the Poles to other Slavs, religion gives them a mark of distinction that they are quick to cite whenever lumped together with “Eastern Europe.” But claims about Poland’s Catholicity often take on a significance that goes far beyond demographic statistics, cultural influences, or even ethnic identity. In the passage quoted above, John Paul II was evoking an understanding of history that gives meaning to Poland’s past by making the nation dependent upon the Church (as the receptacle for true national identity) and by making the Church dependent upon the nation (as the Eastern bastion of the faith). This mutual entanglement of faith and fatherland gives specific meaning to the past and helps determine what is remembered and what is forgotten. The implications of this worldview were suggested in a proclamation by the Solidarity movement in 1981: Because it was Christianity that brought us into our wider motherland, Europe; because for a thousand years Christianity has in a large degree been shaping the content of our culture; since in the most tragic moments of our nation it was the Church that was our main support; since our ethics are predominantly Christian; since, finally, Catholicism is the living faith of the majority of Poles, we deem it necessary that an honest and comprehensive presentation of the role of the Church in the history of Poland and of the world have an adequate place in national education.4 Unfortunately, some versions of that “honest and comprehensive” history silence as much as they reveal.5 There has been a great deal of religious diversity in Poland over the centuries, and advocates of a distinctly Catholic narrative of

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Polish history must perform some delicate maneuvers to hold up their story against alternative ways of ascribing meaning to the past. The Church is deeply rooted in Poland, but the linkage between Catholicism and an articulated ethnic identity—not to mention a politicized understanding of national belonging—is more tenuous than is usually assumed. The equation of Pole with Catholic does not rest on the unobjectionable recognition that there are a lot of Catholics in Poland and that the Church has long been a powerful institution there; rather, it is supported by a deeply ingrained but highly selective telling of national history. The Republic of Poland-Lithuania (as the country was known until it was destroyed at the end of the eighteenth century) contained a hodgepodge of Catholics, Jews, Eastern Orthodox, Protestants, Armenian Catholics, and even some Muslims, making it one of the most religiously diverse countries in Europe. For a period in the mid-sixteenth century Protestants enjoyed a majority in the Polish Senate, and at the high point of the Reformation there were about a thousand Protestant parishes in the Republic, compared to about three thousand Roman Catholic parishes.6 Even the Catholic historian Jerzy Kłoczowski has acknowledged that “the dynamism of the Protestant movement was so great that it was assuredly close to victory.”7 In 1573, during the so-called Warsaw Confederation, the assembled nobles of the Republic even issued a declaration promising, “We who are divided by faith will keep peace among ourselves, and not shed blood on account of differences in faith or church.” In passages like this, “we” were the nobility of the entire Republic, with Protestants and Catholics alike considered compatriots. In other words, this is not an example of tolerance for a confessional minority, but an unusual affirmation of a religiously heterogeneous community. Poland earned a reputation at the time as a land where religious indifference and heterodoxy made Catholicism vulnerable, but also prevented Protestantism from institutionalizing its successes. Well into the seventeenth century, as Magda Teter has demonstrated, many Catholics considered their Church to be in a precarious position, under threat from Protestants, Jews, and a state either too weak or too apathetic to enforce denominational unity.8 Catholics today tend to believe that the Polish nation is and always has been fundamentally loyal to the Church, mostly by defining non-Catholics as tolerated foreigners living in a Polish Catholic country. For example, the historian Bohdan Cywiński recognizes the importance of the Reformation in Poland, but still insists that the national past was “almost entirely Catholic” and that the Church was “the element supporting the entire Polish edifice.” Cywiński emphasizes that Protestantism was limited to the nobility and the townsmen, while “both society and the state remained Catholic.” By implication, those who joined the Protestant movement did not belong to (or by converting had renounced) Polish “society.”9 This means of sustaining the Catholic narrative of Polish history has penetrated beneath the level of explicit argumentation to the realm of

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reflexive linguistic practice. Even Janusz Tazbir, a secular historian who has published more than twenty books on Protestantism and religious tolerance, called a collection of his essays “Protestantism in Poland” rather than “Polish Protestantism,” while giving another volume the subtitle “Studies from the History of the Polish Counterreformation.”10 Apparently it has become difficult to apply the adjective Polish to the noun Protestant. Religious diversity can exist in the nation, but it cannot be of the nation. During the Counterreformation Catholics tried to take control of Poland’s past as well as its present—to both minimize religious diversity within the Polish-Lithuanian Republic and to write Protestantism out of the country’s history. In 1658 we see the first expulsion of non-Catholics (the members of the Polish Brethren denomination), and a decade later it became a crime for Catholics to convert to other faiths. In 1673 the Sejm (the Polish Parliament) made it impossible for non-Catholics to be ennobled; in 1716 a decree banned the construction of non-Catholic houses of worship; and three decrees from 1718, 1736, and 1764 established religious tests for deputies to the Sejm and employees of the state administration. None of this, however, can be categorized as compulsion within the Catholic rendition of Polish history because its coherence depends on a religious identity that is “natural” rather than politically established and enforced. In the words of Kłoczowski, “The cause of the collapse of Protestantism was not force; rather, today we are inclined to see this [as a result of] the attraction of a vital and renewed Catholicism.”11 More complicated and ambiguous tales—with appropriate attention to the multifaceted struggles between Catholics, Calvinists, Lutherans, and the Polish Brethren—are much less likely to be heard. Soon after the Catholic Church seemed to establish a hegemonic position in Poland, the enlightenment introduced some new complexities. While never as aggressively anticlerical as some West European contemporaries may have wished, the Polish enlightenment did strive to “modernize” both the Polish state and the Polish population, in accordance with new sociopolitical models that many conservatives considered unacceptably secular. The clerical monopoly over education was weakened, the reading public delighted in a long list of anticlerical satires, the lifestyles of the elites grew ever more secular, and the Church had to defend itself against attacks from enlightenment theorists. The historian Jerzy Skowronek has even described a “crisis of religious life and ties to the Church in Polish society” in the late eighteenth century.12 Catholic historians have a ready response to the suggestion that the Polish enlightenment eroded the bond between Church and nation: they point to the fact that many of the leading writers and politicians of the era were ordained. Hanna Dylągowa, for example, writes, “Specific to the Polish enlightenment was the participation of the parish and monastic Catholic clergy. Many intellectuals in cassocks were

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among the creators of the great intellectual revolution that took place in the second half of the eighteenth century. One might almost speak of the primacy of the clergy in political, social, and scholarly life.”13 Poland’s Catholicity is thus preserved, but only at the cost of welcoming some extraordinarily unorthodox intellectuals back into the fold. It is certainly true that prominent figures like Father Hugo Kołłątaj, Father Stanisław Staszic, and Bishop Ignacy Krasicki were central to the Polish enlightenment, but all three embraced the era’s anticlericalism. Pointing to such “intellectuals in cassocks” as examples of Poland’s Catholicity raises questions about what the adjective Catholic might mean—but more on that later. The real focal point of the Catholic narrative of Polish history is the nineteenth century, when Poland was partitioned and occupied by Russia, Prussia, and the Habsburg Empire. Vincent Chrypiński exemplifies the pervasive view that there was a “religious sanction accorded the fight for independence” and that “the traditional bond between the Church and the Polish people was further strengthened during the nineteenth-century struggles for national liberation and social justice.”14 On one level, that “religious sanction” is familiar to all students of nationalism. As Carlton Hayes argued almost forty years ago, modern nationalism is grounded in a religious sensibility, and even the most secularized nationalists mimic traditional ritual practices and theological formulas.15 George Mosse also described modern nationalism as a “civic religion” with its own “fully worked-out liturgy,” capable of determining “how people saw the world and their place in it.”16 On a certain level of abstraction, therefore, every study of modern nationalism must take religion into account, whether in terms of the institutional support given to national movements by organized religious bodies, or in terms of the symbolic vocabulary appropriated by nationalist politicians. But the Catholic presentation of Polish history makes a stronger claim, asserting for the Church a central role in the preservation of national identity and in the struggle for independence. For example, Ewa Jabłońska-Deptuła emphasizes the use of the Polish language in Catholic services and the preservation of traditional folk culture within popular devotional practices. She believes that because many national customs were rooted in Christian worship, their endurance “would not have been possible were it not for the support they received from the Church.”17 Michael Bernhard demonstrates how pervasive this account has become, even outside of Poland. During the nineteenth century, he writes, “the Church was often the only institution that had a Polish character. Thus Polish national consciousness came to be strongly tied to a Catholic religious identity.”18 To be sure, the Church was a site for the enactment of ethnicity, and at key moments (such as during Bismarck’s Kulturkampf), defending the Church and defending the nation seemed synonymous. But as I argue throughout this volume, the bond between faith and fatherland in Poland was more complicated

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than it might appear at first glance. In general, religion was far less important to “national survival” in the nineteenth century than is usually assumed. Even during the worst years of denationalization, the Church was never the only space within which Poles could express and cultivate the myths, customs, or practices of their ethnicity. Newspapers, magazines, and books in Polish continued to appear, and many of them (particularly during the 1860s and 1870s) were liberal and anticlerical. Village public life was never successfully Russified, and as literacy spread among the peasantry so did a strong sense of being Polish. Plays and operas in the Polish language were available to both urban and rural residents, and the stage both propagated and defined national identity. Even a Polish-language commercial life remained vibrant, though in some towns Yiddish or German was more common. In other words, the Church was just one of many sites for cultivating Polishness during the period when there was no Polish state. Moreover, the official institutions of the Church tended to oppose the patriotic cause throughout the nineteenth century, and the Catholic hierarchy became one of the few consistent bastions of loyalism in partitioned Poland. This was especially the case early in the century. In his inaugural sermon as archbishop of Warsaw in 1815, Jan Paweł Woronicz affirmed the legitimacy of Alexander I by characterizing the tsar’s authority as an emanation of divine providence.19 Meanwhile, the secular authorities in the Polish Kingdom (the grandiloquent name for the nominally autonomous territories around Warsaw and Lublin) were far more problematic from the Church’s perspective, as they attempted to mediate all communication between the Polish clergy and Rome and to require all priests to submit annual reports on their activities. Stanisław Potocki, the minister of religious denominations and public enlightenment for the Polish Kingdom from 1815 to 1820, was famous (or infamous) for his book Podróż do Ciemnogrodu ( Journey to the City of Darkness), a biting anticlerical satire that portrayed priests as ignorant and backward.20 With people like Potocki governing in Warsaw, the Catholic hierarchy often found Petersburg a more reliable source of support. For example, when the constitutional government tried to institute civil marriages, the bishops successfully appealed to the tsar to scuttle the plan. The situation was similar in the Prussian partition, where a conservative monarch provided security for Catholics who, in the 1830s and 1840s, confronted liberal Polish nationalists on one side and liberal German nationalists on the other. And in Austria, once the tumult of Joseph II’s centralizing reforms subsided, few members of the Galician clergy could see a reason to oppose the Catholic Habsburg emperor in favor of a revolutionary national movement. Only a handful of priests supported the uprising against Russian rule in 1830, and they acted in defiance of the hierarchy’s strong condemnation of the rebellion. The attitude of the Vatican was made clear in 1832 with the publication of Pope Gregory XVI’s encyclical, Cum Primum, which identified the tsar as a

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“legitimate prince” to whom the Poles owed obedience.21 In 1863, when Polish nationalists once again revolted, the Church authorities were only somewhat more supportive. Perhaps as many as 15 percent of the parish clergy acknowledged the rebels as the legitimate national government, but the bishops remained unanimous in urging the rebels to lay down their arms and consent to Russian rule.22 After the 1863 uprising this loyalism was reinforced by a reluctance to provoke the increasingly repressive occupation regime. The Russification measures of the last third of the century pushed some priests into the arms of the nationalist opposition, but far more reacted by withdrawing to a narrowly delineated understanding of their pastoral duties. A century later, when Catholics around the world were called upon by Rome to publicly confess the sins of their collective history, Primate Józef Glemp singled out the loyalism of his predecessors as one of the few things the Polish Church should atone for.23 The strong ideological link between faith and fatherland emerged in full force only at the start of the twentieth century, and it would be many decades before it became unquestioned common sense that Poles were necessarily Catholic. The Second Republic was only about two-thirds Catholic, but the clergy and most lay activists tended to describe the remaining third as more or less tolerated “national minorities” within a Polish Catholic nation-state. Although many people challenged these increasingly rigid ethnolinguistic categories, with each passing year it became more and more difficult to speak of Jewish Poles or Protestant Poles. Any remaining uncertainty regarding the equation between Pole and Catholic was made irrelevant by the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. The postwar boundaries were drawn so as to exclude almost all Lithuanians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians; the Germans and most of the remaining Ukrainians were forcibly expelled; and nearly all the Jews perished in the Holocaust. After 1945 Poland did indeed appear monolithic—for the first time in its history. It seemed only natural, therefore, when the anticommunist opposition began to draw upon religious imagery in the late 1970s and when several bishops were called upon to participate in the roundtable negotiations that brought an end to communism in 1989. Despite this apparent homogeneity, however, Bogdan Szajkowski misses the point when he writes, “The move of the Polish borders some 500 kilometers westwards meant that for the first time in Polish history, and uniquely in Eastern Europe, the Polish nation was religiously and ethnically homogeneous.”24 In the minds of many Poles today, their nation has always been religiously and ethnically homogeneous, even though a great number of “foreigners” ( Jews, Protestant Germans, Greek Catholic and Orthodox Ukrainians, etc.) once lived within the boundaries of the Polish state. After World War II those aliens were gone and it became easier than ever to promote an exclusivist version of Poland’s past, but the story had never been primarily about survey data or explicit religious

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affiliation. During and after the communist era the claim that the Church embodied the national spirit rested on a historical narrative as much as on any demographic information about religious belief or practice. Juxtaposed against the often crude attempts by communist writers to erase Catholicism from Polish history, we find increasingly insistent assertions by Catholic commentators that their religion practically defined the nation.25 A good example of this came during the debate over Poland’s new constitution in 1997, when Marian Krzaklewski, one of Poland’s leading right-wing politicians, protested what he considered an excessively secular draft text. “A national compromise would be possible,” he declared in a speech to the Sejm, “if everyone would recognize that there are facts in Polish history that are not open to interpretation. One of these facts is this: that Poland was always based both in its system of values, as well as, later, in its constitutional legislation, on Christian values which were, meanwhile, directed positively towards people of differing views, convictions, beliefs, and towards different nationalities.”26 Once again we see an image of Poland as tolerant of diversity but nonetheless Christian in its essence. The “people of differing views” would be legally protected in Krzaklewski’s vision of a future Poland (one might say “tolerated,” in the old sense of that term), but they would never be located fully inside the nation. Significantly, even as Catholic activists like Krzaklewski affirm the historical bond between nation and faith, many in the Church are convinced that Catholicism’s formal demographic strength is an illusion concealing pervasive religious indifference and secularism. In the words of Father Mieczysław Nowak, “No statistic can render precisely the question of faith. . . . For a large percentage of the Poles, faith is only a stereotypical mindset, a tradition, an extremely superficial declaration.”27 For many Catholics the indissoluble bond between faith and nation represents an ideal that is all too far removed from the actually existing Poland, where believers feel themselves to be under siege by modern culture, if not by a concerted anti-Christian conspiracy. Bishop Adam Lepa, for example, has lamented the growing acceptance of a “new model” of what it means to be Polish, a “secular, leftist, libertarian” model spread by “manipulation (brainwashing), pornography, and advertising.” This is not, for Bishop Lepa, merely an alternative approach to national identity; it constitutes a rejection of the nation as such. The international media and the cosmopolitan intelligentsia, he charges, propagate “apathy toward the question of national identity, ignorance of Polish history, [and] a dulled sense of national honor.”28 For those like Bishop Lepa, the link between religion and nation depends neither on the actual state of subjective identity nor on the beliefs and behavior of the majority. The “Catholic nation” must reside in both an idealized past and a dreamed-of future, but not in today’s secular, liberal, decadent world. It is not hard to see why someone like Bishop Lepa would be concerned. Nearly two-thirds of Poles support the death penalty, despite the Church’s

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oft-stated opposition to this form of punishment.29 On the touchstone issue of abortion, overwhelming majorities (from 75 to 82 percent) are willing to approve of the practice if the mother’s health is in danger, if the child would be born severely handicapped, or if the pregnancy was the result of rape. About a third are even willing to accept material hardship as an adequate justification for ending a pregnancy.30 In general, Polish attitudes toward sexuality hardly fit the image of a devout Catholic population. In a survey from 2007, 63 percent agreed that “it is entirely normal that people in love have sexual relations; marriage is not necessary for this,” and 33 percent went so far as to endorse the stance that “sex does not require either love or marriage; even a passing union can provide pleasant, beautiful experiences.”31 Forty-two percent even support civil unions for homosexuals (though only 21 percent would be willing to legalize gay and lesbian marriages).32 On matters of doctrine, simple ignorance is a huge factor: 23 percent of practicing Catholics in Poland are unable to name even one of the authors of the Gospels, and 43 percent of those who describe themselves as “devout” think it is possible to receive absolution for original sin.33 Although religious practice is notoriously hard to measure (insofar as Poles, like Americans, routinely overstate the frequency with which they go to church), it seems clear that well under half of the population attends mass regularly. The Church’s own statistical office carries out an annual survey on an ordinary Sunday in October or November, when priests are required to literally count everyone who comes to church. Those numbers are then compared to the parish registers, with adjustments made for those who are too infirm to leave home. Because priests make a particular effort to encourage people to attend that day, the figures are probably higher than they would be on a randomly chosen Sunday. The slow but steady downward trend is clear in the chart on page 12.34 Even 40 percent church attendance would be extraordinary in any other European country, but it is far from the stereotype of universal piety. The Catholic writer Zbigniew Nosowski recently observed, “Whenever foreign guests come to Poland, they certainly have no doubts that they have come to a Catholic country—here the churches are filled to overflowing, and there are very few people professing other religions. . . . But when considering this problem ourselves, many of us have doubts. . . . The greatest danger for the future of Polish Catholicism is the superficiality of the faith of many nominal Catholics.”35 This brings us back to the passage by Archbishop Józef Bilczewski quoted at the start of this chapter: “It is not enough to call oneself a Catholic. We must not simply call ourselves Catholics, but be Catholics.” Catholic priests and commentators in Poland today do not pretend that their countrymen are “being Catholic” in the sense that would have satisfied Bilczewski, but this does not weaken their conviction that Poland remains a Catholic nation. Just as Polish society could remain Catholic during the Reformation despite religious diversity, just as

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nation and faith could remain bound together in the nineteenth century despite loyalist bishops and heterodox patriots, so can Poland today remain Catholic despite widespread and flagrant deviation from the Church’s teachings. As an ideological or theological construct the Catholic nation is both an ideal, serving to remind people of how faithful patriots should behave, and a transhistorical essence that persists regardless of contingent historical events. The idea of Poland as a homogeneous Catholic nation, then, is simultaneously a claim about Poland’s past and a demand that a particular model of national Catholicism be maintained in the present. A popular slogan maintains, “To defend the cross is to defend Poland,” a rallying cry (as Geneviève Zubrzycki has observed) that is directed mainly against those who consider themselves to be Polish Catholics but who are deemed insufficiently loyal to faith and fatherland by their opponents.36 My goal in this book is to understand that accusation, as well as the counterclaims from those who would continue to insist that they are both good Catholics and good Poles. Such debates are hardly new. As a Polish priest put it more than a century ago, “You will hear, ‘but who doesn’t believe in Christ? After all, we are all Christians, and Poland is above all Christian, even ultra-Christian!’ Right. But nonetheless something is lacking. . . . Not every Christ is real.”37 In strikingly similar terms, a Polish catechism from 1999 lamented, “About 90% of the people in our country, if asked whether they believe in God, will say yes. Beneath these words, however, hide various meanings.”38 Both of these texts implied that distinguishing real Catholicism from pseudo-Catholicism should be relatively easy. Unfortunately, for us historians the task is not so simple, precisely because people use the adjective Catholic in so many divergent ways. For some, Catholic functions as a mere ethnocultural label, with little substantive content in the realm of belief or even religious practice. Many social scientists

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and historians think of religion in general in this way, treating it as a Durkheimian means of solidifying a sense of community but relegating the details of particular belief systems to theologians and philosophers.39 There is something to be said for this approach. For those whom we might call “ethno-Catholics,” religion is no more (and no less) than a marker of identity. Thus “Catholics” and “Protestants” fought for decades in Northern Ireland over issues that had little to do with the legitimacy of transubstantiation or the relative importance of faith and works on the road to salvation. People in many contexts employ religious identifiers even if they see the inside of a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple only at key moments in their life passage; indeed, many people in the early twenty-first century have abandoned even these symbolic occasions. In this sense a label like Catholic can sometimes be empty of theological meaning; it can become a category of social practice or identity rather than one of doctrine or faith. For some purposes this sort of definition is sufficient; for many self-defined Catholics the theological and ideological teachings of the Church are distant memories from childhood Sunday School, and the sermons at mass are things to be endured, ignored, or simply avoided. These are the people who can, without any sense of self-contradiction, call themselves Catholics while using birth control, denying papal infallibility, even questioning the existence of God. Yet alongside all these ethno-Catholics, Catholicism still exists as an intellectual formation, an ideological project, and a set of doctrinal claims. It is useful to distinguish between Catholics (who will always defy our generalizations) and Catholicism (which retains boundaries despite the persistence of disobedience and diversity). Not every self-labeled Catholic takes Catholicism seriously, but a great many do. Such people will argue about what exactly constitutes the core of their faith, but these very debates are what constitute the bounded field of assumptions, ideals, and principles that make up Catholicism. Understanding that shifting terrain within modern Poland is the goal of this book. This is not the story of a religious or national community per se, and the claims made here will apply only imperfectly to any particular individual or group. Nor is this an institutional history of the Polish Catholic Church, despite the attention I give to the clergy.40 Rather, this is the story of an ideological and theological frame of reference as it was articulated by the clergy, sustained and defended by the institutions of the Church, discussed in the Catholic press, taught to the faithful through devotional texts and catechism classes, and preached in sermons.41 This is the story, in other words, of an always unfinished normative project that played (and continues to play) an enormous role in delimiting what Poles can say and do whenever they want to speak or act as Catholics. Those same people might, at other moments, express other identities that exist alongside or even contradict their faith, but whenever they are “being Catholic” the gravitational force of Catholicism exerts its influence.

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Approaching Catholicism in this way entails identifying both the doctrinal and ideological core (that which is taken as given and rarely talked about) and the outer limits of what can be said and done while remaining within a Catholic framework. The former would include anything that could be inserted into the formula “They accepted Catholicism, and therefore they did X or believed Y.” Being baptized, accepting the divinity of Jesus, trusting the efficacy of prayer, looking to the Vatican for religious authority—these would be part of any list of core consequences of Catholicism. More interesting historically, however, is the much larger category of actions and beliefs that were contingently linked to Catholicism but not necessary products of it. Delineating such ideas and behaviors shows us what has been possible and acceptable (and by extension what has been impossible and unacceptable) within the boundaries of Catholicism at any particular moment, and thus illuminates the boundary lines beyond which one could not go without eliciting charges of heterodoxy or heresy. Interpreting the history of Catholicism in Poland by concentrating on these two polarities—the doctrinal core and the outer frontiers of orthodoxy—gives us a picture of a faith that is not just a set of dogmatic assertions, but a fluid and contested formation that is constantly being created and re-created by those who participate in it. Catholicism in this sense sets some parameters on thought and action but only determines thought and action in limited, imperfect, and contextually bounded ways. Throughout this book I explore the positions, attitudes, and behaviors that were necessary consequences of an active identification with Catholicism in Poland, those that were contingently likely (but not necessary), and those that occupied the controversial zone at the edge of doctrinal and ideological conformity. The result is not a history of Polish Catholicism in all its multifaceted aspects, much less of the structures of the Polish Catholic Church or the entire population of Polish ethno-Catholics. Rather, this book offers a broad overview of what different people believed to be mandated, encouraged, tolerated, and precluded within the normative ideal of Catholicism as expressed in Poland over the past century and a half. To guide us through this rhetorical landscape, I explore a small cluster of fundamental terms and concepts, with each chapter focusing on the evolving meaning (or meanings) of a key word or phrase in the Catholic vocabulary.42 At times I tighten my focus to explore a specific historical moment; at other times I range widely over broad time periods. At times I adhere faithfully to a linear chronology; at other times I draw examples from discontinuous sites in order to emphasize the continuity or pervasiveness of an idea. Context, after all, can be scaled in a wide variety of ways, depending on what one is trying to see. The ultimate goal of the book is to grasp how Catholicism was reconfigured in order to retain significance in a modern world that appeared to most Catholics

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to be unrelentingly hostile. The path along which Catholicism became modern traversed the ideologically and theologically rocky ground of the nation. As the exponents of Catholicism in Poland tried to come to terms with the tumultuous transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they found themselves in a disadvantaged position. In the words of the historian Dror Wharman, “One element in the changing faces of the nascent modern has until recently remained, overall, rather constant: the modern, we were told, was secular. In any case, it was more so than the pre-modern.”43 Secular Poles (be they liberals, socialists, or nationalists) had recourse to a well-developed story of progress and modernization that they could deploy to understand what was happening around them, and that story predicted that religion was fated to disappear.44 Faced with these claims, some Catholics advocated a truly conservative response: a thorough repudiation of the nineteenth century’s social, political, and cultural transformations. But contrary to what many historians have presumed, this was not the only, or even the most common Catholic reaction to these challenges. Catholicism had its own modernity, its own appropriation of the rhetoric of progress, and its own distinctive responses to the social and political transformations of the past century and a half. Like many other scholars in recent years, I urge an abandonment of what has come to be called “the secularization narrative.”45 Not only does that prophecy break down (or at least get seriously delayed) in the case of Poland, but it is grounded in a dichotomy between piety and progress that is itself ideologically loaded and theoretically problematic. Moreover, and more important for our purposes, the secularization narrative obscures the way Catholicism itself has changed in modern Poland and tends to relegate the Poles to the status of European oddities, the backward cousins of the more advanced West Europeans. Just as it was once common to speak of a distinctive (and pathological) “Eastern” form of nationalism, so today many commentators perceive a unique, atavistic, not quite European form of public religiosity in Poland.46 I would argue that instead of imagining a depersonalized modernity pushing religion to the side, we should focus on the ways adherents reformulated their religious views as they struggled to make sense of a changing world. Doing so not only makes Poland seem more “normal,” but it help us understand other sites around the world where public religion has remained a potent force. In this volume we will see how some seemingly premodern concepts like Church, sin, and the Virgin Mary fit alongside more familiar twentieth-century terms like progress and the nation. The uneven, sometimes painful process of making Catholicism modern thus constitutes the central story line of this volume.

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The Church

In the nineteenth century’s most widely used Polish catechism, Father Józef Krukowski summarized what he took to be the essence of Catholicism: “How should we briefly proclaim our faith? With these words: I believe and proclaim everything that the Holy Roman Catholic Church believes and proclaims.”1 The journal Pielgrzym (The Pilgrim) was a bit more specific in 1845, when it itemized four key principles from which all Catholic teaching was derived: the immortality of the soul, mankind’s collective fall from grace, salvation through Christ, and the orthodox, apostolic Christian Church, visible on earth in the form of an organic spiritual hierarchy and an authoritative leader. From the hands of that Church the Christian world takes orthodox teachings, the  norms of Christian life, and the rules for religious rituals. From these hands it receives the grace and the blessings necessary for eternal happiness and even for worldly success. That Church, which bears God’s promise of eternal assistance from the Holy Spirit until the end of time, is the only true deputy of Christ, Who here on earth has established a new covenant between God and the human race, redeemed and reborn through Him. As St. Cyprian put it, whoever does not recognize that Church as his mother, with a feeling of willing obedience, cannot have God as his Father.2 A great deal has changed over the century and a half since these remarks were made, but the concept of the Church has remained among the small handful of unassailable keywords at the very core of Catholicism. The faithful argue about the relationship between the papacy, the episcopate, and the laity; some call for reforms in the administrative procedures of the Vatican; some advocate the decentralization of power away from the Roman Curia. But framing every disagreement is an ecclesiology that defines the Church as something more than a mere institution headquartered in Rome, more than a group of bishops and 16

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priests, more even than the entire community of the Catholic faithful. Of course, in casual speech the term Church can be (and often is) understood sociologically, anthropologically, politically, institutionally, or demographically, but we fail to fully comprehend Catholicism if we consider only the colloquial uses of this word. Even when unstated or thinly understood, a distinctive ecclesiology gives form and meaning to Catholic ideas and ideals, and all the themes explored in the coming chapters ultimately circle back to this doctrinal foundation. The very term ecclesiology reaches out in two directions, toward the mundane and the divine, toward both sociology and theology. The Greek εκκλησία was originally a general term describing any group of people assembled for a particular reason, but it gained greater weight when it was adopted by the early Christians to refer to their communities. Eventually the word came to support a complex theology that ascribed special significance to the institutions of the Church and the people within them. A 1958 pastoral letter from Stefan Wyszyński, then the primate of Poland, captured the most fundamental feature of Catholic ecclesiology: The entire Church—although it is made up of sinners and saints, of the cold, the lukewarm, and the hot, of the chaff and the wheat—is essentially supernatural. And although it is a visible and earthly society, it nonetheless is not of this world; rather it comes from the Heart of God that was opened on the cross, it is the fruit of the redeeming suffering of Christ, His Most Holy Blood that comes from the abundance of His Redemption. The Church is an exceptional society, the only one of its kind on earth. Because its bonds are not merely a legal system, but above all a system of supernatural love. . . . We must fully understand that the Church is not just a human, secular, natural organization; it is not some sort of exclusively earthly force; it is not a political or economic organization. Of course, the Church possesses social aspects, corresponding to the demands of earthly life, and although it has a redeeming influence on earthly affairs, nonetheless our life in the Church depends on drawing supernatural power from Christ and on contributing to the growth of the supernatural, Mystical Body of the Church.3 A priest in Warsaw tried to convey this message to his parish in a sermon in the fall of 1966, as he cautioned against basing one’s view of the Church on “that which is human, visible, subject to evaluation, and that which can serve as material for historical, sociological, or legal scholarship.” Such a depiction, he said, would always be “like a frame without a picture, a book cover without its contents. The Church is not just a human institution, but above all a divine institution.

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From this come the difficulties in observing it, in this lies the source of that which we call the mystery of the Church.”4 This ecclesiological “mystery” is akin to the ineffable union between the body and the soul, as Bishop Ignacy Tokarczuk of Przemyśl explained in a sermon to a parish in the mountain village of Hoczew in 1974: The Church is something more than just a human organization; it is something more than just some sort of resilient social group. . . . The Church is like a person, consisting of two elements. A person consists of a corporeal and a spiritual element, and the entire person is precisely the play between these two elements, the consequence of their union, the consequence precisely of everything that results from the union between the body and the soul, between matter and spirit. The Church, dear ones, consists of two elements, two components: human and divine.5 Catholics often refer to this point of union between the transcendent and the terrestrial by as “the Kingdom of God on earth,” but the word βασιλεία, as interpreted by the 1992 Catholic catechism, is more ambiguous than the English Kingdom, implying not only the territorial locus or physical manifestation of authority, but also the authority itself. So the βασιλεία mentioned in the Bible could also be translated as “the rule of God” or “the reign of God,” giving the phrase a different connotation. As the catechism puts it, “‘To carry out the will of the Father, Christ inaugurated the Kingdom of heaven on earth.’ Now the Father’s will is ‘to raise up men to share in his own divine life.’ He does this by gathering men around his Son Jesus Christ. This gathering is the Church, ‘on earth the seed and beginning of that Kingdom.’”6 The phrase Kingdom of God in this presentation does not imply a realm characterized by perfect justice, peace, and order; rather, the term refers to both the reign of God and all those who have submitted to it. Through Christ’s death and resurrection, the catechism teaches, He already “accomplished the coming of his Kingdom.” It exists now, as something Christ himself created by coming to earth, and it exists in the hereafter, much as the Father and the Son are one even though Jesus resided temporarily on earth. As a contributor to Pielgrzym put it back in 1843 (in a passage that could be reprinted without revision today): The Church is the representation of Christ; it is the embodiment of the living Christ in humanity, the purpose of which is to carry out and fulfill the redemption of the human race. In all parts of the whole, and likewise in the destiny of the whole, the Church is therefore on the one hand a creation of Christ, the fruit of his death on the cross, and on the

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other hand it is Christ living in humanity for the expansion of His Kingdom over all men. . . . Since the word became flesh and lived among us, so also must the Church, which is that word dwelling within humanity, be embodied and visible.7 The Church, in other words, is the enduring embodiment of Christ in the social realm, the means of perpetuating both His revelation and His salvific power throughout human history. This is why the word Church is capitalized in Catholic writing: it is quite literally a sacred body. It follows that the Church is by definition the bearer of unerring truth. When Pius IX proclaimed the doctrine of papal infallibility in 1870 he was building on a centuries-old insistence that the dogmatic definitions of the Church were not subject to error; his only innovation (though it was a big one) was to elevate the solitary role of the pope over the bishops collectively in articulating such teachings. Many arguments remained about how infallible dogma should be discerned from amid the confusion of human institutions and individual opinions, but fundamental to Catholicism over the entire period covered in this book (and probably much longer) is the claim that the Church is the bearer of truth and the means of salvation. As another contributor to Pielgrzym stated succinctly in 1845 (a quarter century before papal infallibility was proclaimed), “The Church cannot stray from true teachings—it cannot err.”8 More than fifty years later an identical sentiment could be found in a Catholic magazine aimed at the peasants: “We have to obey the Church always and in everything, because everything that the Church commands and recommends is a command from Christ Himself. Therefore, in the words of Christ, whoever does not carry out the commandments of the Church, scorns the Church; whoever scorns the Church, scorns Christ.”9 This teaching is not an artifact of ultramontane thinking. Though stated a bit less forcefully nowadays, the current catechism affirms that “the task of interpreting the Word of God authentically has been entrusted solely to the Magisterium of the Church, that is, to the Pope and to the bishops in communion with him.”10 As this last passage suggests, there is a strong tendency to slide between obedience to the Church (in its mystical sense) and obedience to the men who make up the Church’s hierarchy. The potential for this ecclesiology to support clerical authority has been demonstrated on repeated occasions over the Church’s long history. As a nineteenth-century homiletic guide explained, “It is not enough to believe in Jesus Christ, to be a simple Christian like the heretics [Protestants]; in addition it is necessary to be faithful, that is, to believe strongly and proclaim everything that the Church teaches; to be united with the bond of the Holy Sacraments and remain, through one’s pastor and bishop, unified with and obedient to the highest leader [najwyższa głowa], the Pope.”11 Jan Puzyna,

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bishop of Kraków, appealed to the clergy of his diocese in a pastoral letter from 1895 to strive to speak with “unanimity and uniformity,” something he considered possible “only insofar as there is, within each one of you, obedience for the Holy See and for this diocesan see. Just as . . . you are saddened and angered by defiance or, worse, criticism of your decrees, so too must you, brothers, feel obedience to the Highest Pastor, the Holy Father, as well as to me, your bishop.”12 Already in Puzyna’s day, however, there were many Catholics unwilling to make the leap from an unqualified but abstract belief in the Church to a specific faith in the clergy. In 1903 Bishop Leon Wałęga of Tarnów expressed his bewilderment at the lack of discipline among his flock. He recalled that when he was first elevated to his post (two years earlier) he had expected “that everyone without exception would be prepared to obey me and follow me, not only when I give an order, but even a wish.” Unfortunately, he continued, the people of his diocese did not meet my expectations and hopes .  .  . There have been cases when my warnings and advice have not been taken, when my words have been misrepresented, and when some even openly refused obedience to me. Behind my back, moreover, they have not refrained from slandering me. Several times I had to hear from the mouth of a Polish peasant, a member of my diocese, words such as “What are you talking about, Bishop? [Co mi tam Ksiądz Biskup mówi?] I have my own powers of reason, I know what is harmful for me and what is good for me.” Imagine, my dear ones, what unpleasantness those words caused me. To such an insult I knew no answer other than shame, tears, and prayer. And the issue was not so much my authority, as it was the soul of the blind ones who carelessly trusted their reason—or rather the reason of their insubordinate leaders—more than the words of their bishop. Wałęga concluded by proclaiming, “It is not up to the good will of the flock whether they want to listen to the bishop or not; they should and must listen, if they want to remain faithful Catholics.”13 Throughout his long tenure as bishop (1901–33) Wałęga maintained this attitude. “We often forget,” he said in a speech to a Marian Congress in Przemyśl in 1911, “that the Church has authority, full authority, which we must obey. The disobedient not only may be punished, but must be punished, and the persistently disobedient must be excommunicated.”14 The Catholic hierarchy have been and remain highly resistant to criticism, particularly in Poland, in part because they have recourse to a potent theology of authority. Unfortunately (from their perspective), the emergence of mass political engagement in Europe around the turn of the twentieth century made it

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harder for any authority figure to enforce unquestioned obedience. Meanwhile, the advancement of literacy made it possible to spread tales of clerical scandals more widely than ever before, and many in the laity began to wonder why they should obey priests whose moral rectitude had been cast into doubt. In this environment it was even more urgent to delineate the limits of acceptable critique, to tolerate some criticism while establishing a line that no good Catholic could cross. Contrary to what bishops like Wałęga wished, plenty of Catholics at the  time did challenge their leaders, and such criticism was tolerated (albeit reluctantly) as long as complaints were couched in a way that sustained the institutional and spiritual infallibility of the Church itself. In other words, it was (and remains) possible for faithful Catholics to question the activities and pronouncements of particular members of the clergy, but to imply that the Church more broadly is merely a human creation, merely a terrestrial network of power, is to step outside the bounds of Catholic orthodoxy. As a Polish homiletic guidebook from 1891 put it, “Be understanding and forgiving toward priests. We are not angels, but people. We carry a great treasure in fragile vessels; as people we have our mistakes and weaknesses. The fact that this or that priest transgresses taints the individual, but it does not negate his dignity or his Holy Order. It is not permitted to judge or denigrate the entire [clerical] estate because of the mistakes of one or another [priest].”15 We can see how this teaching was applied by looking at some of the controversies that pushed the limits of obedience in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, when modern mass politics was emerging in the Polish territories and when old institutions were being placed under a new level of scrutiny. One of the most famous cases was that of a Galician priest named Stanisław Stojałowski (1845–1911).16 He is an ambiguous figure: on the one hand, he played a key role in propagating ultramontane Catholicism among the peasants in Galicia, and he was among the founders of the Christian Democratic movement in Poland; on the other hand, he challenged the authority of his clerical superiors and suffered excommunication as a result. Stojałowski became a Jesuit priest at the age of twenty-five, but after only five years he left the order to become a parish priest in Lwów. He said at the time that he wanted to be closer to his family in order to help them through some financial difficulties, but later he admitted that he had felt constrained by the tight discipline of life in a religious order. In 1875 Stojałowski acquired a small magazine that had fallen into bankruptcy, Wieniec i Pszczółka (The Wreath and the Bee), which he used to spread a combination of ultramontane Catholicism, Polish patriotism, and a Catholic critique of social injustice. Within two years these publications had a combined subscriber base of 4,500—not bad given the conditions of widespread illiteracy among the Galician poor. In September 1877 Stojałowski staged his first public demonstration (in Lwów), and in the following years he repeatedly

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showed his skills as an organizer. He arranged a symbolically important peasant pilgrimage to Rome in 1877, a larger pilgrimage (with approximately a thousand people) to the tomb of St. Stanisław in Kraków in 1879, a huge gathering of peasants in Kraków in 1883 to commemorate the bicentennial of a Polish military victory against the Ottomans, and an even more massive show of peasant patriotism during the reinternment of the poet Adam Mickiewicz in Kraków in 1890. He was also responsible for more quotidian organizational work. In 1878 he launched the Society for Popular Education and Work, which encouraged peasants to set up their own shops and agricultural cooperatives in order to counter what he considered a harmful Jewish domination of rural economic life. Within fifteen years this group was responsible for the establishment of 522 new stores and 898 co-ops. Up to this point in Father Stojałowski’s career he was well within the bounds of mainstream Catholicism. In fact, his first publication was a small booklet from 1872 released by the conservative newspaper Czas (Time) as part of a series entitled “Ultramontane Doctrines.” Here Stojałowski declared that a basic principle for Catholics ought to be “that the dogma of the Church may not be violated, and that it constitutes a boundary which our untrustworthy wisdom and human knowledge may not reach.” From this position Stojałowski extrapolated a set of social and political principles that placed the commandments of God above all human legislation, and he called on secular authorities to accept the vital role of the Church in maintaining “education and social morality.”17 A few years later he published a small book with his own funds in which he attacked the liberals (many of whom he identified as Jewish) for demanding that religious faith be separated from political activities. He considered it appropriate to insist that any candidate for office in Galicia either be a Catholic or “respect Catholic sensibilities, since these are the traditional sensibilities of the nation and the actual sensibilities of the overwhelming majority of the country.”18 Stojałowski’s activism started to worry his superiors after his election to the town council of Lwów in 1880, a position that he used to advocate the expansion of the electoral franchise and the establishment of government-financed programs to alleviate the poverty of the Galician countryside. He became steadily more outspoken, and in 1888 the state authorities tried to silence him with trumped-up charges of corruption. The ensuing imprisonment would be the first of many for Father Stojałowski; by the end of his life he had been arrested twenty-seven times for a total of nine years of confinement. During that first incarceration he served only six months, but the timing seemed well-planned because it prevented him from running in the Galician parliamentary elections of 1889. Nonetheless, four of Stojałowski’s supporters were elected that year, and once in office they formed the Catholic-Populist Club (Klub KatolickoLudowy) under the slogan “Faithfulness to the Church, Love of the Fatherland,

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and Work for the People.” This was the kernel that later (in 1893) became the Peasant Party Union (Związek Stronnictwa Chłopskiego). The tensions between Stojałowski and the established elites of Galicia are easy enough to understand: he was calling for (and getting thousands of peasants to demand) enfranchisement and economic justice. Because the Galician episcopate at that time consisted mostly of traditional conservatives from noble families, these slogans were bound to generate controversy within the Church. At the Catholic Convention (Wiec Katolicki) held in Kraków in July 1893 Stojałowski tried several times to speak, but he had not been invited as a participant and was able to enter the hall only after obtaining a press pass. During a question-and-answer session after one panel he argued, “One can be a democrat and still be a good Catholic.” He was silenced by the chair of that session, and when he tried later to address another panel he was not even recognized.19 In December of that same year the hierarchy of the Church got officially involved in Stojałowski’s case, when three bishops (Seweryn Morawski of Lwów, Łukasz Solecki of Przemyśl, and Ignacy Łobos of Tarnów) issued a joint pastoral letter instructing the faithful not to read anything Stojałowski had written. In 1895 this ban was reissued, this time with signatures from all of Galicia’s bishops. Meanwhile, under pressure from the bishops, the ZSC expelled Stojałowski, who responded by creating a rival organization called the Christian-Populist Party (Stronnictwo Chrześcijańsko-Ludowe). Confronted by continued opposition from the bishops, Stojałowski began to question their authority in a more systematic way. He first did so anonymously in 1894 with a small booklet entitled The Word of a Peasant in Response to the Word of the Bishops. Here he attacked the bishops for thinking of themselves as “princes of the Church.” The clergy and the laity, he believed, ought to be organized as a brotherhood rather than a feudal hierarchy. The bishops, Stojałowski wrote, “sat on high in their diocesan sees, never getting close to the people, not seeing what hurts them, or what they think and feel. . . . [The bishops] think that among their flock they still have only foolish and ignorant cattle who will fall in line the moment someone says ‘the bishop says so, the bishop commands it.’ But, thank God, things are not like that any longer.” Stojałowski tried to remain within Catholic orthodoxy by acknowledging episcopal authority in principle, but he crossed the line when he wrote: We know that the Lord God said to the Apostles and to their heirs, the bishops, “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” But is that supposed to happen according to capriciousness and personal tastes? Or rather, according to an adequate and just assessment of the matter, so that even if the Pope himself excommunicates someone, but without foundation—and unjustly—then even such a papal condemnation means nothing.20

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A year later (1895) Stojałowski stepped out from behind the mask of anonymity and made the same arguments in an article published under his own name.21 He got to test his theory about the validity of excommunication when, shortly after the second article appeared, that was precisely the punishment he received. His response came in the form of a brochure entitled We Won’t Go to Canossa, in which he claimed not to care about the excommunication because the bishops responsible for it did not represent the true Church. As he put it, “A Catholic does not listen blindly [sic] to anyone. . . . A blind faith is a bad faith.”22 His defiance was short-lived, though, and within a year he had appealed his excommunication to the Vatican. He was offered a reprieve on the condition that he pledge obedience to his diocesan superiors and to Rome; once he did so (in September 1897) the excommunication was lifted. After this Stojałowski remained politically active (getting elected to the Austrian Parliament in 1898 and to the Galician Assembly in 1900), and he continued to advocate peasant rights until his death from stomach cancer in 1911. During the last decade of his life, however, he frequently affirmed the sanctity of the Church, shifting the main target of his attacks from the bishops to the Jews.23 Taken alone, Stojałowski’s advocacy of social reform was not enough to get him into so much trouble. As we will see in chapter 4, there were plenty of prominent Catholics at the time—including, most famously, Archbishop (now Saint) Józef Bilczewski of Lwów—whose desire for social and political reform was every bit as radical as Stojałowski’s. Such people were also controversial in Catholic circles, but they were able to safely publish their writings and even pursue successful clerical careers. At the Catholic Convention of 1893, where Stojałowski was silenced, many speakers called for far-reaching social change and political democratization. Stojałowski’s message angered some conservatives, but it was not a sufficient cause for excommunication. He crossed the line when he turned his critique of authority onto the Church, and specifically when he implied that individual members of the laity could judge whether a pope was just or unjust. This was a profound transgression, but Stojałowski had not burned all his bridges. He was eventually able to reconcile with Rome because even as he attacked the hierarchy without distinction, he never really challenged the fundamental perfection and infallibility of the Church itself, in its transcendent aspect. Stojałowski was always primarily interested in social reform, not ecclesiological critique, so backtracking on this matter was not terribly difficult. Father Izydor Wysłouch (1869–1937), in contrast, took that fatal extra step.24 His transgressions were similar to those of Stojałowski, but unlike his Galician counterpart he embraced his own excommunication and left the Church. After graduating from Warsaw University with a degree in history, Wysłouch joined the Capuchin order and devoted himself to ministering to that city’s urban poor. He became famous locally as a dynamic preacher, social activist, and author

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(using the pseudonym “Antoni Szech,” under which he became famous). He provoked controversy when he spoke at some socialist rallies during the 1905 Revolution, after which his superiors sent him to a Jesuit academy in Innsbruck in 1906 so that he might meditate on his errors. He returned to Warsaw after a year, only to resume his activism with the same vigor and with increasingly intemperate language. In 1908 he was expelled from the Capuchin order, and shortly thereafter he was excommunicated.25 If we compare Szech’s writing with that of other Catholic social reformers at the time, we can see that the problem was not his critique of the rich and powerful, nor was it his dedication to evangelical and charitable work among the poor. As in Stojałowski’s case, this earned him some political enemies but did not justify excommunication, because plenty of other priests of his day were doing the same. Szech’s inexcusable sin was to situate his calls for social change within a story of historical progress that eventually encompassed the Church itself. That pushed him beyond social reform to ecclesiological heresy. Szech believed that Catholics had a mandate to change the world. “The task of the Church,” he wrote in 1906, “is not only to preserve and proclaim the principles of Christ’s Gospels, but also to strive so that those principles penetrate ever more deeply into human souls and sink in ever more deeply into institutions—into the law, into the governing of states and nations.”26 Any Catholic at the time would have agreed that the state should encourage Christian behavior and facilitate evangelical efforts, but Szech linked this demand to a teleological scheme that pushed him toward heresy. He believed that as humanity progressed and social forms more closely adhered to God’s law, the Church itself would have to change to meet new needs. In fact, he contended, the reactionary politics, corruption, and doctrinal obscurity of the hierarchy had left the Church’s future in doubt. God will win in the end, that’s certain. But will He indeed win with us [Catholics], and does he indeed sympathize with our ignorance and our conceit and our contempt for others, and our Phariseeism? That’s the big question. . . . God will be victorious, but necessarily through us? Might he not utilize others, maybe indeed those whom we hold in contempt, those who don’t even acknowledge [the Church], but who nonetheless, insofar as they love humanity and seek the truth, and are of good will, belong to Him and in spirit might be closer [to Him] than we are?27 While in Innsbruck he answered these questions by writing a book called The Religion of Humanity, which he did not publish until more than a year after he was expelled from the priesthood. As the title suggests, Szech took an anthropological

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approach to the Church, demoting it from the transcendent place it enjoyed within Catholic ecclesiology to a position of human transience. “That religious system will be best,” he wrote, “which under the given circumstances best corresponds to the level of development of man—which aids him most in perfecting himself, in the development of the spirit. . . . Toleration will cease to be an empty phrase only when people recognize the aforementioned truth. Namely: that everyone ought to take the path to spiritual development that best suits him.”28 Szech attacked one of the handful of principles on which Church officials could not compromise, lest they abandon one of their most important ramparts: the idea that the Church was the Kingdom of God on earth, the embodiment of God’s will and revelation. Szech, in contrast, perceived that kingdom in socioeconomic terms, as a terrestrial reign of divine justice that we would attain at some point in the future. The Church, in his scheme, mattered only insofar as it contributed to this project. As his opponents emphasized, this was an ecclesiological step too far. He quickly learned just how far: in 1908 he described the “piles” of letters he received, addressed to “Servant of the devil,” “Master of the Masons,” “Traitor of the Fatherland,” “Consolation of the Jews,” “Traitor of your order,” and so on.29 The charges against him were summarized in a book by Father Jan Gnatowski, who argued that the Church’s hierarchal institutions were immutable: That is how Christ founded it; that is how it is, and it cannot be otherwise. The difference between [Catholicism] and Protestantism is that in Protestantism the relationship of man to God and to his own conscience is measured individually and subjectively, whereas in Catholicism it is collective and subordinate to the authorities solely designated to decide such matters. Therefore the internal structure of Catholicism must be strictly monarchic, and even autocratic.30 For Gnatowski the Church was much more than a moral watchdog, much more than a guarantor of social order, more even than a distributor of sacraments (though all these were important). The Catholic Church was the living representation of God’s will on earth, so from Gnatowski’s perspective, Szech was not merely criticizing the clergy, he was denying ecclesiology as such by seeing in the Church only a sociological, political, and devotional community, only an institutional hierarchy made by humans to serve humanity. An even more dramatic challenge to Catholic ecclesiology in early twentiethcentury Poland came from the Mariavite movement, a group of Catholics who used an eclectic mix of devotional traditions to promote an intensely emotional religious revival.31 The movement was founded by a nun named Feliksa Kozłowska after she received a revelation in 1893 instructing her to combat, as

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she put it, “the universal corruption of the world, . . . the laxity of morals among the clergy, and the sins committed by the priests.”32 She stressed a personal relationship with the divine facilitated by devotional medallions (she believed these could focus the energy of prayer) and by frequent participation in Holy Communion and other rites associated with the Eucharist. She also preached rigorous personal rectitude and expected priests to serve as models of righteousness. Her criticism of the clergy was particularly severe, as she charged both rank-and-file priests and the hierarchy with moral turpitude and inadequate spiritual leadership. According to Kozłowska, Jesus told her in a personal revelation, “I shall stir the people against the priests and they will throw them out as I once threw out the tradesmen from the Temple of Jerusalem, because they serve Me for money and honors.”33 This, she believed, justified the formation of a new religious order for both laity and priests dedicated to the spiritual renewal of the Church. She called her order the Mariavites (Mariawici), from the Latin phrase Mariae vitam imitans (in imitation of the life of Mary). Accompanied by seventeen priests from her movement, Kozłowska personally met with the newly elevated Pope Pius X on August 13, 1903, to plead for official recognition of her order. In going directly to Rome she deliberately bypassed the Polish hierarchy, convinced that their moral degradation was at the root of the problem she was trying to solve. The response was not what she had hoped for: Pius issued a formal repudiation of the Mariavites, and in 1904 he banned all contact with Sister Kozłowska. Most Mariavite priests were transferred to isolated rural areas, and in 1906 those who remained recalcitrant were suspended from the clergy. The pope then issued the encyclical Tribus Circiter on April 5, 1906, condemning the Mariavites and promising excommunication to all those who refused to recant their errors. This didn’t seem to help much, because the Mariavite movement grew rapidly among both the laity and the lower clergy in the Russian partition of Poland, with almost 59,000 members in 1907, 83,000 in 1909, and 156,400 in 1910. Some outbreaks of violence ensued when Mariavites and Roman Catholics struggled over control of individual churches; one such battle in the town of Leszno left six dead and twenty-seven wounded, and in Łódź another five were killed. Father Czesław Bogdalski, a Franciscan from Kraków, led a group of charismatic missionary preachers north during those years, traveling around the countryside giving sermons, hearing confessions, recruiting people into devotional organizations, and encouraging them to publicly renounce any affiliation with the Mariavites. As a sign of their orthodoxy, Bogdalski’s missionaries urged their audiences to turn over any Marian medals given to them by Kozłowska’s followers. The Franciscans collected 41,000 such medals during a three-month tour in 1906, and another 10,907 the following year. Over a three-year period they delivered 2,612 sermons and heard 511,154 confessions, by their own scrupulous count.34 All this slowed the growth of the Mariavite movement, but even

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in the 1920s they still had sixty-seven parishes and 42,000 members. To this day an estimated 28,000 Mariavites continue to propagate Kozłowska’s message.35 On the surface the Mariavites were simply repeating orthodox Catholic teachings; the devotional practices they promoted were well-established and uncontroversial, and their moral strictures accorded generally with the standards of the day (though they were certainly more rigorous than most). In other circumstances the Church was even willing to endorse personal revelations akin to Kozłowska’s, and in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth many new religious orders similar to the Mariavites were authorized. In Tribus Circiter Pius X recognized that much of what the Mariavites were doing was unimpeachable on the surface, but he believed that their virtue was undermined by their improper attacks on the hierarchy of the Church. Relying on an alleged mandate from God, they set themselves to promote without discrimination and of their own initiative among the people frequent exercises of piety (highly commendable when rightly carried out), especially the adoration of the Most Holy Sacrament and the practice of frequent communion; but at the same time they made the gravest charges against all priests and bishops who ventured to express any doubt about the sanctity and divine election of [Kozłowska], or show any hostility to the society of the Mariavites.36 The various dioceses of Poland issued their own statements of condemnation, echoing Tribus Circiter and confirming the primary sin of the Mariavites. A special synod of the Przemyśl diocese, for example, stated, “[The Mariavites’] main error is to negate hierarchical authority and the primacy of the Holy Father.”37 A Catholic periodical written for the peasantry made the same point in a more vulgar manner, arguing that the Mariavites preferred to follow “that old hag, Kozłowska” rather than the pope, “who is recognized throughout the world as an authority.”38 There is an easy cynical interpretation of this episode: the Mariavites were being reprimanded for challenging their superiors. It seemed to be a simple case of authority versus resistance, the powerful versus the subaltern. It was that, to be sure, but in a Catholic context this revolt had an additional layer of meaning. The problem was not just that Kozłowska had criticized high-ranking members of the clergy; this would have generated controversy under any circumstances but would not on its own lead to the deployment of a heavy weapon like collective excommunication. Much worse was Kozłowska’s radical ecclesiology, according to which God’s revelation flowed not through the Church, but directly to individuals. The key phrase in Tribus Circiter was “without discrimination and of their own initiative.” The Mariavites did not merely bypass the hierarchical

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institutions of the Church; they denied that doctrinal and devotional issues ought to be channeled through them. They saw priests as moral guides, justified by their personal holiness rather than their office, whereas Pius X was reaffirming the well-established Catholic teaching that priestly offices retained their sacred power even if the individuals holding them were flawed. Once again the issue at stake was the transcendent power of the Church as such—a power that should be honored regardless of the virtue (or lack thereof) of particular members of the clergy. This was the question at the center of a much broader controversy that was simmering in Western Europe at exactly the same time. Only a year after Tribus Circiter, Pius X responded to the so-called Catholic modernists by issuing the encyclicals Pascendi Dominici Gregis and Lamentabili Sane Exitu and by excommunicating a cluster of intellectuals whom he charged with undermining the sacred authority of the Church. In 1910 the Vatican even instituted the “Oath against Modernism” that every priest for more than half a century to follow would have to recite upon ordination. In about a thousand words the Oath summarized all the things that a faithful Roman Catholic was required to believe, starting with the pledge “I, [name], firmly embrace and accept each and every definition that has been set forth and declared by the unerring teaching authority of the Church, especially those principal truths which are directly opposed to the errors of this day.” One of the most important of these truths was an unquestioning faith in both “the supernatural origin of Catholic tradition” and the ongoing transmission of revelation through that tradition. Catholicism, unlike some variants of Protestantism, does not hold that God’s revelation is entirely contained within the Holy Scripture. Rather, the Church is both a divine depository and (even more) a living embodiment of the reign of God on earth. Thus, all those who took the Oath promised to “hold to [their] dying breath the belief of the Fathers in the charism of truth, which certainly is, was, and always will be in the succession of the episcopacy from the apostles.”39 This is not to say that each and every bishop was infallible or that every utterance of the pope was beyond question. The Oath did affirm, however, that the form of the Church— the collective “succession of the episcopacy”—was established by God to convey His ongoing revelation to mankind. It followed that these structures had to be honored even if the individuals within them were flawed, and God would ensure that the truth would remain intact through all such human imperfections.40 Back in Poland, a monk named Honorat Koźmiński exemplified how one could advocate moral rigor, devotional innovation, and even institutional reform while remaining within the bounds of Catholic orthodoxy. Koźmiński was in an awkward position, because he was closely connected to Kozłowska and, as a Capuchin, even had indirect links to Szech. For several decades he had been spearheading the creation of new female religious communities. He first became

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interested in sponsoring women’s orders in 1855, when he assisted Zofia Truszkowska in the formation of a new contemplative and charitable order called the Felician Sisters. When a Polish uprising broke out in the Russian Empire in 1863, the Felicians gave medical care to the rebels and as a result were swept up in a massive wave of monastic closures in 1864. Truszkowska responded by moving to Kraków (in the Austrian partition) to continue her work. Koźmiński, however, decided to remain in Warsaw with a plan to cultivate a network of secret religious communities based on the model of the “tertiary orders.” These groups, named after the Third Order of St. Francis, consisted of lay people who remained in the secular world but agreed to follow particularly rigorous devotional and moral rules. Members would pray and attend mass together, commit themselves to works of charity and devotion, and strive to exemplify a higher standard of moral purity. Because they remained in their lay occupations and lived outside traditional religious houses, they could not easily be detected by the Russian authorities.41 The Mariavites, however, were a major black spot on Koźmiński’s résumé, because he was the personal confessor for the young Feliksa Kozłowska and the two of them had jointly founded a chapter of the Poor Sisters of St. Clare in 1887. Initially Koźmiński had approved of Kozłowska’s moral rigor and her efforts to popularize the adoration of the Eucharist. He even shared her dismay over the moral failings of the clergy. In other words, although he was never directly involved with the Mariavite movement as such, he was generally identified with the sort of devotional enthusiasm that Kozłowska exemplified. The papal condemnation of 1906 thus left him vulnerable, and he scrambled to distance himself from his former colleague and to immunize the other tertiary communities he had helped to create. He succeeded: not only did his orders retain official sanction, but Koźmiński himself was eventually beatified (by Pope John Paul II in 1988). In a small book called The Truth about the Mariavites, Koźmiński described how some minor doctrinal errors in Kozłowska’s thinking grew over time into “Satanic delusions.” At the core of the Mariavite movement, he argued, was an ecclesiological error: “The rebellious priests taught in a heretical manner that those bishops and priests who did not live in accordance with what [the Mariavites] considered to be appropriate rules for a chaplain lost the power to govern [their subordinates]. Only people with small minds [ludzie krótkiego rozumu] could think up something like that, or believe it, because what would happen if spiritual power were tied to virtue? There would be no certainty for the faithful.”42 This is a crucial point. For centuries the Church has resisted any resurgence of the so-called Donatist heresy, named after Donatus Magnus, the founder of a  Christian sect that flourished briefly in northern Africa in the fourth century. Donatus had maintained that a sacrament performed by a sinner would be

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rendered invalid, and that as a consequence priests were required to lead absolutely spotless lives. He was renounced by the Synod of Arles of 314 because his teachings implied that nearly every sacramental act was void (no one, after all, was completely blameless). This argument reemerged from time to time throughout the history of Christianity, most famously among the Hussites of Bohemia in the fifteenth century. The Catechism of the Council of Trent issued a clear statement on this matter in 1566: “Representing as he does, in the discharge of his sacred functions, not his own, but the person of Christ, the minister of the Sacraments, be he good or bad, validly consecrates and confers the Sacraments.”43 It is the Church as a whole that guarantees the spiritual power of communion, absolution, and baptism; if the individual priest who is performing the ritual does so with a tarnished soul, the Church that stands behind him still ensures that the sacrament is valid. This is not theological hairsplitting; it is a doctrinal cornerstone without which the whole edifice of Catholic teaching begins to totter. The role of the priest within Catholicism differs significantly from the function of a minister in most Protestant denominations. He is more than the administrator of a parish community, more than a facilitator during religious meetings or services, and certainly more than a teacher and spiritual counselor. He is all those things, but above everything else the priest is empowered to perform sacramental acts that channel God’s grace. According to Catholic doctrine, the clerical estate is not a social creation, not a mere administrative office within a man-made institution; it is part of the sacred order created by Christ. As Bishop Leon Wałęga put it succinctly in a 1911 sermon, “Without the clergy there is no Catholicism.”44 Without a priest the most profound rituals of the mass become empty words and the encounter with God captured in the mystery of transubstantiation is lost. As Wałęga put it on another occasion, “People can be wiser, more learned, and even more devout than a priest, but the priest carries in his soul something supernatural, something that distinguishes him from all laypeople—that is, the character of the sacrament of Holy Orders, which one cannot obtain from learning nor from any natural authority.”45 This vital doctrinal point clarifies why the Mariavites, Antoni Szech, and the modernists more generally were dealt with so harshly. Kozłowska and her followers were accused of demanding that priests be morally pure, and they refused to recognize the authority of anyone in the hierarchy who fell short of their rigorous moral standards. They were, in effect, repudiating the ecclesiological validity of the clergy by implicitly denying that the Church’s sacramental power alone was adequate to legitimate a priest. To be sure, Church authorities are also motivated by less lofty considerations; as has become all too evident at the start of the twenty-first century, there is a sort of clerical omertà that inhibits the public acknowledgment of any sin or crime. As is usually the case, however, such mundane defensiveness is supported by more subtle theological reasoning, and

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without the latter the former would be much harder to sustain. Ecclesiology has helped demarcate the boundary line separating acceptable (albeit controversial) criticism from the attacks that provoked excommunication for Stojałowski, Szech, and the Mariavites. Bishop Wałęga described this boundary when he said in a sermon, “You have the right to demand of the clergy a good example and greater perfection in their lives, for we are the servants of your souls, but alongside that, we are by the will of God your spiritual guides, mediators between God and you, we are your spiritual superiors or, as they used to say, your spiritual fathers.”46 The way to remain within the Catholic fold was to demonstrate sincere respect for the office of the clergy whenever criticizing a specific priest, because the former had to remain holy even if the latter was mired in sin. The most popular catechism of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Poland repeated Wałęga’s familial metaphor: “Even if [priests] do evil things (God forbid), the cloak of mercy protects the good parishioner from the faults of his spiritual father, and [the parishioner] will pray for [the priest], so that God will cause him to repent, because he knows that even a sinful father does not cease to be a father.”47 Addressing the controversy over Antoni Szech, one priest admitted that there were many problems with the clergy and with the organization of the Church: “Yet we are not empowered to fix them, because they cannot always be fixed, since the Church, having within itself earthly elements, being composed of humans, succumbs in its human life to mistakes and imperfections while preserving without error the principles of the faith.”48 To push beyond the condemnation of individual priests toward a systematic critique of the clergy as such undermined the holiness of the Church itself and (if taken to a logical extreme) challenged the validity of the sacraments. The great miracle of the Church, in the eyes of the faithful, is precisely that it preserves the sanctity of Christ’s teachings and the efficacy of His sacraments despite the imperfect humans who manage it. As Archbishop Antoni Fijałkowski put it back in 1857, “Bad clerics are only harmful to themselves; for you they are always the vicars of God.”49 Catholic ecclesiology, then, depicts the Church as having two elements: one corporeal and one spiritual, roughly akin to the body and the soul of an individual. Any challenge to the transcendent side of this duality has consistently been treated as a fundamental challenge. But what about the earthly component of the Church? What, exactly, constitutes the body that corresponds to the Church’s spirit? For at least a half century the answer to this question has been clear. While still a young bishop in 1964, Karol Wojtyła explained, “The Church, in its deepest essence, is the Mystical Body of Christ, which means it is Christ unfolding, so to speak, in humanity, in society—through people.”50 Bishop Zygmunt Kamiński of Lublin was also stressing the social aspect of the Church when he told parishioners in 1980, “The Church is above all a great mystery, a mystery

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of God that lives and acts in its people.”51 In other words, the Church manifests itself on earth through the community of the faithful. On one level this is hardly new; for centuries Catholics have spoken about a Church Triumphant (those residing in Heaven), a Church Suffering (those destined eventually for heaven but currently in purgatory), and a Church Militant (those still alive on earth). All three of these categories (which I will explore later in more detail) imply that the Church’s earthly body is social rather than institutional, that it is made up of the communities of the faithful and not just the clergy. Even a century ago one would hear affirmations (as a sermon from 1910 put it) that “the Kingdom of Christ that is the Catholic Church covers the entire world and counts about 400 million subjects on this earth, and in heaven a countless host of heavenly souls and the Lord’s Saints.”52 But despite the inclusiveness implied by counting the millions of the laity alongside the clergy, at that time little ecclesiological significance was attributed to the rank-and-file parishioners. Even today one often encounters discussions among Catholics about their attitudes toward the Church, as if it were an institution separate from themselves, a hierarchical organization including only the clergy. This would change gradually and unevenly over the course of the twentieth century, as more and more attention was given to the function of the laity in the life of the Church. In the 1960s the phrase “the people of God” would enter into the language of Catholicism as a way of describing the Church’s earthly manifestation, indicating the formal acceptance of an ecclesiology that encompassed far more than just the bishops, the priests, and the nuns. Although the expression “the people of God” is from the Bible (see, for example, Exodus 19:5–6 and 1 Peter 2:10), it became central to Catholic ecclesiology only in the second half of the twentieth century. Incorporating “the people of God” into Catholic writing and speech turned out to have wide-ranging ramifications. As Catholics began to deploy this expression they could not help but get drawn into the broader political vocabulary of modernity. Whatever “the people of God” (lud Boży) might have signified in earlier times, by the twentieth century the phrase suggested a degree of popular participation in (and ultimately even ownership of) the Church. The term lud (the people), like its corollaries popolo, peuple, puebla, Volk, and нapo∂, carries a linguistic legacy that is inextricably tied up with modern mass politics, so bringing this highly charged word into Catholicism could not help but complicate an ecclesiological model based on authority and discipline. Calls for more lay involvement in the life of the Church did not spring ex nihilo from the Second Vatican Council. Even in the interwar years there was a campaign to promote a deeper understanding of the sacraments. Both Pius XI and Pius XII raised this issue (particularly in the 1947 encyclical Mediator Dei), and since the early twentieth century there were regular campaigns to persuade

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people to receive Holy Communion on a more regular basis.53 More generally, educational projects about the theological significance of a variety of devotional practices proliferated prior to World War II, with the stated premise that the sacraments were of greater value if the faithful actively and consciously participated in them. In 1936 Archbishop Aleksander Cardinal Kakowski of Warsaw sent a pastoral letter to the clergy of his archdiocese reminding them that the flock must not be reduced to an audience. “The faithful,” he wrote, “in whose name the priest performs the Most Holy Offering, ought to also take part in the mass. Although [the priest] consecrates on his own, nonetheless the faithful also, together with him, ought to make an offering to Christ the Lord, and so they ought to join with the Lord God in Holy Communion, actually or at least spiritually.”54 During the first half of the twentieth century more and more Catholics began talking about the need to “experience” the mass and “participate in” the sacrifice of the Eucharist, words that in themselves signified a subtle but important shift away from “witnessing” the rituals and “receiving” communion. There was even some limited consideration before World War II of involving the laity in the administration of the Church. The Polish Primate from 1926 to 1948, August Cardinal Hlond, wrote in a pastoral letter in 1933, “Alongside the hierarchical element represented by the priest, there ought to appear in the life of the parish another factor: the lay parishioners. The parish will not have a full life until the cooperation of the laity supplements the work of the priest.”55 The laity did indeed get involved in Catholic life more than ever before, albeit under tightly controlled conditions. As I will discuss more fully in chapters 4 and 5, the interwar years witnessed a proliferation of Catholic periodicals, the emergence of several Catholic political parties with lay leadership, the organization of workers in specifically Catholic unions, and the creation of the Catholic Action movement to mobilize the laity for a variety of purposes. This last phenomenon was defined by Pope Pius XI as “the participation and the collaboration of the laity with the Apostolic Hierarchy.”56 This carefully worded phrase, which Pius quoted repeatedly in exactly the same formulation, implied an egalitarianism of purpose but not of function; lay Catholics were described as full members of the Church, sharing with the priests and the bishops a common mission while remaining subordinated within tight networks of authority and obedience. Cardinal Kakowski captured this ambiguity when he wrote a pastoral letter to the parish clergy in 1936. On the one hand, he characterized Catholic Action as “an organized army of lay apostles, with whose help the bishop carries out apostolic work alongside his leading associates, the priests.” After this affirmation of his own leadership, however, Kakowski warned the priests that the laity would henceforth assume a greater role: “Catholic Action turns the lay Catholic into a knight for Christ, and gives him a certain voice in the Church, subordinate to the

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bishops but not to ordinary priests. You must accept this fact, my dear shepherds of souls.”57 Even as the bishops called for the laity to take on a larger role, however, Primate Hlond stressed that “the hierarchy leads and directs, because that is its calling and duty,” while ordinary parishioners were limited to “cooperation and assistance.” He objected in particular to any suggestion that the Church might be organized as a democratic society, with power and authority deriving from the people. “The guardian of power in the Church is not the community,” he wrote, “nor anyone nominated by the community, for in the Christian Church power derives from Christ and from Him, through the pope and the bishop, [power] flows onto those who are supposed to tend God’s flock [trzoda boża] in the parish.”58 A 1922 article in the mass-circulation Catholic weekly Przewodnik Katolicki developed this theme more fully, labeling the Church the “monarchy of Christ.” The anonymous author addressed directly those who were trying to introduce the concept of “the people” into Catholic rhetoric: Today they are placing the will of the people on a pedestal, like an idol. . . . They want to turn the will of the people into the source of all laws and even place it above the will of God. Every day, every hour, people would like to elect everyone and everything.  .  .  . Today it is necessary to remind people that such a democracy in the Christian Church is impermissible. . . . Let us thus firmly remind everyone that as long as the Church is the true Christian Church, it will never permit and can never allow the people to rule it, never allow the faithful to appropriate for themselves the authority to rule in the Church. . . . Just like St. Peter and the Apostles after the death of the Savior, so today the pope and the bishops—and only they—have the right to rule the Church.59 Throughout the interwar years a priest was required to sit on the governing board of every Catholic Action chapter and every Church-affiliated political or labor organization. In the 1930s the Episcopate tried to achieve even more control by closing down groups formed outside the centralized network of Catholic Action. Kakowski’s injunction that priests should be merely “associates, helpers, and assistants” was routinely ignored, and the clergy often interfered in these groups with a very heavy hand.60 A prominent leader of the Catholic Action movement in Poland, Father Antoni Szymański, referred to the members of this group as “soldiers” called to the ranks by their “Supreme Leader [Zwierzchnik Naczelny].” When lay activists took responsibility for Catholic organizations, Szymański argued,

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They are not entirely independent from the educational and governing authority of the Church. . . .[This is necessary] not only because a central leadership can best manage the division of labor and most effectively utilize the strength that the Church or the diocese has available, but above all because Catholic Action is a religious action, a manifestation of the activity of an organism at the head of which stands the Church hierarchy. The Holy Father is the helmsman of the ship of Peter both in doctrinal and educational matters, both in the sphere of private and social relations. He is the source of life.61 The Second World War threw these older models of lay-clerical relations into turmoil. The arrest and murder of so many priests during the Nazi and Soviet occupations imbued the clergy with the moral authority of martyrdom, but the sheer scale of the casualties meant that a great many parishes were deprived of any clerical leadership whatsoever. Different sources provide different figures for the number of priests who died during the war, ranging from 1,932 to 3,600, or from 20 to 30 percent of the prewar parish clergy.62 Although the Roman Catholic Church enjoyed some limited autonomy under the Nazis, that did not apply to Polish priests or bishops. Virtually every Polish parish in the western lands annexed by Germany was either closed (which happened to 97 percent of the churches in Poznania) or Germanized (a more common fate for churches in Pomerania, where even confessions had to be given in German). The Polish clergy was arrested en masse: out of 1,900 priests in Poznania in 1939, only seventy-three remained at liberty in 1941. About one-third of all the Polish priests from the diocese of Poznań-Gniezno were killed during the war, far more than in any other diocese. Out of 659 Catholic priests in Pomerania in 1939, only 210 were still alive in October 1942.63 The situation was not as bad in the Nazi-administered occupation zone called the General Government (a reservation for Poles and Jews that the Germans set up around Warsaw and Kraków). The Polish clergy and hierarchy there were mostly left in place, and there was no concerted Germanization campaign. Nonetheless, the sheer terror of Nazi rule in this region led to the deaths of at least 500 priests. From the other direction (geographically as well as ideologically), priests and nuns living in the land occupied by the Soviet Union were subjected to arrests, deportations, and severe constraints on their activities. The casualty rates were somewhat lower than in the Nazi zone, but the situation was nonetheless dire. The suffering of the clergy during the war, however, did not necessarily earn them special respect afterward. First of all, their losses did not set them apart: 37.5 percent of Poles with a university degree and 30 percent of those with a secondary education had died, and on a per capita basis the clergy suffered less than many other professions.64 Moreover, the Church was not immune from the

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pervasive postwar skepticism, even hostility, toward prewar figures of authority. The communist takeovers in Eastern Europe in the late 1940s were so obviously stage-managed by the Soviet Union that we can easily lose sight of the genuine radical mood that marked the late 1940s.65 Exacerbating this discontent in the case of the Church was the Vatican’s ambiguous stance vis-à-vis occupied Poland. In the months prior to the invasions of 1939 Pius XII issued several appeals to the Polish government to agree to Nazi demands in order to preserve the peace, and once the fighting started he refused to condemn Germany. His 1939 encyclical Summi Pontificatus lamented the suffering in Poland in generic terms but did not label anyone as the aggressor, and he spoke in very guarded language about Poland’s fate throughout the war.66 Even Pius himself acknowledged, in a letter to the bishops of Poland immediately after the war ended, “[We] had almost no opportunity to convey to you the consolation that We so wanted to send to you in your horrible situation. We hope, nonetheless, that you knew that We did not spare any effort in trying to alleviate at least a little bit your misfortune.”67 Unfortunately for the Vatican, those quiet efforts were not visible to most Poles at the time. Added to this, Primate August Cardinal Hlond spent the war years in exile, and many Poles were disillusioned that he had not followed the lead of Archbishop Adam Sapieha of Kraków by remaining at his post.68 All of this quickly got caught up in the polemical battles of the postwar years, and most Catholics in Poland rallied around their bishops and their pope when faced with communist anticlericalism. Nonetheless, a residue of mistrust remained and would frequently bubble to the surface in the years to come. The hierarchy sensed the new mood. In 1948 Stefan Wyszyński (then still bishop of Lublin but soon to be named primate of Poland) deplored “attempts at ludowładztwo within the Church.” This phrase is etymologically equivalent to “democracy” (lud = people, władztwo = rule) but is typically used in a negative sense to indicate populist demagogy and mob rule, in contrast to the more positive borrowed word, demokracja. Wyszyński perceived a spread of ludowładztwo at all levels: priests were defying bishops, laypeople were defying priests, and the unity of the Church was fracturing. He offered a suggestive analogy: “Wherever there is a bishop, there is a faithful lud, just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.” In his view the people of God might constitute the Church, but only insofar as they were properly subordinated to the established clerical authorities. “Our priesthood does not emerge from the Christian community,” he wrote, “nor is it bestowed by the will of the people. . . . The hierarchy of the Church, although coming from the people, is established for the people so as to lead the flock of God and lead it as a shepherd leads his sheep, along the most certain path to God, without succumbing to the mood of the masses.”69 A particularly revealing example of Wyszyński’s approach to the laity came in a memo that was sent to all the priests in the Warsaw archdiocese in 1951, in

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which the primate wrote, “We were supposed to stand before the people so as to guide our children to the mystery of living together and working together with the Church in order to prepare the faithful to honor the Sabbath and to teach  them how to actively take part in the Holy Mass.”70 Even more striking than Wyszyński’s characterization of the laity as “children” was a subtle slip: he spoke of the laity “cooperating with the Church” (z Kościołem), whereas those calling for more participation by the laity spoke of their presence in the Church (w Kościele). Wyszyński’s attitude was widespread among the clergy. In 1966 the theologian Tadeusz Żychiewicz (better known by the pseudonym he used in his regular advice column, “Poczta Ojca Malachiasza” [The Mailbox of Father Malachi]) organized an informal survey by asking readers to comment on the relationship between the laity and the clergy in their parishes. He received 462 responses, totaling more than four thousand pages. The dominant theme in these letters was dissatisfaction over the poor relationship between the clergy and the laity. Readers complained that priests were “isolated from their surroundings” and that they should stop “standing on a pedestal, which provokes among a lot of people the desire to knock them off, or to pretend that they don’t see them at all.” One correspondent wrote that “priests are afraid of the laity” and as a result they “hide behind their cassocks, behind Latin, behind their serious demeanor.”71 These complaints were well-founded; in fact, they reflected Primate Wyszyński’s oft-stated desire to surround the “clerical estate” (stan duchowny) with an aura of mystery. Back in 1949, shortly after his appointment as primate, Wyszyński had composed a letter to the priests of Poland entitled “The Polish Clergy vis-à-vis Contemporary Needs.” Here he urged his colleagues (now subordinates) to cultivate their special status, in words that were ironically reminiscent of Sister Kozłowska’s demands a half century earlier: We are above all ministri Christi et dispensatores mysterium Dei—servants and bearers of the divine grace. The people must recognize us as such (see 1 Corinthians 4:1). For this to take place in reality, it is not enough just to perform the holy sacraments as visible demonstrations of grace. Our entire lives, our intentions, actions, and goals, should emanate the supernatural. The sensuous, materialistic, earthly world must perceive in us an emanation from another world. It is indeed difficult to elevate ourselves—“from mankind drawn and for mankind established”—above earthly, human matters. But we must learn how to carry out those earthly matters in a Godly way [po Bożemu].72 This stance would eventually come into conflict with the pastoral message of Vatican II, and after returning from the Council’s first session in 1962 the Polish

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Episcopate briefly softened its tone. “From experience, we know that separatism by the priest cannot be a proper pastoral technique,” the bishops wrote in a collective letter to the clergy in Poland, “because it creates between him and the faithful a vacuum, it makes him seem distant, foreign and incomprehensible.” The bishops reminded their subordinates, “We are not always better than our parishioners,” and cautioned against “superfluous conceit.” Priests ought to think of themselves not as a “spiritual aristocracy”: “[Rather we should remember that] in relations with people we remain ordinary men, because, after all, that is what we are and that is what God wants us to be.”73 But there were limits to the Polish bishops’ willingness to change. Only nine months later they issued another pastoral letter to the clergy warning them against too much involvement with the secular world: With distress we are observing certain phenomena in the lives of some priests, which one might generally call desacralization [desakralizacja], that is, the loss of holiness in their lives. . . . Most clearly, it seems to us, the process of desacralization is evident in the manner in which some priests spend their free time. They try at these times to become similar to lay people, both in terms of their attire and their entertainment. They almost always spend their free time away from home: at the cinema, at the theater, at the sports field, on outings and various kinds of social gatherings. It does not bother them that the atmosphere at these gatherings is often unchristian, and they themselves sometimes behave with a freedom that does not correspond to their priestly calling. Such priests, the bishops continued, tried to justify their behavior by claiming that they were merely trying to establish better contact with the daily life of modern man, but in doing so they “seem to look upon the Church as a human institution,” forgetting that they were to remain separate from the world.74 Primate Wyszyński was deeply suspicious (to put it mildly) of the tendency of Catholic priests in Western Europe to blend in with the laity. An informant for the security services was present during a Christmas party attended by several members of the Episcopate in 1969, shortly after the primate had returned from a visit to Rome: Speaking about the priests [in Italy], Wyszyński stated that it was unknown what sort of people they were, because they did not have cassocks. They imitated the mobs on the Roman streets. Such people spread moral scandals. In the modern world they are creating an unrealistic trend, a trend of negation without a program. The cause of this lies with the current moral situation of humanity, with the hippies

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[młodzież hippisowska], who behave scandalously, amorally. The new generation is rebelling against everything and everyone. . . . In comparison to those young people, our young people are full of ambition, ideals, and they should be valued highly . . . [but] among us such a generation could also arise. That must not be allowed to happen. Humanity must not return to the era of the cavemen.75 A few years later Bishop Antoni Baraniak of Poznań grumbled to his colleagues (among whom the security services also had an informant) that more and more priests considered it acceptable to wear ordinary street clothes outside of church. In general the bishop lamented that the priests of Poland were being corrupted by travel abroad, trips that invariably “brought harm to the Church in Poland.”76 When Wyszyński denounced Catholic ludowładztwo he might have been thinking of the ideas promoted by a new periodical, Tygodnik Powszechny (The Universal Weekly). This publication, founded in Kraków on March 24, 1945, propagated a style of Catholicism that stressed collegiality rather than discipline, lay autonomy rather than clerical authority, and engagement with the modern world rather than cultural entrenchment. A founding editor of Tygodnik Powszechny, Father Jan Piwowarczyk, exemplified the magazine’s position when he wrote in 1947, “The duties of Catholics are not limited to the passive receipt of the hierarchy’s commands. The clergy does not constitute the Church. It is constituted by the faithful, together with [the clergy]. Holy life in the Church is fulfilled not only by the virtue of obedience, but by creative work.”77 Tygodnik Powszechny was never broadly representative of the Polish Church: its circulation was always small, its style was distinctly high-brow, and its views were well to the left of the Catholic mainstream in Poland. When the magazine conducted a poll of its readers in 1961, the editors felt able to conclude, “On the basis of this survey we must assert decisively that today Polish religiosity is no longer predominantly based on tradition.” The authors of this editorial did not seem to notice that 409 of the 862 respondents had university degrees—hardly a representative sample of the population.78 Nonetheless, Tygodnik Powszechny is important to our story because its contributors constantly pushed at the edges of Polish Catholicism (and, for that matter, Polish communism), testing how far one could go without crossing some line that would solicit charges of heterodoxy. If Wyszyński represented the center of Polish Catholicism, Tygodnik Powszechny illuminated the outer boundaries. For a time during the 1960s those outer edges of the Polish Church moved considerably closer to the center of the universal Church, as the bishops of the world met for the Second Vatican Council (1962–65).79 I will have occasion to return to this seminal gathering repeatedly, because it transformed the way Catholics talked about nearly everything. Certainly the Council had a greater

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resonance in some places and was more muted in others, but even in the conservative circles of the Polish hierarchy, the decade of the 1960s was a time of monumental change. In September 1962, as the Polish bishops were preparing to depart for the opening of the Council, they issued a joint pastoral letter assuring the faithful that the task of the Council was to protect the Church “against the dangers of error” and to preserve “the inflexible foundations of the holy faith.”80 A mere four months later those same bishops issued another pastoral letter recognizing that the Council had a “pastoral character” and was not particularly concerned with “evaluating or condemning contemporary errors.”81 A Polish commentator at the time played off an old socialist epithet by characterizing the Council as “Christian revisionism,” made necessary because it had become “hugely dangerous” for any institution to stand in place when confronted with progress. Switching metaphors, this author acknowledged that the Council was uncovering “a huge cargo of ideological dynamite” by looking anew at the Gospels.82 The explosive metaphor was appropriate, because unlike at previous Councils, the debates surrounding Vatican II were not limited to the hierarchy. As one Polish observer put it as the Council was being prepared, “It might indeed have seemed that this would essentially be a matter for Roman theologians and canon lawyers . . . but such an opinion is already prehistory. Today the entire Church is ‘in a conciliar state,’ that is, in a state of general discussion about nearly all aspects of the life of the Church.”83 On few matters was the impact of Vatican II greater than in the field of ecclesiology. In 2002, on the fortieth anniversary of the opening of the first session, an  eighty-eight-year-old retired bishop named Ignacy Jeż (who had been in St.  Peter’s Basilica when Pope John XXIII opened the Council) was asked to identify Vatican II’s most important reforms. Jeż singled out two innovations: the repudiation of anti-Semitism and the elevation of the laity. “When we talked about the Church before the Council,” he told a reporter, “we mentioned the Holy Father, the bishops, and the priests, whereas the most numerous group in the Church are the laypeople. Pushing that fact to the forefront was a colossal change in comparison to the pre-conciliar ecclesiology.”84 Observers at the time had the same impression. At a 1961 conference held at the Catholic University of Lublin, the presenters made it clear (in the words of a priest who reported on the event) that “ecclesiology . . . [was] emerging to the forefront of Catholic theology.” Bishop Bolesław Kominek of Wrocław, who was then a member of the Vatican Commission for the Affairs of the Lay Apostolate, told the Lublin conference that the most momentous issue to be dealt with at the forthcoming Council would be “a change in the approach to the role and position of lay Catholics in the Church.”85 Elsewhere Kominek praised the “democratizing” that was going on within his Church, and even Primate Wyszyński eventually accepted that a “divine democracy” encompassed the entire people of God.86 In 1966 a

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priest from Poznań described Vatican II to his parishioners as “the council of the laity” because of “the heretofore unprecedented emphasis not only on duties, but also on the dignity of the lay estate, which after all includes the greatest number of the members of the people of God.”87 A priest from Wrocław went a step further and attacked the very idea that there were distinct “estates” within the Church: “The Church is not a secular society, and even less a feudal society. The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ, and in that Body are ‘organs,’ and every one of them is important, everyone has something to accomplish.  .  .  . Before our eyes, the recent Council has started to uncover from under centuries of ‘imperial dust’ the pure idea of the freedom and responsibility of all members of the Church.”88 Not surprisingly, Tygodnik Powszechny and its audience were enthusiastic about this new tone. When readers of the magazine were surveyed in 1962, only 15 percent favored a complete switch in the text of the mass from Latin to Polish; in contrast, the prospect of changing the relationship between the clergy and the laity enjoyed overwhelming support.89 One respondent (a mathematics teacher) lamented that in his town “only a small handful of the faithful take an interest in the affairs of their parish and are drawn in somehow to its affairs. More, no one demands of them any participation in parish affairs. The distance between the priest and the lay people is still too great.” Another correspondent, a physician, believed that the “most important task of contemporary pastoral work is the activation of the laity,” who needed to assume “mutual responsibility for the development of religious life in the society formed by the parish.”90 As Tygodnik Powszechny publicized these views, however, it took great care not to cross any of the lines that had pushed people like Stojałowski, Szech, and Kozłowska outside the Church. The danger of following that path was very real, even in the 1960s, because the changes under discussion involved a new model of ecclesiological organization that would have profound implications. There was only a small gap between calling for more equality between the laity and the clergy, and challenging the idea that the hierarchy enjoyed divinely ordained sacramental and institutional authority. The Tygodnik Powszechny circle managed to safely walk along the edge of that gap because they actually prioritized the spiritual, transcendent, and unchanging essence of the Church. Unlike Szech or the West European modernists of the turn of the century, they never suggested that the Church itself needed to evolve in any fundamental way. Unlike Kozłowska and the Mariavites, they never directly challenged the authority or legitimacy of any bishops, priests, or nuns; they asked only for a place alongside the clergy in carrying out the (unchanging) mission of the Church. No single individual in Poland was more important in this effort than Jerzy Turowicz, the editor in chief of Tygodnik Powszechny. In April 1962 he published a lengthy front-page essay with the ambitious title “To Be a Christian,” in

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which he carefully distinguished between the eternal and the malleable within Catholicism: The Church, unchanging in its essence, established once and for all, is from the start “ready” and complete. From the start its content and sense are given, from the start in a perfect and sufficient way it fulfills its function vis-à-vis man, vis-à-vis humanity: the function of teaching the truth, the function of guiding people through the world to eternal life. But this Church belongs to history. Through the centuries the Church lives, develops, grows, changes the form of its presence in the world, changes its method of operation, adapts to needs, responds to the pleas of man. It is changeless and perfect—because it is divine. But it is, at the same time, changeable and imperfect—because it is human.91 Turowicz was reaffirming that the Church could never really change, even as he advocated reform. More, he was arguing that the permanence of the Church’s divine mandate virtually required innovation. As he wrote later that same year, “A Church that is founded for all times and for all peoples is not tied organically to any culture or any civilization.”92 Precisely because of this universality and timelessness, wide swaths of ritual and structure could be customized to fit a variety of contexts. The Church is not an immobile monolith, a guard of unchanging truth that waits for the world to come to it for that truth and to subordinate itself. The Church was established for the world; it has a mission vis-à-vis that world and in that world, and since the world changes, the Church must be sensitive to those changes; it must accommodate so that it fulfills its mission as fully, as effectively as possible, so that it may speak to people in their own language.93 Such arguments rested on a reconfiguration, or rather, a clarification of the boundary between the essential and the contingent. Antoni Szech and other early twentieth-century modernists challenged the Church in the most profound way possible, by arguing that a new age of mankind demanded a new ecclesiology. For someone like Szech, relegating the Church to terrestrial historical time was a way of secularizing what had been sacred, a means of stripping away from the Church its status as the Kingdom of God and subjecting it to the vagaries of historical progress. Turowicz, on the other hand, believed that everything essential to Catholicism transcended history; only the superficial forms of the faith were immersed in secular time and subject to revision. By deflating the theological significance of their own agenda, the reformists of Vatican II

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shifted the field of debate away from theology altogether. As Turowicz wrote in an essay summarizing the accomplishments of the Council’s first session, “The truth proclaimed by the Church, given to it as a deposit from God, the truth of faith, cannot suffer any sort of damage, and no one can back away from it or try to efface it. We are only concerned with distinguishing the essence of that truth from its form—the form that comes from people and is thus transient.” Once that “form” was identified, it could be changed so as to make the truth of the Church “more accessible to the person of today.”94 Of course, this ecclesiology of form and substance was hardly unique to Tygodnik Powszechny; this was the way the reformist bishops at Vatican II were framing their broader agenda. Whether this approach persuaded many who would otherwise have opposed change (either in Poland or in Rome) is less significant than the fact that it carved out a space for people like Turowicz to advocate ambitious new ideas with little danger of stepping outside the bounds of Catholic orthodoxy. In this way the Tygodnik Powszechny circle could make arguments that were strikingly similar to those that would have led to excommunication a generation earlier. One could hear the echoes of Stojałowski in Turowicz’s affirmation “The Church is not just the pope, the bishops, and the priests, not just the institution and the organization; it is a living organism, all of us, clerical and lay. . . . The Church does not in any way demand blind faith or blind obedience from the faithful.” But whereas Stojałowski made arguments like these as a prelude to attacking his superiors, Turowicz proceeded in an entirely different (and much safer) direction: “The Church wants—it demands—that the faithful know well the contents of their faith, that they understand it, that it be their own personal faith, a result of personal experience, appropriation, absorption.”95 Turowicz felt that only when laypeople were fully engaged with the life of the Church, “experiencing” its activities and “absorbing” its teachings, could they fully appreciate the essential, eternal truth of Catholicism. With unintended irony he had implied that his conservative opponents were the ones who treated the Church like a worldly institution by concentrating on preserving external forms rather than helping people appreciate the spiritual universality of the faith. By disaggregating the eternal from the contingent in this way, Turowicz was even able to relocate the spiritual focal point of the Church away from the clergy and onto the people: In the new understanding, the Church is above all the People of God, a community of people serving as the object of the work of the Holy Spirit. That Church is also, still, an institution, but the accent has been placed on the community. The legalism of the post-tridentine period has been abandoned. The institution is supposed to serve the human community; that service is its essence, its task. Meanwhile, the accent

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has been placed on the historicity of the Church: the Church fulfills its mission in time, in history, it reacts to the “signs of the times,” it accommodates to those times in order to fulfill its mission better, in accordance with the plan of God.96 Thus when Turowicz wrote that the Church had become democratized, he was not just talking about institutional reform. On a much deeper level he was trying to make it impossible to say (as Wyszyński had in 1951) that the laity should cooperate with the Church. He was laying the groundwork for the view expressed by Bishop Ignacy Tokarczuk in 1973, when he succinctly told a village parish, “We are all the Church.”97 That a bishop would say this in the early 1970s reflected the wide impact of Vatican II. The Polish hierarchy remained highly traditional by postconciliar standards, but the idea of “the people of God” was hard to resist after it was enshrined in Lumen Gentium, the new “Dogmatic Constitution of the Church” that was passed by the Council in 1964.98 As the bishops gathered in Rome in 1962, Tygodnik Powszechny coyly reminded traditionalists that conciliar decisions were binding by printing a front-page prayer in which they asked God, “Strengthen our minds in truth and induce our hearts to obedience, so that we may accept the resolutions of the Council with sincere submission and willingly bring them to fulfillment.”99 This raises yet another difference between the reformists of the 1900s and those of the 1960s: the latter could avoid questioning the sacramental validity or the ecclesiological authority of the clergy simply because they had so many of the world’s bishops on their side. The dissidents discussed earlier in this chapter had little choice but to confront their superiors; the writers at Tygodnik Powszechny could assert with some justification that they were merely carrying out the will of the Vatican (while simply ignoring those members of the Polish Episcopate who opposed them). This rhetorical maneuver was facilitated by the support the Tygodnik Powszechny circle enjoyed from their own diocesan bishop, a dynamic young man named Karol Wojtyła who had been appointed to head the diocese of Kraków just prior to the start of Vatican II. Liberal Catholics outside of Poland have been harshly critical of Pope John Paul II, blaming him for failing to push the ideals of Vatican II forward and even for turning the Church back to a preconciliar era.100 Without denying that many of the Church’s most ambitious reformers were thwarted after Wojtyła was elected pope in 1978, it is not quite correct to label him an opponent of the Council. In fact he was known in Poland as a leading advocate for change, and he first rose to international recognition as a member of the commission that composed Gaudium et Spes, the Council’s new “Pastoral Constitution.” For all the centralization that he eventually brought to Rome, in his early days he appeared to be an enthusiastic and articulate exponent of the

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new ecclesiology.101 In 1962, shortly after being named bishop, Wojtyła held a retreat for a group of university students at which he captivated his audience with a striking style marked by short, often fragmentary sentences filled with rich imagery and provocative ideas. Particularly noteworthy at that gathering was the way he described the people of God: Christ created us. Today, in Holy Communion, He wants to create us anew. To transform us. That process has yet a second direction. We also create Christ. That Christ, which we create, is called the Church. Often we hear that the Church is the mystical Christ. We, so to speak, constitute Him, we are His parts, His cells. . . . That is our creation, our work. We begin with Him, He creates us—Christ—but once he has already created us in his own image, we then create Him—the Church—as we are created.102 A few years later Wojtyła tried to capture this same message with slightly different metaphors: The Church is a mystery of the perpetual descent of God toward man. The Church is simultaneously a second mystery, a second reality. . . . The Church, which perceives man and elevates man toward the divine cause, so that he might see it, so that he might with his human heart embrace and love it. That is the Church! That is the People of God. That is us! That is me! . . . That is the Church: the mystery of the perpetual ascent of man toward God.103 All mention of hierarchy, obedience, and discipline evaporated from these presentations, not so much repudiated as transcended. More than any other Polish priest of his day, he embraced the idea that the Church was “us.” In 1978 he said in a prayer, “Through You, through Your torment, death and resurrection, we are all the People of God, we are the clergy of the Kingdom, we are the Church. We come to You to proclaim that for the cause of Your body, which You gave up for us in death, and Your blood, which you shed on the cross, all of us, the people of God, Your Church, are also your body.”104 The intimacy of this passage was also typical of Wojtyła’s homiletic style, which literally embodied Christ and His Church within each listener. He even used the word clergy to refer not to priests alone, but to all the faithful. For the young bishop, the Church was above all a mystical phenomenon, a “mystery” in the theological sense of that word. All of its visible components—the institutions in Rome, the clergy, the parishioners—were but pale reflections of a real Church that no human could fully grasp, a Church that was Jesus, and the laity, and the clergy.

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Though one might be tempted to dismiss this as a poetic distraction from more concrete issues of clerical authority and lay autonomy, Wojtyła’s mystical ecclesiology allowed him to prioritize the laity much more than most of his peers in the Polish Episcopate. Reflecting in 1967 on the innovations of the Second Vatican Council, he told an audience at the Wawel Cathedral in Kraków: The mission of the laity, which previously had perhaps not been so well understood, became more comprehensible. . . . The laity, after all, are the Church: they are the Church as the People of God, together with their pastors, with the hierarchy. Meanwhile they—more than the clergy—“are” in the world: they therefore have, one might say, greater potential, but also greater obligations, when it comes to bringing to fulfillment the maturation of the world in Christ.105 In hindsight we know that during the three decades of John Paul II’s papacy power within the Church was centralized in the Vatican to a degree that even the preconciliar popes would have envied. Not only the laity, but even diocesan bishops were constrained by a newly assertive Vatican Curia. Nonetheless, back in the 1960s and 1970s Wojtyła’s commitment to the “people of God” helped ensure that the Tygodnik Powszechny circle could elaborate their views with the full support of their bishop—and that in turn allowed them to steer away from the criticisms leveled against the Church leadership at the start of the twentieth century. For his part Wojtyła’s poetic, often mystical language allowed him to finesse the tensions between the postconciliar terminology and ecclesiology and the centralism favored by Wyszyński and most of the remainder of the Polish Episcopate. A careful review of his career before 1978 (when he became pope) reveals an enthusiastic embrace of Vatican II’s pastoral implications, but no concrete discussion of how a postconciliar Church should be organized in practical terms. He reached out to the laity in ways few Polish bishops had ever done and earned a reputation for unorthodox forms of ministry (retreats in the mountains, skiing trips with young people, etc.). At the same time, he would not abide any weakening of his authority as bishop, and he fully accepted Wyszyński’s call for unity and obedience in the face of the communist threat. He would take to Rome this ability to combine pastoral innovation and homiletic eloquence on the one hand with institutional conservatism on the other. Even if Wojtyła avoided actual decentralization, there could be no doubt that he was the product of a postconciliar era. In this he was in a distinct minority among the Polish bishops. Had the polemicists at Tygodnik Powszechny wished (or felt compelled) to mount a campaign against the Episcopate, they would have had no difficulty finding targets. At the end of the third session of the Council, in December 1964, the bishops issued a pastoral letter to all the faithful in

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which they tried to correct what they saw as “rather pervasive, but mistaken views” about what had been happening: “We often hear the question, ‘what changes will the Council introduce?’ Certainly, some changes will be carried out . . . [but] the goals which the Council set for itself penetrate much more deeply. This is not about a change [zmiana] in heretofore obligatory rules or customs, but a transformation [przemiana], fully in the spirit of the Gospels, of everything in the Church.”106 A move “deeper” into the meaning of the liturgy would have met with the approval of the reformers, but it seemed that the bishops were plunging to the depths in order to keep the surface as smooth as possible. They were slow to prepare the new Polish-language version of the mass, introducing the vernacular only in 1970 (in the United States most of the mass was said in English beginning in 1965). Even seemingly nonthreatening moves like the push for more frequent participation in the Eucharist met with resistance. In the United States most practicing Catholics now receive communion at almost every mass, but even in 2008 only 15.3 percent of Poles received regular communion, and even this figure is a dramatic improvement from the 7.8 percent level of 1980.107 Nonetheless, the Council’s vocabulary penetrated even some of the most traditionalist bastions of the Polish Church. The best source for what priests were supposed to be telling their parishioners was (and remains) a magazine called Biblioteka Kaznodziejska (The Homiletic Library). This little-known publication has been distributed to priests for over a century to provide models for their Sunday sermons—models that were often repeated verbatim (to the ongoing consternation of the editors).108 Although the sermons were chosen from actual texts written and delivered by priests all over Poland, the periodical bore the imprimatur and can be considered a representation of what Church authorities wanted rank-and-file priests to say. Though the circulation of Biblioteka Kaznodziejska reached a peak of about 11,300 in the 1980s, this was an impressive figure considering that Poland had only 8,000 parishes and 20,000 priests at the time.109 If we survey the homilies printed by this magazine we can see how the clergy in Poland assimilated the phraseology of Vatican II without significantly altering the relationship between the laity and the clergy. Prior to the Second Vatican Council, the sermons in Biblioteka Kaznodziejska encouraged the Catholic faithful to treat their priests as unerring authorities. As late as 1963, Father Mieczysław Pohl from the small town of Zbąszyń in western Poland contributed to the magazine a sermon entitled “Obedience: The Bond of Society.” He perceived changes in the world around him, and he did not like what he saw: “One of the most unpopular words today is ‘obedience.’ In many people this provokes disgust and a sort of psychic resistance. From all sides we hear complaints that people do not want to obey, do not want to carry out orders.” The pervasive rebellion against authority, Pohl continued, was corrosive

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for all aspects of modern life, but at the most fundamental level it was a challenge to the Christian faith. “The task of man is to fulfill the will of God,” he wrote, “and without obedience that is impossible.” Above all one needed to be obedient to the clergy, from the pope on down to the lowest parish priest, because “through obedience to them we sanctify our souls and grow closer to God.”110 That same year Father Henryk Zimny from Inowrocław (near Toruń) told his parish that there was no place for any kind of democracy within the Church. As he put it, “The legitimacy of Church precepts does not depend upon their acceptance by the faithful. The Church receives full authority not from humans, but from Christ himself.”111 In the very same issue as Zimny’s sermon, however, we find Biblioteka Kaznodziejska’s first specific reference to the Second Vatican Council: a sermon by Father Józef Anczarski of Gorzów (near Katowice) on the theme of “responsibility for the fate of the Church.” The idea that the laity might share some of this responsibility was being discussed a great deal, wrote Anczarski, so much so that he even overheard two random train passengers debating the issue. Summarizing the ongoing deliberations at the Council, he called the Church “our common spiritual organism” and told his congregation, “We are the Church. . . . The Church is not the Pope, the bishops, and the priests. Rather, the Church is the Pope, the bishops, the priests, and all of us, united with Christ as the Head of this mystical organism.” To diffuse the danger that this ecclesiology might suggest some sort of equality within the Church, Anczarski redirected the issue away from the internal workings of the Catholic community and toward the outside world. The most important job for the laity, he clarified, was to “preserve and proclaim to others” the teachings of the Church.112 In the ensuing years this would become a familiar way of describing the role of the laity, who were often cast as the representative face of the Church in the wider world—precisely where priests were not to tread, according to Wyszyński. The annual homiletic program for 1981, for example, included this injunction: Lay people, who live in the world and carry out various worldly tasks, are in their own way bearers of the Gospels. The proper fields for their evangelical activity are the spheres of political, social, and economic life, diverse cultural, academic and artistic areas, as well as international relations, the mass media, and particularly the areas that are especially open to the Gospels, like family love, the education of children and youth, professional work, and human suffering.113 Another way of preserving the line between the laity and the clergy was to shift the conversation to spiritual and devotional matters. With the Second Vatican Council proclaiming that the laity were “responsible” for the Church, Father

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Tadeusz Jabłoński of Poznań emphasized, “The Church does not want the clergy to surrender its proper tasks to lay people; it wants [the clergy] to be entirely dedicated to the goals of their vocation. They are distinguished from among other members of the Church into a separate estate, a clerical estate. Alongside the duties common to all the faithful, they have duties that are particular only to the clerical estate.” As the priests exercised these duties, he continued, the laity should focus on cultivating a deeper understanding of and involvement in the mass. He believed that this would be facilitated by the new devotional reforms being planned by the Council, thanks to which “we are able to speak today of an active role for the laity in the Church.”114 Needless to say, this is not quite what the contributors to Tygodnik Powszechny had in mind when they wrote about an “active role for the laity.” The rhetoric of Catholicism was definitely changing, but in the hands of people like Father Jabłoński, the new slogans were configured so that the traditional position of the clergy in religious life could remain unaltered. But the embrace of Vatican II’s phraseology—above all “the people of God”— would have consequences even among those most reluctant to support lay involvement in the Church’s institutional life. Primate Wyszyński demonstrated the power of the new rhetoric by trying to position himself as more connected to the Polish laity than the supporters of conciliar reform. In 1965 he addressed a group of Catholic intellectuals in Warsaw with a speech entitled “The True Spirit of the Council.” The tone of his presentation was unusually blunt. “The Church is not just made up of philosophers and thinkers,” he said, “but also of people who, despite having a modest intellectual level, sometimes have a very deep religious life.” Wyszyński warned against “intellectualizing the Church, as if it consisted entirely of philosophers.” He was adroitly attempting to defend traditional devotional practices by identifying them with the people (as opposed to the urban, cosmopolitan, overeducated intellectuals), thus retaining the vocabulary of Vatican II even as he challenged some of its conclusions. He even attempted to justify the retention of Latin as a populist move, arguing that revising traditional rites in the name of comprehensibility was the manifestation of an arrogant individualism that denied the centrality of community and continuity.115 Later the entire Episcopate attacked the “errors and licentiousness [swawola] of the modern human mind,” exemplified by those who claimed to represent the spirit of Vatican II. Such people were merely “elites” who failed to understand the “collective folk piety” of the genuine people of God.116 Other members of the Polish hierarchy were more explicit in their discomfort with the Council’s reforms, but even they felt compelled to repeat John XXIII’s call for aggiornamento. In 1969 Bishop Antoni Baraniak of Poznań composed a pastoral letter that he ordered all priests of his diocese to read from the pulpit during every mass on Christmas Day—that is, at a time when virtually everyone

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who had even the most ephemeral ties to Catholicism would be present. Baraniak’s displeasure with the reforms of Vatican II was evident: In our times there is no lack of believers in Christ who are convinced that there has emerged a burning need to carry out revolutionary changes in the Church. They sometimes look with contempt on the traditions of centuries; the wisdom gathered over centuries is without meaning for them. In their campaigns they act on their own, without giving any attention to the Holy Father or to the hierarchy. . . . We do not want that kind of renewal, spreading confusion and disorder. That squanders the values that constitute the product of centuries, and needlessly wastes the spiritual treasury of God’s Church on earth. We can only accept renewal that carries with itself greater concern for the development of the Kingdom of God on earth, that is marked by moderation, balance, and a reliable evaluation of reality.117 Baraniak’s Interior Ministry file (where this sermon is preserved) also contains a report on how the parish priests of his diocese were responding to their bishop’s conservative stance. During a diocesan synod in 1968 Baraniak supposedly provoked dissatisfaction among the rank-and-file clergy because of his unwillingness to introduce reforms “in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council.” The meetings Baraniak organized, the subordinates were said to have griped, “did not differ in any way from the synods of the middle ages.”118 But Baraniak and the other traditionalists in the Episcopate were not living in the Middle Ages, if only because they had little choice but to use the conciliar vocabulary that was now mandated by the Vatican. In fact it seems to have been easier to avoid Rome’s policy initiatives than it was to avoid Rome’s new language. In a pastoral letter issued on the fifth anniversary of the Council, the entire Episcopate reminded the Polish faithful, “The same Holy Spirit that inspired the work of conciliar renewal continues to watch over it, acting through the Holy Father, the bishops, and the appointed institutions to which belong the authentic interpretation of the conciliar documents and the management of renewal.”119 Again the term renewal was used, but it was domesticated by making it entirely dependent upon the established hierarchy of the Church. Later the Episcopate denounced the “abundance of words” pouring forth from unauthorized theologians, and they reminded all Catholics that “responsibility for the faith of the people of God is carried by the bishops.”120 They even urged the lower clergy to cultivate “the spiritual obedience that almost allows you to guess the thoughts and the will of the bishops in matters most important to the Church.”121 In all of these pastoral letters, however, one finds repeated references to the texts of the Vatican Council and constant deployment of the new keywords of the Church.

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To be sure, there were those in the hierarchy who openly opposed the Council, eschewing all talk of “renewal” or “the people of God” in favor of older and more authoritarian phraseology. At his Easter mass in 1970 Bishop Franciszek Jop of Opole complained, “Everyone today considers himself to be a reformer. Amid this confusion, caused by people chattering, one senses the rising power of the ‘Kingdom of Lies.’” There are many people, the bishop claimed, who believe that it is necessary to destroy virtually the entire structure of the Church, not preserving either the head of the Church, or the bishops dispatched by Christ, or the priests appointed by [the bishops]. They want to transform the Church from a visible society into an intangible cloud, to shatter all the cells of life starting with marriage and the family, to deprive the nation of its cultural and historical bonds and then, on the ruins, wonder what to do next. This they call “conciliar renewal,” a renewal of the world, a new humanity, progress, etc. To protect against this coming wave of “anarchy, dissolution, and falsity,” Bishop Jop believed, it was important for Poles to guard against foreign influences: “Let us not admit to the threshold of our homes and our fatherland the spirit of social disorder, mistrust toward the Church and its might, or disruptive chatter.”122 Considering that the call to “conciliar renewal” had come from Pope John XXIII himself, such hostility toward “foreigners” was striking. This, ultimately, was the greatest problem faced by people like Jop: they could no longer evoke the authority of the Oath against Modernism or other preconciliar texts, nor count on the Vatican to silence reformers. Jop’s only option in the end was to follow the example of Wyszyński in using the language of Vatican II to praise aggiornamento while in practice defending traditional lines of authority. Because of these constraints, voices such as those at Tygodnik Powszechny could articulate their dissident views (dissident, that is, vis-à-vis their own Episcopate) while remaining Catholics in good standing. Moreover, as they did so they had no particular reason to publicly attack any members of the hierarchy directly, which liberated them from the risks faced by reformers of the early twentieth century. This was fortuitous, because not only could such criticism have pushed them into a conflict with Rome, but the communist authorities were constantly on the lookout for any means of driving a wedge between different factions of the Church. The result was that people as contrasting as Jop and Turowicz could remain members of the same Catholic community (even if neither would accept the validity of the other’s worldview). There is no doubt that Tygodnik Powszechny’s enthusiastic advocacy of ecclesiological reform represented a minority opinion among Polish Catholics. Most of the bishops and (as far as I can tell) the bulk of the parish priests continued to

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value discipline, obedience, and authority, and “the people of God” were incorporated into the life of the Polish Church in an attenuated way. In 1991 the theologian and philosopher Stefan Swieżawski, a former teacher and mentor to Karol Wojtyła, wrote a personal letter to the pope lamenting the failure of the Polish Church to embrace what he considered the key teaching of Vatican Council II. Addressing his letter to “Our Most Dear Holy Father, Beloved Karol,” Swieżawski reported, “In practice the concept of the Church as the people of God has been forgotten. Too often the dichotomy ‘clergy—people of God’ is used as if the clergy stood apart from the people of God (as a ruling and directing element). This leads directly to clericalism, paternalism, and triumphalism.”123 When in 2003 the Catholic website Opoka.org.pl launched an open forum on lay involvement in parish life, the editors began with the affirmation “The vision of the Church according to which the faithful were divided between the ‘teaching Church’ and the ‘learning Church’ belongs irrecoverably to the past. . . . The role of the laypeople is not just to learn, but to actively participate in the local community of the Church.” The responses posted on the site, however, indicate that this old dichotomy is alive and well. Elżbieta K. of the town of Zabrze wrote, “In my parish it is better to be just a listener. I am waiting; maybe our parish priest will break down and recognize that we might be of some use to him. There exists a distance that is hard to overcome. To restore my soul I often visit a neighboring parish.” An anonymous posting eloquently and simply captured this lament: “In my parish I am nobody.”124 Although few priests would openly defend a preconciliar deference to the Church hierarchy, some commentators have complained recently about “an excessively sociological understanding of the people of God,” preferring instead a more mystical “vision of the Church as a communio, that is, a spiritual community of people with God and among themselves.”125 This theological turn accepted the basic claims of the Second Vatican Council, but made it possible to muffle their actual impact on parish life. Once safely relocated to the realm of the spirit, the people of God were less likely to form a meddling parish council. It remains significant, however, that opponents of the postconciliar ecclesiology had to cast their arguments within the rhetorical context of “the people of God.” A comparison between the mid-twentieth century and the early twentyfirst reveals how much has changed. Since the 1960s priests have been taught to eschew the phrase “I belong to the Church” in favor of “I am in the Church,” “I live with the Church,” even “I am the Church.”126 After Vatican II the terrain of the debate shifted, and it became a lot easier to call for a more balanced relationship between priest and parishioner. Even when that balance was not achieved (and it usually was not), it was much easier to argue that it ought to be. The Polish Church today does not meet the ideal of those who advocated a turn to the people of God back in the 1960s, but the ideal itself survives. As a result, the boundaries of Catholic ecclesiology have considerably expanded.

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As described in chapter 1, Catholic ecclesiology defines the Church as the institutional embodiment of salvation and revelation—in the eyes of the faithful, it cannot be reduced to just another political, social, or even pedagogical institution. That said, on a day-to-day basis many Catholics experience the Church primarily as an ethical and moral guidepost, as a means of articulating and enforcing norms of right and wrong. A contributor to Pielgrzym put it this way in 1843: “The Faith is not just a collection of dogmas and mysteries, but also a teacher of morals. . . . The faith forbids deviance, revenge, pride, narcissism, and it urges humility and virtue. These are the necessary consequences of the revealed faith.”1 For centuries Christian theologians have debated the relationship between divine grace and good works, with Protestants typically highlighting the former and Catholics the latter. Abstracting from the great diversity among Protestants, they have generally maintained that our nature is so corrupted by original sin that we cannot hope to earn our way into God’s heavenly Kingdom; only His infinite love can explain the miraculous gift of salvation. Catholic theologians, in contrast, have ascribed more importance to good deeds. As the 1992 Catechism puts it, “When He comes at the end of time to judge the living and the dead, the glorious Christ will reveal the secret disposition of hearts and will render to each man according to his works and according to his acceptance or refusal of grace.”2 This theological dispute can easily be overstated; few Catholics would argue that human virtue alone can earn us entry to heaven, nor would many Protestants claim that our deeds are irrelevant in the economy of salvation. In practice priests and preachers of nearly all Christian denominations place a heavy emphasis on ethical teachings, and Protestants can be just as moralistic as Catholics. Nonetheless the rewards of virtue and (even more) the dangerous consequences of vice loom a bit larger within Catholicism because of the doctrine stating that our free will can lead us to the gates of heaven or the pits of hell. Consequently the Catholic homily has long been a forum for moral correction and uplift, and only secondarily an opportunity for theological edification. 54

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Although this has been the case for centuries, both the tone and the specific content of Polish sermons underwent a major change over the past hundred years. The most prominent theme in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth was death and damnation, and fear was the corresponding pedagogical lever. The world was typically depicted as a realm of unrelenting suffering and sin, offering no prospects for meaningful happiness, and the Christian challenge was to endure this “vale of tears” with virtuous patience while awaiting one’s reward in the next life. Engaging with such a world—whether by trying to right social wrongs or by attempting to improve one’s own individual position—was at best pointless, at worst a sign of hubris. This gloomy mood lasted well into the twentieth century, and only after World War II did the transition to a less otherworldly form of Catholicism begin to take hold. This shift was linked to the Second Vatican Council’s optimism about the terrestrial world. Vatican II painted a portrait of God as a benevolent deity offering universal salvation rather than an implacable judge carefully guarding the gates of heaven. The underlying theology of salvation did not really change much, but the focal point was repositioned so as to valorize our earthly existence and downplay the fear of death. After the 1960s Catholic preachers were less likely to hold the threat of damnation over the heads of their parishioners and much more likely to speak of God’s love and mercy. As the specter of hell receded somewhat from the Catholic imagination (or at least from the homiletic vocabulary) priests in different cultural settings responded differently. In Poland they found ways of repackaging their old moral concerns about materialism, greed, pride, indolence, and above all sexuality. As we will see in later chapters, the origins of sin were gradually displaced from the individual transgressor onto a shifting and ill-defined rogue’s gallery of national enemies. Moving away from early twentieth-century jeremiads, Polish priests were increasingly prone to describe their flocks as besieged, innocent victims of a hostile world. Meanwhile, the consequences of sin were similarly transposed to a national level, as the prospect of hell was replaced by warnings about the social impact of avarice or lust. Tracking over a century of homiletics we see that the actual content of Catholicism’s moral doctrine—the list of forbidden and approved behaviors—has changed very little in Poland, while the rationale behind these prohibitions has proven to be remarkably flexible. In this chapter, as throughout this volume, I focus on the messages transmitted in sermons, pastoral letters, devotional books, and other forms of normative writing. The goal, for now, is not to assess how these injunctions were received and appropriated by lay Catholics. In fact we can be reasonably confident that a gap remained between the asceticism and moralism of the clergy and the behavior of the laity. Everything we know about popular entertainment in twentieth-century Poland suggests that dancing, drinking, and sex were far more

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pervasive than the clergy would have desired. The very fact that these transgressions were condemned with such vehemence and frequency implies that the priests perceived a need to correct existing behavior. The picture is further complicated by the fact that each text examined here was published or otherwise preserved because it was considered a model, not because it necessarily exemplified what every parish priest was actually saying. The overwhelming consistency and repetitiveness of the homiletic models, however, demonstrate that priests and laypeople alike knew what the Church expected of them—and that, ultimately, is what this book is trying to describe. As explained in the introduction, even when many Catholics ignored the prohibitions and commandments of Catholicism, those rules (and how they are explained) continued to shape and give meaning to what people said or did whenever they were explicitly trying to speak or act as Catholics. Certain ideas (to be explored in the coming chapters) became possible and others got pushed aside as the ethical framework of Catholicism was lifted out of the vale of tears and as new rhetorical and homiletic strategies were developed for a Church that was increasingly engaged with the modern world. From at least the mid-nineteenth century until the Second World War, the homiletic tradition in Poland was remarkably stable. One could take a Sunday sermon composed in 1880 and deliver it in 1920, and only the most astute observer would notice subtle anachronisms. Not only were contextually specific references rare, but both the style and the substance remained consistent. In fact the most popular homiletic guides (which priests drew upon when composing their sermons) were literally unchanged for decades on end; collections from prepartition authors like Tomasz Grodziecki, Jakub Wujek, Jan Kamperda, and Piotr Skarga remained popular and in print well into the twentieth century, and sermons from the 1840s and 1850s were reissued multiple times over the next half century. A catechism by Józef Krukowski from 1875 was still considered the standard summary of the faith a generation later.3 Józef Stagraczyński, the pastor of a small parish in the town of Wonieść (southwest of Poznań) began publishing a magazine called Biblioteka Kaznodziejska (The Homiletic Library) in 1872, drawing upon various older sources in order to perpetuate (as he put it) “the most valuable pearls of the Church’s oratory.” Reissued collections of his editorial work were still being released three decades later. When the St. Wojciech Publishing House took up Stagraczyński’s project with Nowa Biblioteka Kaznodziejska (The New Homiletic Library) in 1906 the tone, style, and content of the sermons were virtually indistinguishable from earlier models; indeed, the editor asked contributors to prioritize “composition, clarity, practicality, and topicality” rather than “originality.” 4 The reestablishment of Polish independence in 1918 facilitated the publication of some new homiletic collections, but

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these followed both the stylistic and substantive norms established before World War I (and reprints remained popular). Only the trauma of World War II and its aftermath—and even more, the new pastoral mood established by the Second Vatican Council—would finally inspire priests in Poland to develop new modes of presenting and packaging their ideas. So whether one went to mass in 1860, 1910, or 1930, one was very likely to hear a sermon that contrasted the misery of this life with the glories of heaven. Catholicism in Poland (and elsewhere as well) earned a reputation for otherworldliness and gloom, with messages of fear and guilt overwhelming those of love and hope. Life was typically presented as something to be endured rather than celebrated, and the physical world was depicted as a land of torment and temptation through which the pious must walk carefully on their way to salvation. “It is not for nothing that the world is called a vale of tears and misery,” wrote Józef Krukowski in his 1875 catechism, “[because] whether we want to or not, we must suffer. . . . If it came to counting the moments of life and comparing them to each other, indeed we would find more bitterness and sadness than joy in the world.”5 Even the family, so often vaunted in Catholic homiletics as a refuge from the world, could provide no escape. As a contributor to the magazine Przewodnik Katolicki put it in 1895: O, how often it seems to brides and grooms, standing at the foot of the altar, that they are entering the gates of paradise and that only pleasure awaits them, that in that paradise there will never be tears, that there will be no pain, nor even any dark thoughts there. In their opinion, their lives ought to be a kind of festival, amid flowers and flowing with fragrance, without clouds, without shadows. But this is marriage, after all! And in marriage one must fulfill hard duties, raise up crosses, for that is what practical life teaches.6 This tone remained typical of Polish Catholic sermons until the mid-twentieth century. In 1927 a sermon contributed to Biblioteka Kaznodziejska bemoaned the fact that people constantly sought comfort and happiness, even though these things could only be attained in the next life: “Everyone has strived, and continues to strive, so that we may feel and say ‘it is good to be here’—and everyone has been disappointed. We cried then and we cry now. . . . And why? Because we do not seek happiness where it is, and thus we cannot find it.”7 One of interwar Poland’s most popular and dynamic preachers, Father Ireneusz Kmiecik, chastised the faithful: “We chase after happiness, but we cannot attain happiness on earth; it constantly vanishes before us like a shadow. Not only those of us oppressed by poverty are incapable of achieving happiness—no one can achieve it. . . . There is no happiness on earth, because neither wealth, nor honor, nor joy,

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nor the love of friends can satisfy entirely our souls.”8 As late as 1945 a collection of sermons published by émigrés in the United States but drawing upon (sometimes copying) earlier models from Poland denounced the obstinacy of those who seek pleasure in life. “We have all experienced illness, disease, nuisances, sadness, worries, disasters, disrespect and persecution,” an anonymous author lamented, “and yet we cannot get rid of the idea that we are here on earth to be successful, to be happy, to have fun. But in fact we suffer, my dear ones, we all suffer, without exception.  .  .  . The whole life of a Christian is essentially one never-ending cross.”9 With life in this world characterized in such dark terms, Catholic homilies directed the attention of the faithful to death as the only source of hope—but also of fear. The popular sermons of Archbishop Jan Paweł Woronicz (1757– 1829) remained in print throughout the nineteenth century, in part because his eloquent fatalism captured so well the mood of the era. “As I have been speaking to you,” he told one audience, “several moments have gone by, and they will not return. An hour will pass, and death will advance a step closer to us. Today will end, and then we will stand closer to the grave by a whole day. It will not be long before that horrible night arrives which will seal our eyes shut forever. . . . The day we now begin will end, and another after it (if we live that long), and where is the sign of our work toward achieving eternal life?”10 Father Józef Stagraczyński, the founder of Biblioteka Kaznodziejska, once composed a New Year’s Day sermon in which he scolded his parishioners for partying the night before. Instead of celebrating they should “think often about death.” You lay down on your bed for a rest—imagine that it is your deathbed, imagine that slowly your strength is falling away, that your thoughts are growing dim, that your breathing is becoming more and more shallow, until it finally stops. Imagine that you are already lying there as a corpse, without feeling. Imagine that your family, your neighbors, your friends are standing next to you and crying. . . . A few more moments, and you will be lying deep in the earth, which will cover you up, until you eventually turn into dust. Do this often, and it will be good practice for death. Imagining your death in this way will tear you away from an inappropriate attachment to creation; it will be an impetus to the sort of life that you might wish for yourself on your deathbed.11 Stagraczyński’s preoccupation with death was quite typical. A 1929 Gospel commentary in the magazine of the Łomża diocese advised readers, “Remember that you are ashes and to ashes you will return. . . . If life can be so easily snuffed out and cut down by the worm of death, then it isn’t worthwhile to make so many efforts to pamper oneself. Instead, it is worthwhile and necessary to think about

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the life that will last for all time.”12 Or, as Father Kmiecik preached a year later, “If we thought more often about death, which inevitably awaits each one of us, then how holy our lives would be, how carefully we would go about the tasks of our salvation. But unfortunately we don’t forget anything as totally as our own death, and that is the main reason that we cling so much to our transitory earthly welfare, and care so little about our welfare after the grave.”13 All this gloom inspired Father Stagraczyński to pose the obvious question in the title of one of his sermons: “What Is Best: To Die or to Live?” There was a strong argument for the former option. Tell me, what is it about human life that you love so much? Have you ever considered a person being born? From the first there are tears, as if to show everyone that, emerging from inside the mother, he is entering into a miserable condition. Have you ever considered a child’s years of growth? He is subjected to clumsiness, ignorance, errors and foolishness. Have you ever considered a young person? It is as if he is drawn to everything evil, and will dare to do everything evil. Have you ever considered someone who is middle aged? O, my God! So much effort, so many exertions, so much work! So many problems, accidents, misfortunes! Have you considered someone in old age? He succumbs to constant illness, disability, pain, and moreover is often impoverished. So what is there to love in life? But despite all this, Stagraczyński concluded, we are better off alive, because after death most of us will end up in hell, where it will be even worse. The only solution is to say “I do not want to live or die; I only want what [God] wants.”14 In explaining why humanity had to suffer so, there were two possible answers (often used together). As Father Zygmunt Golian put it in a sermon from 1858, “Everything that happens to us happens either because the Lord wants to punish us for our sins or because He has allowed Satan to put our faith and our virtue to the test.”15 Either way, it was misguided (not to mention blasphemous) to cry out in anger to God, or even to complain about one’s fate. The Catholic publisher and philosopher Eleonora Ziemięcka believed that “all suffering, whether physical or moral, whether great or small, [should be] accepted with humility as a punishment from God.” Indeed, she proposed that we “praise God in our oppression,” because any hardship we endured was surely set upon us “for our essential good.”16 After a devastating crop failure in 1855 Archbishop Antoni Fijałkowski reminded the faithful that in this disaster “God’s verdict is fulfilled”: “God, who rules and governs everything, allowed this, but He is the best Father, so that which comes from Him can only have our welfare as a goal. . . . There is

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no evil. There is no misfortune. Only sin is the true evil because it separates us from God and inhibits decisively the goal to which we are created: eternal salvation.” For Fijałkowski every misfortune should be accepted as a just punishment from God, and the reason for His divine anger should be identified and corrected.17 The God depicted in Polish sermons of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth was a judgmental and vengeful deity. As Stagraczyński put it, somewhat paradoxically, “Although the mercy of God is infinite, it nonetheless has its boundaries. Above all, the mercy of God lasts only as long as we make our pilgrimage on this earth, it lasts to the final moment of our life. And with death God’s mercy ends, ends forever. In the next world we cannot obtain mercy. In the next world there is retribution, and only God’s justice rules there—nothing else but justice.”18 An anonymous priest in 1919 imagined Jesus and Mary confronting the sinner at the moment of truth: “We can imagine how the damned will throw themselves on their knees before the Judge and beg for forgiveness, but the Judge will answer, ‘too late, get away from me!’ They will raise their hands to Mary, the merciful mother, the rescuer of sinners, but Mary will say to them, ‘I no longer know you.’”19 But even if mercy could be found in this life, it seems that God’s wrathful vengeance was more common. Another 1919 sermon instructed that sin was the cause of “all the various sicknesses, disabilities, and sudden deaths . . . those droughts and deluges, those frequent crop failures . . . and the recent horrible war, bloodier than ever before, encompassing the whole world, becoming the cause of tears for so many mothers, wives, and orphans.”20 As the Great Depression ravaged Poland in the early 1930s Kmiecik even maintained, “Today’s misery, just like [World War I], is simply a result of turning away from God, forgetting the teachings of Divine Jesus, teachings of love and justice.”21 For all these warnings about God’s justice in this life, his wrath in the next was feared even more. Lest anyone suspect that the images of flames and torture in hell were just metaphors, Stagraczyński reminded the faithful that “man consists of body and soul; body and soul take part in sin, so God punishes man in body and in soul, and punishes both one and the other with inconceivable severity.”22 This same lesson was included in Krukowski’s catechism, which characterized hell as “a place of eternal torment of body and soul, horrible beyond description or understanding, where an inextinguishable fire burns the damned . . . where the worst devils, full of evil and hatred, administer all kinds of torment without rest, without refreshment, without hope of departure.”23 World War I provided a visceral preview of hell for every European, so perhaps it is no coincidence that homilies afterward became even more graphic in their descriptions of what awaited sinners in the afterlife. In 1919 a priest painted a verbal image of a sinner who had just gone to hell:

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Now he gnashes his teeth in a dark prison, suffering torture day and night. Now he cries out, rages, and blasphemes in unhappy company to be let out of the confinement of his hellish prison, but all hope is lost. “Quia in inferno nulla est redemptio.” Now he cries, complains, and despairs from the pain, but for naught. Now he curses and swears, but no one hears him. Now he would like to return to earth to do penance for his sins, but it is too late. He must suffer, he must burn, he must despair—always—forever! This is the fate of the sinner.24 An even more vivid portrayal comes from a 1930 sermon: What is hell? Hell! Ah, I tremble with horror and trepidation at the very mention of it. Hell is the place of God’s anger and justice! Hell is the place of torment and eternal agony, a place of despair! Hell is the home of Satan the damned, and in that home there is nothing but evil, there is nothing good. In hell there is black darkness and harsh flames; a persistent, stifling atmosphere and hideous, voracious insects that never die; cruel, heartless tormentors; horrible torture chambers; wild beasts and incurable diseases; unbearable hunger and burning desires; poverty, shame, betrayal, despair; everything evil and nothing good.25 Priests must have often confronted skepticism from their parishioners about the link between misery and sin, because they frequently addressed questions about the suffering of the righteous. As many sermons from the nineteenth century and early twentieth pointed out, God’s vengeance was always justified because everyone, no matter how virtuous on the surface, was guilty of something. We could never know what sins hid within the hearts of others; indeed, we could not even be sure of our own transgressions. A priest from Galicia demanded in 1890, “Who among us can say that in our lives we have not gravely sinned? Who can be certain that we adequately did penance for that sin? Who can say that we will not fall into sin again? Who can claim that he is a saint? Dear ones! Let us not trust ourselves, even if our conscience gives us the best witness. We do not know ourselves well, for our self-love shades our eyes.”26 Even those who did indeed avoid the most obvious sins might still risk the fires of hell, as a parable in Krukowski’s catechism pointed out: A certain servant of God, visiting the countryside and looking about at the simple rural life, was deeply moved and said to himself, “certainly the greater part of these people will make it to heaven.” At that moment an Angel sent from heaven by God stood before him, and proclaimed “you are mistaken in your opinion, mortal. Know for certain that the

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greater part of the people who live in the villages and the towns find themselves in great danger of eternal damnation, not for their sins, but because they do not know the most important articles of the faith and other things necessary for salvation.”27 A generation later Ireneusz Kmiecik observed that there were in theory “two paths to heaven, the path of innocence and the path of penance.” In reality, however, this was misleading, because the first option was viable for such a tiny number of people. “None of us can flatter ourselves,” he said, “that by the path of innocence we will reach eternal life, for whoever would claim that he has no sin is a liar and is fooling himself!” Kmiecik was not referring to minor sins, either. He urged his audience to reflect upon the ten commandments: “You will recognize to your great shame that there is not a single one that you have not violated. And you have sinned not from carelessness, not from haste, not unconsciously, but—just don’t hide from yourself—you have sinned with intent, you have sinned consciously and voluntarily.”28 There were, however, other ways to justify the suffering of the apparently innocent. A contributor to Pielgrzym in 1845 described misery as a “great good,” because it gives us the opportunity to manifest our virtues and our piety. “What sweet joy in moments of bitterness,” he wrote. “We ought to regard present misfortunes—that is, those that touch us already—as the consequences of our mistakes. We ought to consider them warnings. We ought to use them to kindle in ourselves a feeling of repentance and regret. Through them we ought to learn judgment and prudence, straighten the misguided turns of our lives, and in general look upon them as guides for our improvement.29 Father Zygmunt Golian, the author of a homiletic guide published in 1858, believed that “among the greatest proofs of the eternal mercy of God are those unfailingly horrible threats that He thunders over the heads of sinners. For what else could God want when he threatens, other than for the sinner to sense his misery and save himself from the danger into which his own sins have sunk him?”30 The good Christian, he wrote elsewhere, should understand the pedagogical value of misery and punishment, recognizing that “suffering, after all, ought to teach us and give us the certainty of faith that God alone is our only good and our refuge, that we can be happy only if we glorify God and serve him with all the love in our hearts.”31 In 1896 Archbishop Floryan Stablewski of Gniezno-Poznań told his flock, “Someday you will be convinced that the things you wanted for your supposed happiness were your misfortunes on earth; and the opposite—that which was troublesome was a means to your happiness.”32 This was true, he continued, because if our lives were full of comfort and ease here on earth, we could “easily become tied excessively to the earth, when in fact we are to seek above all the Kingdom of God.”33 Spinning this in a slightly more positive way a generation

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later, a priest from the village of Myślenice (near Kraków) told his congregation, “Just as gold, when subjected to flame, will secrete all foreign elements and emerge from the test clear and pure, so will man, when subjected to suffering, become purified and elevated, and thus ennobled and internally transformed, will become worthy of future glory.”34 What, precisely, were these lessons that the faithful were supposed to learn from all their suffering? What sins caused all this misery, and how could they be avoided? Franciszek Walczyński itemized the most important transgressions in a sermon from 1910: “Let us carefully avoid all occasions [for sin], particularly occasions for sins against chastity; let us avoid evil, immoral companions and excessively familiar associations with people of the other sex; let us not read books, periodicals, or brochures with suspicious or immodest content; let us guard against indecent conversations and entertainment; let us avoid laziness and effeminacy [zniewieściałość]; let us diligently overcome our revulsion for work.” He then went on to discuss the positive obligations that would make us virtuous: “Let us pray often and fervently; let us participate often and honorably in the Holy Sacraments; let us think about the presence of God, about eternity, about final things; let us pray for the protection of Mary and call upon Her for help at times of temptation; let us pray for the intercession of the Lord’s Saints.”35 This was a familiar presentation for early-twentieth-century audiences, juxtaposing specific earthly sins against acts of devotion. The acts to avoid were all related to our lives on this earth; the acts to perform related to the afterlife. Or, to put this differently, the goal was to transcend this life by denying the pleasures of the flesh and directing our attention to God. While on earth we should carry out our duties, work hard, and pray, all of which would prepare us for the life to come. In 1909 Antoni Szech complained, “Morality for Catholics, at least as generally understood, is virtually equated with sexual chastity.”36 One can understand where Szech got this idea: sexuality has been a major concern for Catholic priests throughout the modern era (if not longer). Stagraczyński’s sermons inveighed against anything that might “excite the desires of the body,” such as “feasts, parties, banquets, dances, balls, games, playing late into the night, masquerades, immodest stage performances, fancy clothes, etc.”37 That all of these things were features of Polish popular culture at the time illustrated the challenge moralists like Stagraczyński faced. He was especially concerned about dancing, because (like later moralists confronting different vices) he was convinced that this was a gateway to more serious addictions: At dances, friendships are established, and a great many illegitimate children come from this. Whoever is seized by the Satan of dance quite simply becomes crazy about dancing, throwing away his or her honor

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and innocence in order to dance. Young people who develop a taste for dancing grow impudent, and they don’t listen to anyone—neither their pastor nor their confessor. They go to confession, they take Holy Communion, but in their hearts they have the desire to go dancing, so they commit a horrible sacrilege.  .  .  . Dancing causes all kinds of theft, because dancing costs money. So children steal from their parents, and servants steal from their masters. Stagraczyński was outraged that many Christians allowed dancing at wedding celebrations: “The Lord God will only bless those marriages that take place according to his will, and He cannot bless a marriage that is connected to dancing.”38 This is a good example of the gap between homiletic demands and actual practice: if Stagraczyński was right, then the vast majority of Polish weddings have been deprived of God’s sanction.39 Even with these hyperbolic examples, however, we see the logical application of general principles typical of more mainstream moral demands. Stagraczyński may have occasionally gone to extremes, but the enduring popularity of his sermons reveals that his severity was widely shared. With the spread of mass popular culture in the early twentieth century, the fear expressed in Polish homiletics grew much more intense. Already in 1910 one homiletic guide cautioned, “Satan is lying in wait to undermine chastity; he strikes us with temptation, provocation, seduction and corruption of all kinds. The corrupt world is lying in wait to undermine chastity; bound together in a league of friendship with the prince of darkness and the impure spirit, it strikes at chastity with immodest periodicals, newspapers, books, pictures, photographs, post cards, shows, games, clothing, conversations, songs and music— everywhere spreading the plague of lechery and shamelessness.”40 In the interwar years Archbishop Kakowski of Warsaw saw a similar slippery slope leading from sexual immodesty to civil unrest. “So much nakedness in fashionable clothing, in bathing suits and sportswear,” he lamented, “so much promiscuity in houses of prostitution, in cabarets, cinemas, theaters; so much pornography in books, periodicals, and pictures that arouse the passions; so much neo-paganism, racism, sterilization, political and class struggle.”41 But even as some in the clergy began to direct their attention to the transgressions of the modern urban world, the older opportunities for sin remained a concern. In 1930 Father Kmiecik was still worried that “during the long winter nights women and girls go around to various homes, and there they sew, embroider, and stitch, and oh, what joy they create in hell! Alongside those women and girls, young shameless men also sit in the corners and together they enjoy themselves, joke, and make shameless conversation. What a satanic school, a school for sins against chastity.” Kmiecik realized that such gatherings served as an

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occasion for young people to meet potential spouses, but he considered this entirely superfluous. “For entering into the marital union no acquaintance is necessary,” he advised. “If the time comes for marriage, the young man comes to the threshold of the home of the girl on whom he has his sights, makes a few public visits, but with a sense of honor he carefully avoids all secret strolls with his fiancée and in innocence, he leads an innocent girl to the altar.” Prior to that moment of matrimony, Kmiecik preached in another sermon, virtually any contact between the sexes was dangerous, because “the eyes are the doors through which the sin of impurity most often creeps into the soul of man.” He taught that it was important to avoid “looking at people of the opposite sex, particularly if they are immodestly dressed.” Thus the theater was dangerous, but so were “indecent statues, prints, and paintings.” Unfortunately even avoiding the company of women altogether could not keep men from sin, because some would resort to “unchaste acts carried out on themselves,” a transgression that disturbed Kmiecik because “all of the nervousness of today’s youth, their eerie appearance, their defiance, impertinence, their godlessness, has its causes and roots in precisely the performance of masturbation.” Worst of all, he concluded, some might even turn to sex “carried out in an unnatural manner,” with other men or with animals, leading to “sins against chastity about which it is hard to speak without the greatest disgust and horror.” Like Stagraczyński and Kakowski, Kmiecik considered all transgressions against chastity to be early steps on the road to perdition, because the sin of promiscuity “carries with it all others: injustice, murder, perjury, sacrilege, suicide; it is the sin that extinguishes faith, debases the soul, kills the body, destroys family happiness and lowers man to the ranks of the animals; it is the sin that fills hell more than all the other sins taken together.”42 Obviously by the 1930s Kmiecik was preaching against an onslaught of changing social practices; indeed, his model of asexual courtship had never been the norm in Poland. But even if sermons like these diverged from reality, that just provided the foundation for additional jeremiads, without inspiring significant changes (yet) in the normative doctrine of the Polish Church. Even those who tried to argue that Catholics were allowed to have fun found themselves trapped within extraordinarily narrow limits. Father Tomasz Dąbrowski wrote in 1891 that “entertainment is not only permitted, but even necessary and essential” because being alone too much “produces eccentricities and eccentrics.” He spelled out some examples of what a good Christian was allowed to do for fun: Spiritual entertainment, like reading good books, drawing and painting, and other such higher activities, are enough to bring fun and to refresh the mind, but we ought never to seek out sensual entertainment. Insofar as sensual entertainment is necessary, one must select the sort that

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does not violate either the laws of God or the Church, does not waste time designated for work, and does not bring harm to one’s health or one’s assets. I count among these [acceptable forms of entertainment] spending time with cheerful but pious people, strolling, singing, music, growing flowers, fishing, and even traveling if one has the means to do so.43 Even Krukowski specified that “one may only have fun after one has fulfilled one’s duties,” and never on Sundays or Holy Days. Young people in particular should enjoy themselves only “under the eyes of parents or chaperones.” In general, “Christian entertainment ought to be modest, innocent, without offending God. . . . When having fun, one must remember God, and thus dedicate the entertainment to the greater glory of God, in order to refresh oneself so as to fulfill more willingly one’s obligations.”44 Another half-hearted attempt to accommodate homiletic practice to the social practices of the laity came at a conference of the Polish Episcopate in 1921, when one speaker suggested that perhaps not every dance was equally sinful; some folk routines, for example, seemed to be chaste enough. After some discussion it was decided that the time had come to prepare a list of approved and forbidden dances, and the bishops promised to have this ready before the next Carnival season.45 If that list was ever generated, I was unable to find a copy; in any case, there is no evidence that dancing in Poland became more modest. Several years later a contributor to the diocesan paper of Łomża lamented that almost every social gathering was characterized by “shameless clothing, some kind of wild and debauched dances, and along with all that, drunkenness.” This author offered a formula for the faithful: “It is permitted to take part in festivities and parties, but only those to which one could invite Christ.”46 The popular devotional magazine Rycerz Niepokalanej described such a party in detail in 1939: there would be no alcohol, the event would run from 3:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., and the music would be carefully chosen to encourage good morals. This author recognized that even “these sorts of parties are hard to manage without scandal,” so an even better option would be to limit social gatherings to private homes, where parents could keep a close eye on everything.47 It is all too easy to lampoon the moral rigor of these early twentieth-century sermons, but the commitment to chastity was actually part of a larger message that transcended the preoccupation with sexual misbehavior. As the magazine Życie i Praca put it in 1934, “We must be victorious over ourselves, and conquer the three desires with which we are born: the desires of the body, of the eye, and of pride. This three-pronged force vigorously pushes us in the direction of evil, without consideration of the warnings from reason and the commandments of God.”48 In this context “evil” included sex, but it also encompassed everything

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else that held us too closely to this life, distracting our attention from heaven and deceptively implying that joy could be obtained here on earth. One of Krukowski’s model sermons defined chastity very broadly as “the virtue by which we restrain in ourselves all disorderly sensual feelings, thoughts, words, and deeds. It subordinates bodily lust under the rule of reason and divine law, and keeps it reigned in.” This was not just about sex, he emphasized, but about all forms of corporeal pleasure and relaxation. “Our life is labor,” Krukowski wrote. “It is a struggle and a journey; in heaven there will be time to relax.”49 There was a powerful strain of asceticism in nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Catholicism, which manifested itself sometimes in puritanical jeremiads and sometimes in a more sophisticated mysticism. Perhaps the most articulate proponent of the latter was Piotr Semeneńko, one of only a small handful of Polish priests to attain international renown in the nineteenth-century Catholic world. As the founder of the Resurrectionist Order (a group formed in 1836 to minister to the large Polish émigré community in Western Europe), and later as a Vatican official and a popular preacher, Semeneńko reached an unusually large audience and was widely read long after his death in 1886. Indeed, his works are still sold in Poland today.50 During a retreat in 1867 Father Semeneńko echoed the message I have been recapitulating here, urging his audience to recognize that “the human person is nothingness in itself. Man fills that nothingness either with God, or with deceptive objects from life,” and the latter path leads invariably to sin. To escape from this, and thus to genuinely avoid suffering, it was necessary to “renounce ourselves as the beginning and the cause”: “We must cast the ‘ego’ out of our person; ‘It is now no longer I that live, but Christ lives in me.’ This means that the ‘I’ must cease to live; the natural, the human ‘I’ must cease to be the life of my person. . . . Slowly and gradually we must come to achieve a loathing, a contempt, a hatred of self.” The denial of the self needs to be thorough, and it must be rooted in an appreciation of our own utter degradation. The true Christian, Semeneńko believed, ought to look inward for the cause of all hardship, and not fall back on either unjust social institutions or the machinations of Satan. “In both cases,” he argued, “they are putting the blame on someone else; they are not at all conscious of their own perverse and corrupt nature.” This repudiation of the self extended to a much broader imperative to cut ourselves off from corporeal life in general. “Temptation does not permit us to attach ourselves to this earth,” Semeneńko wrote, “for it continues to expose [the earth] as a vale of tears, a battlefield of suffering.”51 If “nothingness” was the ultimate virtue, then pride was the ultimate vice. Archbishop Zygmunt Feliński, in a series of retreats he conducted for seminarians while he was director of the St. Petersburg Spiritual Academy (1857–62), argued, “There is essentially no sin that does not arise from pride.” If we wavered in our awareness of our own guilt, we would be tempted to believe that we could

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earn our way into heaven without God’s saving grace, and this would be the ultimate form of hubris.52 Krukowski’s catechism made the same point in even stronger terms: [Humility entails] a recognition that alone we are nothing, and everything that we have is a gift of God; a recognition of oneself as a person without any merit. . . . Pride is a dislocation of reason, a sick imagination; if you want to cure yourself of this, it is necessary to know yourself. You ask yourself, who were you [before your birth]? The answer: no one! Go back a few dozen years, and you were not in the world, and the world got along without you. You did not have a right to existence— you only exist because God’s omnipotence and love created you from nothing. Who are you [now]? You are a weak, miserable, incompetent being—in body and soul. If it were not for your parents, you would have died in infancy; if it were not for the grace of God, you would not have faith, nor hope, nor love, nor other virtues, because all by yourself you are weak and miserable.53 This self-denial had a special significance when juxtaposed alongside nineteenth-century models of femininity. We see this with particular clarity in the writings of Eleonora Ziemięcka, who was one of the most important ultramontane Catholic publishers and philosophers of her day and the first prominent Polish advocate of women’s education. To our eyes, she may appear a contradictory figure. On the one hand, she insisted that men and women be treated as intellectual equals, and she denounced the practice of viewing a woman as “a pretty picture” rather than “a moral being, living both for herself and for others, responsible before God for her actions.” Ziemięcka boldly demanded that women “live in this century” and “be nourished by the same elements” as men, and she considered it imperative to “educate first the person rather than the woman” so as to “give her the means for autonomous existence.”54 She even got into a sharp polemic with the philosopher Bronisław Trentowski about the ability of women to write about philosophy.55 But alongside all this Ziemięcka urged women to embrace a life of service and suffering, even within the family. It is hard to identify her as a proto-feminist when we read “It is not a woman’s place to judge her husband. God will someday take account of his soul. His coldness, and even his errors do not justify her perversions [zboczenie]. The only option for a Christian wife is complete subordination to all the consequences of her irrevocable pledge.”56 The apparent tensions within Ziemięcka’s writing fade when seen from within the Catholic context discussed in this chapter. She accepted that the purpose of life (for men and women) was to endure suffering and pain, and her dissatisfaction

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with female educational institutions was based on the tendency to train women to be pretty and charming and to expect a life of romance and happiness with a loving husband. This, she insisted, was neither probable nor even desirable. Instead, a Christian woman should accept whatever fate God ordained, and that would invariably entail a life of duty and hard work (just as it did for men). A Christian woman would understand, she argued, “that the family does not serve her happiness, but rather she ought to serve the happiness of the family.” Like Semeneńko, Ziemięcka advocated self-abnegation, but she identified the family as the optimal site for achieving this, because “family life consists almost exclusively of duties; the very expression ‘duty’ makes the mind conscious of the act of victory over oneself, of the confinement of will, of sacrifice.” Once faith was combined with proper moral education, women would “recognize the necessity of suffering.  .  .  . As soon as [a woman] ceases to fear pain, as soon as she is presented with this as the normal condition of man on earth, then she will not withdraw from any difficulty.”57 Throughout the nineteenth century and the interwar years, when talking about everything from crop failure to illness to marriage, Catholic priests in Poland rarely deviated from the script described in this chapter. The world was a vale of tears, humans were invariably sinful, and only by denying this life could we hope to receive our reward in the next one. In July 1939 the devotional magazine Rycerz Niepokalanej published an article that summed up the prewar pessimism: If the most holy, most wise, most just God sends down suffering upon someone, then He most obviously does so because that person needs suffering. God does not commit injustices under any circumstances. Above all one must remember that much of the suffering that falls upon people is suffering that they earned. . . . Not everyone who in the eyes of man passes as innocent, even if he talks a lot in front of everyone about his honesty and goodness, is truly without guilt before God. . . . Certainly, every one of us has something to atone for. . . . Even if suffering is visited upon someone who is indeed entirely innocent, then still no one has the right to be angry at God for sending the suffering. . . . For it provides the opportunity to attain greater praise in heaven.58 A few weeks after this issue of Rycerz Niepokalanej reached its readers, the quiescent acceptance of misery would be put to the ultimate test. World War II did not meaningfully alter the specific content of Catholic morality in Poland, but never again would it be possible to justify it in quite the same way. Over the coming years there was enough suffering in Poland to expiate quite a lot of sin, and even the most judgmental priests found it difficult to sustain

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their prewar tone. It would be misleading to suggest that the Lord of Judgment was entirely replaced by a loving and caring deity, but there was an undeniable shift after the war toward an emphasis on God’s redemptive power rather than His anger and vengeance. In part this was a response to the experiences of the 1940s: only the most tone-deaf priest would stand in the ruins of a bombed-out church in a devastated city and say that such misery was appropriate punishment from a vengeful Lord, or that pain was a gift from God to help us keep our eyes focused on heaven. The war alone, however, does not entirely explain the changes in the mid-twentieth century, because the earliest signs of a new homiletic style could be seen even in the 1920s and 1930s. As we will see in chapters 4 and 5, priests and lay commentators prior to World War II were advocating more and more engagement with this world, and Catholic political parties and social movements proliferated. These new initiatives did not overtly challenge the gloomy mood of most Sunday sermons, but they did imply that one could make the world a better place, thus making doom seem less inevitable. Moreover (and this too will be explored in later chapters) an increasing preoccupation with enemies both human and demonic made it less likely that Christian sinners would be blamed for their own problems. After World War II these trends reached their fruition, culminating with the Second Vatican Council. Gaudium et Spes, the “Pastoral Constitution” of 1965, devoted its first chapter to “the dignity of the human person” and began with the proclamation, “According to the almost unanimous opinion of believers and unbelievers alike, all things on earth should be related to man as their center and crown.” This text unambiguously rejected the idea that misery and suffering were divine punishments, and distanced the Church from the ascetic contempt for the corporeal that had once been such a basic component of Catholic homiletics. “Man is not allowed to despise his bodily life,” the Council taught, “rather, he is obliged to regard his body as good and honorable since God has created it.” To be sure, Gaudium et Spes did not challenge the belief that God would judge us in the end, but the tone of the text was directed to the realization of the good within us rather than the mere avoidance of sin.59 In accordance with this new humanism Vatican theologians came to describe hell as a self-imposed exile from God. By the time the official catechism of the Roman Catholic Church was revised in 1992, hell was defined as “the state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed,” and the old images of flame and torture were dismissed as metaphors. Even more important, salvation became the default option for all humans. “God predestines no one to go to hell,” the catechism now teaches. “For this, a willful turning away from God (a mortal sin) is necessary, and persistence in it until the end.”60 Such profound changes did not take place overnight, and the Vatican’s new tone did not penetrate every part of the Catholic world with equal thoroughness. In Poland even today one can still

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encounter preachers who eagerly draw upon nineteenth-century homiletic models, but the rhetorical mainstream has undeniably de-emphasized the God of suffering and retribution and moved toward a focus on human dignity and even joy. In Poland it is possible to find challenges to the vale-of-tears model prior to World War II, but only rarely, and mostly in high-brow publications.61 In the 1950s and 1960s, however, the argument that love was more powerful than fear began to spread widely. The Church hierarchy recognized that their dour homilies were counterproductive in an environment marked (eventually) by rising standards of living and a rebellious youth culture. Moreover they now had to compete with a hostile communist state for the hearts and minds of the postwar youth, and that state was promising ever more progress toward material prosperity. In this environment it would have put the Church at a serious disadvantage had the clergy continued to instruct Poles to turn away from this world and embrace deprivation. In 1956 the Episcopate assured young people, “The Church does not want to cast a shadow on the charms of your lives, but only to expand and enrich them. We do not forbid you joy—quite the contrary, we make it into a virtue and a duty. We do not prohibit you from taking part in decent forms of entertainment—rather, we support your joyous activities. . . . God has destined you for great things—for eternal happiness.”62 This message quickly filtered through to the sermons of parish priests. In 1957, for example, Father Kazimierz Pielatowski told his parishioners in the town of Puszczykowo (near Poznań): When we speak about the fear of God, an Old Testament God stands before our eyes in all of His terror and severity, holding in His hands the horrible lightning bolts of punishment. When we mention our sins, we then start to feel overwhelmed with fear before God and before the threat of the eternal punishment of hell. This, however, is a completely false conception of the fear of God. After all, God does not want any sort of servile fear, which neither brings Him glory nor has any spiritual utility for us.63 Familiar moral injunctions began to be cast in a new light, with a new emphasis on the fulfillment of our humanity in this life rather than the transcendence of it in the next. A model sermon distributed to the priests of the Warsaw Archdiocese in 1951 seemed familiar in its condemnation of “the madness of pride, self-deification, and all sorts of anarchy,” and its claim that “the foundation of moral law is obedience to God and love.” But in elaborating this theme the anonymous author of this unpublished sermon listed the ways sin eroded our humanity. Drawing upon a personalist approach that was becoming increasingly

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popular among Polish Catholics (as we will explore in chapter four), he did not even mention divine punishment; instead he argued that human nature was naturally honorable and dignified, unless denigrated by base passions. The morality in this sermon (particularly its treatment of gender) was entirely in keeping with older norms, but the mechanism for enforcing and justifying these standards were relocated within the human soul. Instead of fear, the motive force was now self-fulfillment and the quest for “dignity” and “freedom.” Sin deprives man above all of freedom, for it harnesses him in slavery to his rebellious lust. The sinner is a slave to his own passions and to the devil. Succumbing to him, as a man, one loses one’s masculinity, the essence of which—fortitude [męstwo]—depends on the overcoming of every obstacle and the rule of the higher world over the lower, along the lines of the classical stoic principle “abstine et sustine,” and in accordance with the injunctions of the teachings of the Cross. One loses one’s honor and demeans one’s personal dignity (not even considering the loss of material goods like health, property, and more). Sin deprives a woman of true femininity, which in its essence is a humble servitude of generous, pure love, and through which she conquers her own weakness and gives a godly tone to life. Sin, therefore, threatens humanity itself, undermines it and destroys it.64 Over the coming years the substance of the Polish Church’s moral message remained relatively unchanged, but words like freedom, human dignity, and even joy largely replaced the old slogans of divine justice and punishment. One of the leading advocates in Poland of this new rhetoric was Karol Wojtyła. From very early in his career he was known for his uplifting pastoral and homiletic style, marked by a turn away from the fire-and-brimstone models of a previous generation. His distinctive personality doubtlessly had a lot to do with this, but he was also exemplifying a transformation that was penetrating the Polish Church more broadly. In 1964 the young bishop told an audience in Kraków that “Christian morality is not a collection of principles, formulas, abstract rules,” because all these things were just “human sanctions.” Much more important was our relationship with the divine, which imbued us with a natural goodness whose power we only had to unlock (with the help of Jesus). Morality was not something external to man, taught Wojtyła, but a basic element of human nature, a “conscience” that “pushes man in the direction of good.”65 He similarly told a group of young people that everyone had the potential of “breaking with evil and finding good.”66 In Wojtyła’s sermons the stress was no longer on the fear of externally inflicted punishment, be it pain and suffering in this life or damnation in the next. Instead, he directed attention to the individual’s own potential for

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sanctity. Wojtyła’s turn away from older teachings about damnation would remain a constant even after his election to the papacy; despite his conservative reputation, on this matter he remained firmly in the pastoral tradition of Vatican II. It was John Paul II, after all, who said in 1999 that hell was “not a punishment imposed externally by God”: “Rather than a place, hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy.”67 Not every member of the Polish Episcopate adjusted to this uplifting mood so easily, but after the Second Vatican Council their official pronouncements began to incorporate the new keywords dignity, redemption, and joy. In 1969 in fact they explicitly instructed the Polish clergy to stop focusing on fear and punishment. “Everyone has a right to happiness,” the bishops announced in a joint pastoral letter. “God created us because He wanted to share with us His happiness. He summoned us to happiness and poured into us His wishes.”68 A few years later the bishops repudiated the idea that God imposed misfortune upon us as a punishment or a test. Instead they offered Christianity as an antidote to pain: The evil that haunts man has various symptoms. They are suffering, abuse, injustice, exploitation, falsehood, hatred, hunger, sickness, death. The root of all evil—moral, physical, social—is sin. . . . People need the Savior, who has the power to liberate us from the yoke of the slavery of sin. . . . We are called to unity with God, on the model of the union of humanity and divinity in Christ. . . . Recognize, Christian, your dignity! You are summoned to become a child of God!69 Suffering still appeared here as the wage of sin, yet all the emphasis was relocated away from pain and toward salvation and the ensuing alleviation of evil. The tone was hopeful, full of promise and comfort, and the potential goodness and sanctity of man was placed at the center of the message. Torment and sin were no longer offered as the natural state, but instead presented as a transitory problem that could be solved—not just in the afterlife, but here on earth as well. It may seem like a small step to reframe misery as a consequence of sin rather than a punishment from God, but this transferred agency and causation from God to humanity and thus made suffering both explicable and resolvable (though the means to resolve it would remain contested). Despite the presence of charismatic advocates like Karol Wojtyła, and despite the professed desire of the Episcopate to promote a more affirmative tone, the transition to the new phraseology in Poland was neither easy nor complete. Ever since the 1960s Polish homiletics have been characterized by an awkward attempt to express many of the old moral concerns in the new postconciliar

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language. The fear of eternal fire and damnation would never again enjoy such prominence, but the clergy would continue to worry about rampant sexuality, decadent entertainment, and an encroaching worldliness. Just as Catholics found new ways to talk about authority and discipline after the 1960s, so they fit familiar moral teachings into the new framework of “happiness” and “personal dignity.” During the deliberations of the Vatican Council the Episcopate sent out a pastoral letter expressing their alarm that “the Polish family [was] surrounded by an ever more poisonous wave of demoralization and decay.” The bishops wanted to quash any rumors that the Council might weaken the Church’s moral rigor, declaring, “All those who expect from the Church changes in the principles regulating marital and family life are mistaken. God established [these rules], and the Church cannot change any part of them.” The Polish Episcopate continued to condemn “eroticism, infidelity and adultery, alcoholism, a lack of responsible concern for the religious and moral education of children, breakups of families and divorces, and finally the most disgraceful crime of our times—the murder of unborn children.” The bishops made a thinly veiled reference to the communist regime by attributing part of the blame for all these problems to “postwar social and economic changes,” but they stressed that the real issue was a “general crisis of faith and morality” that extended to the entire modern world. This crisis was exemplified by a spreading consumerism, an aversion to sacrifice, and an “eroticism that places sex above all else.” Chastity, warned the bishops, was being treated like “an anachronism for which there is no space in today’s world,” and no one seemed to grasp any more that “the primary goal of marriage is the birth and education of children.”70 Primate Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński was instrumental in crafting these laments, and in his individual writings and sermons he used even stronger terms. However, he cast his concerns using a postconciliar language, which proved to be easier than one might have expected. The title of a pastoral letter written in 1968 was revealing: “Easter Letter to the Clergy and the Faithful about the Threats to the Morality of the Nation.” This last term was the keystone in the primate’s vocabulary. Over the following chapters I will show how “the nation” was defined within Polish Catholicism, and how it inflected the way Catholics talked about a wide variety of issues. I will also discuss how it became such a central component of Polish Catholicism over the course of the twentieth century. For now, I just want to focus on the way the danger of national decline came to replace, for Wyszyński and others, the threat of personal damnation. No longer able to frighten people with images of eternal torment in hell, the primate held up the specter of national calamity even while promising that individuals were enveloped in God’s love and forgiveness. In that 1968 letter Wyszyński identified the “demographic situation of Poland” as the greatest danger of the

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time, and he attributed the falling birthrate to “a weakening of sensitivity to moral principles in marital life, a devaluation of the value of the life of man and the citizen, the victory of egoism and comfort above the dictates of the national raison d’état.”71 He used this last phrase often. Even when speaking about the evils of alcoholism and smoking (which he called nikotynizm) he cast the problem as a national issue, lamenting, “The great mass of people do not take any account of the ‘national raison d’état,’ . . . they violate the right of others to live together in hygienic conditions, and thus to an extent they undermine the duty of social love for all the children of the Nation.”72 A decade later Wyszyński seemed even more concerned about the health and reproductive vitality of the nation. Noting that only 700,000 families in the country had four or more children, he criticized his compatriots for failing to adequately reproduce. He saw this as the “horrifying price that [Poles] paid for pettiness and for succumbing to immoral practices in family life.” These immoral practices included allowing women to join the workforce, because “the more women work in various professions, the fewer mothers there are, and even fewer children.” Legal divorce and “moral liberty” also contributed to the crisis. Noteworthy here was the way Wyszyński located all these sins in the social rather than the spiritual realm. He did not mention the danger of hell for those who committed sexual transgressions; instead he described marriage as a “social calling,” and he warned that sins of the flesh “once led to the fall of even such a powerful empire as Rome, and in the past century they practically destroyed France.”73 In early 1977 the Episcopate would refer to the erosion of traditional family structures as a form of “biological extermination.”74 Later that same year they wrote, “Dearest Children of God! We do not want to frighten you, but the situation is truly serious. Christ once proclaimed ‘if you do not repent, you will all . . . die’ (Luke 13:5). Today, with a full sense of responsibility, we can repeat this.” But whereas earlier Catholic homiletics threatened a spiritual death in the pits of hell, now the danger was national, and whereas the focus had once been on the sinfulness of wayward Catholics, now the problem was externalized onto an unnamed enemy. One can feel today some kind of hidden plan for the moral disintegration of the Nation, for taking from it the healthy principles of conduct and the biological strength of its existence [bytowanie]. The program preys upon the weakness of human nature; it tries to cut man off from higher interests and aspirations, and direct his attention to the terrain of sensual experiences. We must be sober and not allow ourselves to be deluded. After all, this is not an alleged “liberation of man,” but a horrible slavery! . . . Who, then, when the need arises, will defend the

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freedom of the Fatherland? It is easy to destroy and occupy an enslaved nation, without moral backbone, decayed and depraved by impurity and sin.75 There was some debate among the bishops about how to respond to this threat. In the joint letter just cited they called on the government to use its power of censorship to keep out of Poland the books and magazines that were undermining the nation’s morality. Bishop Ignacy Tokarczuk, however, seemed reluctant to employ this method. In a 1971 sermon that was recorded by the security services, he complained bitterly about the “destructive forces spreading today, particularly in Western Europe,” and he declared that “humanity must be rescued from this.” However, he cautioned, “One may not rescue with mechanical prohibitions, for after all this would lead to the other extreme, a sort of totalism, censorship, a lack of freedom against which everyone would rebel. One must find the proper path. Education is necessary.”76 Either way there was general agreement that the media was to blame. As early as 1962 the bishops worried that “in an almost imperceptible manner, the media of mass culture, such as radio, cinema, television, theater, the press, and literature influence the mentality of contemporary man and shape his thinking and his values according to an un-Christian model. This influence is particularly strong regarding the means of taking advantage of free time.”77 By the 1970s these concerns had grown even sharper, perhaps because by then nearly every urban Polish family (and a great many in the countryside) had access to a television. For whatever reason, this unpublished sermon from the Warsaw archdiocese reflected fears that were expressed with increasing frequency by the Polish clergy: The mass media, which constitutes a powerful force acting on the psyche and the imagination of man, is systematically causing great devastation in the personal, family, and social life of many millions of people. Today’s cinema, aimed at earning great fortunes, has reached a point for the majority of film services at which the basic themes have become sophisticated murders, violence, and sex. The same applies to a great number of periodicals, particularly weekly publications. In this way a man who is increasingly sensual and materialistic is formed.78 Transferring guilt and agency onto a political or cultural foe became a common maneuver in Catholic writing in the late twentieth century, as I will explore more fully in the coming chapters. When a Polish-language abridged version of the Church’s new 1992 Catechism was released, one of the most telling sections to be cut from the Latin original was the following: “Contemporary man does not like the word sin. He even tries to belittle not just the word

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itself, but the reality of sin. If he acknowledges that sin exists, he is more willing to see it in the activities of politicians, in threats to peace, in armaments, in terrorism. He does not want to recognize the reality of sin on the level of his own life.”79 We can only speculate why these lines were omitted, but with so many members of the Polish hierarchy (not to mention the rank-and-file clergy) routinely arguing that the media, the communists, the Jews, or some other alien force was the cause of perversion and moral decay, it might have muddied the waters to relocate the source of sin back on the individual Catholic. This is not to say that the concept of personal responsibility disappeared from Catholic rhetoric—quite the contrary. In its new form, however, the goal of moral rectitude was displaced from personal salvation to national preservation. Behavioral discipline would be retained, but the object of anxiety would be shifted from the damnation of the individual to the demographic collapse and political devastation of the nation. When the Solidarity movement briefly challenged the communists in 1980 and 1981, the Episcopate issued a joint pastoral letter reminding the faithful that “every renewal must begin with oneself.” However, even as they tried to divert attention away from social activism and onto personal penance, the bishops exemplified their tendency to avoid discussions of hell and perdition. Every renewal must begin with oneself.  .  .  . Others have adequately demonstrated the moral crisis in the national economy. Relations facilitating dishonesty were tolerated, and people closed their eyes before all sorts of abuses. But does that justify any of us who worked unreliably, accepted even the smallest theft, profited from bribery? We have also often pointed out the plague of alcoholism. The consumption of alcohol was facilitated, and that is worthy of condemnation. But was any of us truly forced to drink? Was it not we ourselves who abused alcohol, destroying our own lives, the lives of our families, and the social well being? And let us consider for a moment rapidly expanding evils in marital, family, and sexual life. It is true that by allowing civil divorces, by legalizing abortion, by the lack of respect for morality in the mass media, a social atmosphere contributing to promiscuity was created, which leads, as history shows, to social decay. But after all, in this case as well no one was required to take advantage of these opportunities for evil.80 Even as the spotlight was cast on individual responsibility, there was no comparable move back to the fear of individual damnation. The primary danger was that “social well being” would be undermined and “social decay” advanced. As Poland shifted from communism to consumerism (a process that began long before the formal moment of systemic transition in 1989) sermons began

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to focus increasingly on the pitfalls of prosperity. Again, though, these presentations usually claimed not that materialism threatened people with damnation, but that it undermined national customs and communal bonds. As early as 1982, in the midst of martial law and the worst economic crisis in postwar Polish history, Father Janusz Tereszczuk of Warsaw offered his parishioners a lengthy parable about a man who wanted to buy a car. At first the story seemed like a good capitalist morality tale: the man worked very hard, saved his money, and sacrificed immediate pleasures in order to obtain the funds needed to buy an automobile. At long last he was able to do so, only to find that he had to continue his frugal ways in order to have enough money for maintenance and supplies. His friends and his lifestyle started to change; he began hanging out with other people who owned cars instead of his old friends, and he started taking family drives on Sundays instead of going to Church. Then his son was killed in a car accident, and the man finally understood “the proper measure of a human life.”81 More important than the condemnation of materialism was the fact that Tereszczuk did not juxtapose earthly vice with otherworldly, spiritual virtue. The man’s life at the start of the story is depicted as happy and stress-free, embedded in rich bonds of sociability and family affection. Materialism did not so much destroy his soul as it tore him away from his proper communal bonds. In November 1989, as the first postcommunist government in Poland was struggling to resolve the massive problems it had inherited from the old regime and as communist governments all over Eastern Europe were falling, the Polish Episcopate met to set the homiletic theme for the coming liturgical year. The pronouncement published in Biblioteka Kaznodziejska carried no references at all to the dramatic events then transforming Europe and the world; instead the theme for 1990 was to be “the family,” and the need to preserve it against the threats from modern immorality.82 Abortion was a prominent topic, but it was only one part of a much larger campaign. In the summer of 1990 Father Jacek Pulikowski of Poznań offered a sermon in which he denounced the growing use of birth control. (Contraception had been hard to obtain under the communists, but it became much more accessible after 1989.) His avoidance of euphemisms was startling: This is an attitude directed against conception, resulting from fear of the child. It is advocated by those who want to treat sexual relations exclusively as a pleasure, cut off from the difficulties of parenting. . . . All [methods of birth control] have as their goal the destruction of a healthy, normal situation, when after marital union the undestroyed semen of the husband remains in a properly functioning, unmutilated sexual organ of the wife. . . . Contraception radically negates the function of intercourse, treating the possible conception of a child as the

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greatest enemy, which must be destroyed with all available means. . . . I have never met a married couple who would state that intercourse taking place in fear of the conception of a child, with one’s health mutilated by birth control, can give greater pleasure than natural, proper [prawidłowe] intercourse, expressing love without any fear.83 Pulikowski’s moral code may seem identical to those of priests from a century earlier, but his quest for “greater pleasure” was typical of the late twentieth century. Gone (or at least muted) were the threats that sexual sin would lead to damnation; indeed, fear is associated here with the use of contraception, and Catholic procreation is offered as a way of achieving uninhibited joy. As the debate over abortion and birth control intensified over the course of the 1990s the primary emphasis was not on the individual sinner who opted to use a condom or terminate a pregnancy; rather abortion was discussed primarily as a matter of public policy with consequences for the national soul. As Janine Holc has shown, the abortion debate in Poland in the 1990s did not rotate around the dichotomy of “choice” versus “life” as it did in the United States, thanks in part to a hierarchical medical culture in which patients enjoyed little empowerment to make any sort of choice. Instead, all sides in the early postcommunist abortion debate concentrated on the way the nation would be harmed by one policy or the other.84 This changed a bit in the early twenty-first century— some Polish liberals did eventually move toward a stronger emphasis on individual rights—but the general point still stands for most Catholic opponents of abortion and birth control. The most popular citations are John Paul II’s famous (or infamous) comparison between abortion and the Holocaust, and his assertion that “a nation that kills its children has no future.”85 For “pro-life” advocates in Poland there is little to be gained in frightening the individual pregnant woman with visions of hell, because this recenters the whole issue on the “choice” of each particular sinner. Much more effective are campaigns against “the culture of death” (another phrase from John Paul II), in which guilt is transposed to the community and solutions made dependent upon legal prohibitions. Aside from such tactical and polemical considerations, however, the language of the antiabortion movement in Poland fits with a tendency in Catholic rhetoric to stress the fate of the national community rather than that of the individual soul. In September 2002 a survey revealed that whereas 91 percent of Poles believed in God and 72 percent believed in heaven, only 41 percent believed in hell.86 This is definitely not in accordance with Catholic teaching; hell has been redefined, but it is a long way from joining limbo in the dust heap of doctrinal embarrassments. Nonetheless, it should not be surprising that many Catholics no longer believe in the existence of hell, because Polish priests today talk about

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it much less than they used to. Even the current debates over the future of the Church in Poland do not usually focus on the danger to the immortal souls of all the young people who are questioning Catholic teachings. Instead the options are typically drawn as “the Church of the People” versus “the Church of Choice”—that is, an institution rooted in folk practices and ethnic identity as opposed to one that people freely choose and consciously join.87 A transformation from the former to the latter would entail a decline in religious identification but a concomitant strengthening of active religious belief and theological cohesion among those who remain. Most members of the Polish clergy are deeply concerned about this possibility, in part because “the nation” has become so central to their vocabulary that they cannot envision a world in which they are no longer a national institution, but also because the Polish homiletic tradition has drifted away from a preoccupation with the salvation and damnation of individual souls. In the abridged Polish version of the current catechism the faithful are told to respect those who say “I believe because I was raised that way,” because “this is an expression of the very nature of faith, which we receive because it has been transmitted to us.” Being part of a Catholic culture is therefore a “a gift from God” that saves people from the dangers of false choices and allows them to receive the faith without individual spiritual seeking.88 One of the ironies in the history of Polish moral homiletics is that prior to the Second World War those defending the strictest forms of moral rigor were also those who were most likely to call on the faithful to look inward, to their own sinfulness, not outward at the alleged injustices of a hostile world. As we saw in chapter 1, early twentiethcentury Catholic reformers like Stojałowski and Szech urged their fellow clergy to recognize that oppressive institutions and unjust economic relations—not personal sin—were at the root of poverty and misery. Today this has been inverted, with more conservative members of the clergy likely to look to the outside world for both the sources of evil (the media, former communists, liberals, Jews, etc.) and the foundation of morality (national tradition). In chapter 4 I will explore the ongoing Catholic debates over the social causes of injustice and suffering. For now, though, it is important to note that there are fewer Polish Catholics today who would endorse those early twentieth-century sermons instructing the poor to embrace their own poverty as either a punishment from God or a means to focus attention on the glories of the next life. Obviously the salvation of the individual soul must always be central to Catholic teaching, but the causal links between a miserable existence on earth and a glorious eternal life in heaven have been markedly downplayed. Across the spectrum of Catholic thought it no longer seems to be enough to tell people to just wait until they die to attain either happiness or justice.

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Modernity

Stefan Świeżawski, a professor of philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Kraków and a mentor to the young Karol Wojtyła, once complained to his former student (who was by then Pope John Paul II) that most of their coreligionists in Poland were characterized by a “nationalistic, narrow, and hyper-conservative Catholicism.”1 The professor’s accusation is familiar; the Catholic Church in general, and the Polish Catholic Church in particular, has long been described as a bastion of tradition fundamentally at odds with the modern world. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it often seemed that modernity and religion, particularly Catholicism, were necessarily hostile. The Church lost its worldly power with the destruction of the Papal States; growing state bureaucracies seized authority over marriage, education, and charity; the rapidly expanding industrial cities seemed to be nearly devoid of religious life; and the European intelligentsia was growing increasingly anticlerical (and sometimes anti-Christian). When Max Weber wrote about the “disenchantment of the world” in 1905, many thought that the secularization he predicted was well under way. Subsequent scholars have challenged this story (as I noted in the introduction), but whether real or imagined, European Catholics definitely perceived a crisis at the time. By the start of the twentieth century it was widely accepted that modernity was antiCatholic and that Catholicism was anti-modern. This was just as true in Poland as it was farther to the west. The industrial economy was fully entrenched in major cities such as Warsaw and Łódź even before World War I, and the accompanying demographic detonation had a profound impact on the effectiveness of pastoral care. In 1860 there were 1,527 Catholics per priest in the Kingdom of Poland (the Russian partition), but a half-century later this figure had increased to 2,857. The statistics were similar in Poznania (increasing from 1,576 to 2,505) and even worse in Galicia (2,837 to 4,362).2 The relative decline in the size of the clergy relative to the booming population was a problem for countryside and city alike, but the issues were made acute in the new urban agglomerations because of the Church’s failure to 81

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adjust to the era’s huge population shifts. By the start of World War I one working-class parish in the Warsaw district of Praga had 82,000 parishioners, and within the boundaries of the Holy Cross parish in Łódź there were 142,000.3 These distortions were in part due to the reluctance of the Russian authorities to approve new church construction, but that does not fully explain this phenomenon, because it was just as bad in autonomous Galicia. In fact the problem existed throughout Europe: at the start of the twentieth century the average Parisian parish had 36,000 members, the average Berlin parish 31,000, and the average Viennese parish 22,500. Warsaw’s figure of 34,000 parishioners per parish fits into this pattern (though Łódź’s 50,000:1 ratio remained an outlier).4 Moreover the situation improved only slightly after Poland regained independence, and in some regions of the country it continued to get worse.5 The ensuing erosion of the more intimate forms of pastoral work once typical of Polish villages only exacerbated the sense among many Catholics that “modernity” (whatever might be subsumed under that amorphous label) constituted a grave spiritual danger. As grave as these demographic and institutional problems were, most Catholic commentators were even more worried about the cultural threats they perceived. From Pius IX’s “Syllabus of Errors” in 1864 to Pius X’s “Oath against Modernism” in 1910 Rome unambiguously condemned what many Catholics saw as an increasingly sinful, decadent, and above all secular culture. Archbishop Antoni Fijałkowski lamented as early as 1857, “There have always been errors, but systematically committing them and elevating them to the dignity of virtue belongs to recent times. There have always been transgressions, but wrong without compensation, discord without reconciliation, the defiance and triumph of sin belongs to our times.”6 A few years later the anonymous author of a small book called The Church and Progress asked, “Is it not true that progress turns people into animals? . . . Today egoism rules the world in the place of God, so everyone thinks only about themselves and how to do harm to everyone else.”7 I argue in this chapter, however, that despite such categorical language, Catholics responded to change with more complexity and diversity than is usually recognized. The sharp polemics of the nineteenth century and early twentieth make it hard to notice how the Church has adjusted to the cultural, social, economic, and political changes that we typically collapse under the label of modernity. The clergy eventually developed new approaches to pastoral care in order to adjust to an increasingly urbanized landscape, and they found ways to work within the institutions of mass politics and the genres of popular culture. Catholic authors even appropriated and to some extent domesticated the troublesome vocabulary of modernity, words like science and progress. Catholics, no less than  liberals or socialists, eventually embraced an understanding of historical time that envisioned humanity steadily advancing toward a better future. This

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dynamic historiosophy did not initially fit well within a Catholic framework, but with each passing decade of the twentieth century it became increasingly hard to avoid. Catholicism’s modernity does not look like liberalism’s modernity, but it is no less modern for that. Discussing historical change always has ideological implications, and the word progress is one of the most fraught terms in any language. Benedict Anderson famously claimed that there is a difference between the simultaneity of (Christian) sacred time and the dynamism of secular time: whereas the former imagines a flat plain of continuity between key events in the story of salvation (the creation, the resurrection, and the second coming), the latter envisions movement through time toward an ever improving future.8 That movement can be plotted in a number of ways, but the typical “modern” trajectory has been one of development and growth. It is possible to argue that this progressive arc has been deflected or even reversed, but to reject the very possibility of meaningful historical time has proven to be difficult and even dangerous.9 Catholics have faced a special challenge in dealing with historical time in the modern world, because the Christian tradition actually offers (pace Anderson) both dynamic and static historiosophical alternatives. Even though the former has long been denounced as heretical and the latter has received Magisterial endorsement and institutional support, this enduring dynamic of heterodoxy and repression has helped define Catholicism. In nineteenth-century Poland national activists tried to reconcile a distinctly modern liberation project with a religious vocabulary grounded in a highly unorthodox vision of sacred time. The result was rhetorically potent for a while, but it was firmly repudiated by the institutions of the Catholic Church. The second line of the Lord’s Prayer can be troublesome: “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” We have already seen that the catechism claims that this line refers to the establishment of the Church as the earthly embodiment of revelation and salvation: God’s Kingdom is indeed here, manifest in the Magisterium and the sacramental power of the Church, and by repeating the Lord’s Prayer the faithful are pledging their subordination to God’s rule. But in defiance of this orthodox exegesis of Matthew 6:10 and Luke 11:2 a great many Christians over the centuries have taken comfort in the promise that a very different sort of earthly kingdom—a utopia of virtue and justice—was approaching, and some have turned this hopeful conviction into a theological foundation for political action. When faced with a world that seemed filled with vice, oppression, and hatred, Christians have periodically assumed the responsibility for actively creating what they understood to be the Kingdom of God within this world’s social, political, or economic order. From the medieval period to the present day, from the Hussites to the liberation theologians, Christianity has generated a stream of revolutionary utopian movements that have attempted

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to make manifest God’s justice. Those in positions of clerical authority, meanwhile, have tended to resist the idea that faith could serve as the inspiration for radical change of that sort. Polish Catholic thinkers have had a particularly difficult time coping with this idea, because throughout the nineteenth century (and to a lesser extent in the twentieth) they had to contend with several political movements rooted in the idea that God was guiding history toward a utopian conclusion—and that the Polish nation would play a key role in bringing humanity into the next age. Pope Pius IX once complained, “The Poles are seeking Poland above all, not the Kingdom of God. This is why they do not have Poland.”10 He was mistaken; the Poles were seeking the Kingdom—they were merely looking for it in places the pope considered inappropriate. When Polish intellectuals and politicians of the early nineteenth century discussed the Kingdom of God they did so within a formation that scholars call “national messianism.” This label is shorthand for a wide range of thinkers who shared an expectation that the world was about to enter a new age in which injustice would be resolved, human consciousness would be elevated, and strife would come to an end. Exactly how this would come to pass was a matter of dispute, but the Polish messianists tended to believe that their nation would be the primary agent of change.11 One of the first Poles to articulate this position was an enigmatic figure named Andrzej Towiański. In 1828 this minor landowner had a vision in a Wilno church revealing that he was the new messiah, sent to announce the coming of a new age. He began to preach that humanity’s ultimate goal was to break away from the restraints of this world and seek a higher union with God. Since the dawn of time, he taught, humanity has been advancing toward this objective, guided by the progressive reincarnation of the messiah. Jesus was one such instantiation; Towiański himself was another. In 1840 this new messiah moved from Poland to France, where he established the Circle of Servants of the Divine Cause. After a few months he had gathered about forty-five acolytes, but successive expulsions from Paris and Rome, and a Vatican decision in 1850 to place all his writings on the Index of Forbidden Books, eroded his support to a tiny cluster of followers.12 The details of Towiański’s teachings need not detain us here, because few of his contemporaries paid much attention to his new gospel and most of his followers (among whom were such prominent figures as Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki) left the fold after only brief subordination to this overbearing master. More important for our purposes is the very existence of a figure like Towiański, and the fact that his message did not, by itself, marginalize him among Polish elites in the 1840s. Church officials would focus on Towiański as they condemned the spread of millenarian heresies in the mid-nineteenth century, but he was far too eccentric to be either blamed or credited for inspiring national messianism. The broadest outlines of his teachings—a mystical vision of spiritual perfection,

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attainable in this world by those who understood the truth and acted upon it— exemplified a much deeper trend. Count August Cieszkowski, a philosopher with far more prestige, social standing, and lasting influence, was less likely to earn Rome’s public rebuke but no less drawn to millenarian musings.13 From 1848 to 1870 this prominent member of the Polish aristocracy served as a delegate to the Prussian Assembly, acting after 1860 as chair of the “Polish circle” in Berlin. He was one of the first to advocate “organic work” (a plan to serve the Polish cause within the sociopolitical status quo), and he spoke of his desire for a “moral government” that would guide his countrymen toward practical engagement with their circumstances, away from the dangers of revolution. By all appearances Cieszkowski was a moderately conservative scion of a distinguished family, but he was as philosophically bold as he was politically cautious. In 1838 he published the book that made him momentarily famous all over Europe: A Prologue to Historiosophy (released first in German as Prolegomena zur Historiosophie). Here Cieszkowski called history the “touch-stone of all speculation,” but his understanding of history extended beyond the part that had already happened. “The entirety of history must consist of the past and the future,” he wrote, “of both the path already taken and the one which we have yet to take.”14 His historiosophical speculations convinced him that a new age of humanity characterized by “absolute good” and a fully realized “self-awareness” was about to dawn.15 These ideas were elaborated in a posthumous work entitled Our Father, in which Cieszkowski argued that the Lord’s Prayer offered a specific blueprint for the future. He predicted that the time would come when God and the world would be rejoined into one integral whole, bringing to an end our present bifurcation. In this coming age, Cieszkowski promised, there would be a whole new social order, and to go with it a new “Church of humanity.” Just as Christianity had come into the world in order to proclaim and make manifest the “postulates” of our current age (which Cieszkowski described as “abstract freedom” and “human dignity”), so would “the coming of the Kingdom of God entail the posing of a new postulate, and the further history of [the Kingdom] would be its realization.”16 One of Cieszkowski’s friends, a fellow nobleman and a devout Catholic named Zygmunt Krasiński, acknowledged the count’s influence on his own work.17 Krasiński’s poetry earned him a place in Poland’s literary pantheon, but even as he was building his reputation in the conservative circles of the cultural establishment he was quietly composing a work of heterodox religious philosophy entitled On the Trinity in Time and Space. No one read this book during Krasiński’s lifetime, but in his testament he asked two close friends, both priests, to look over the manuscript and decide whether it should be posthumously published. The two refused to release the book to the public, declaring it to be “unchristian both in its first principles and in its final conclusions.”18 In this

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volume Krasiński maintained that the goal of human existence was “to reach the position from which eternal life will begin” and “the earth will be transformed into one grand, living temple of the Holy Spirit.” In other words, our destiny was to realize “the Kingdom of God on earth.” The attainment of the new age would come, Krasiński wrote, only after mankind reconciled the long-standing gap between the sacred realm (the Church) and the secular realm (the state). Krasiński not only brought together the earthly sphere of human society with the heavenly sphere of Christ; he also introduced the nation into his prophecy. He argued that patriotism should not be about “loving the land or a town,” but should instead entail a commitment to the “goal of all souls who work under such and such a law, in such and such a distinct shape, on that land, in this place.” And what was this goal, in the case of Poland? Here Krasiński stepped from the generic millenarianism that was quite pervasive in the 1830s and 1840s in Europe to the national messianism that made Polish thought of the day somewhat distinctive. Just as Christ died and rose again in order to show us the way to eternal life, Krasiński wrote, now it was time for a collective entity—a nation— to do the same, showing humanity how to apply the Savior’s message to the social world. Such a nation had to be one that had demonstrated its virtues, but yet had died (as had Jesus). And that nation was Poland, which first demonstrated national immortality by attaining national Christness [Chrystusowość narodowa]. It first introduced this national Christness to the world, just as Christ revealed immortality by uniting all individual human souls with the Word of God. Henceforth, collective souls—governments, states, world powers, and peoples—will believe in these truths and will have to be transformed into collective Christness, just as individuals were transformed into Christians two thousand years ago—and this [transformation] will constitute the introduction to the Kingdom of God on earth, without which our souls . . . will never attain eternal life.19 Because this manuscript was never published, Krasiński’s effort to plug his patriotism into a millenarian historiosophy could have had no immediate impact. But these were not merely unpublished scribblings—they were Krasiński’s appropriation of a much broader trend in Polish thought. No one was more instrumental in spreading this messianic sensibility among nineteenthcentury Polish intellectuals than Adam Mickiewicz. His monumental epic poems and plays retain their popularity to this day, but his most exemplary text for our purposes was a little volume published shortly after the 1830 uprising, The Books of the Polish Nation and the Polish Pilgrimage. This text rapidly became required reading for Polish patriots, and Mickiewicz’s language shaped the way

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an entire generation talked about the nation.20 The style of this volume evoked the Bible, as Mickiewicz blended the language of a sermon with that of a revolutionary tract. He started with Genesis: “In the beginning there was faith in one God, and there was Freedom on earth. There were no laws, only the will of God, and there were no masters or slaves, only the patriarchs and their children.” Unfortunately this primitive (and masculine) equality did not last, and soon humanity divided into the exploiters and the exploited. Amid widespread corruption and injustice stood Poland, the one nation that did not “bow before the new idols.” Mickiewicz reconfigured the history of prepartition Poland into a morality tale of brotherhood and harmony, declaring, “In the end Poland said, ‘Whosoever comes to me will be free and equal, for I am Freedom.’” Just as Christ was killed for his message, an evil trinity of monarchs destroyed Poland because they feared the freedom it embodied. But this apparent death was not the end, “for the Polish nation did not die. Its body lay in the grave and its soul had gone from the earth, that is, from public life, into purgatory, that is, into the domestic life of [those nations] suffering from slavery. . . . And on the third day the soul will return to the body and the nation will rise again and free all the peoples of Europe from slavery.”21 Mickiewicz later distanced himself from the idea that Poland would serve as a collective savior. Lecturing in Paris in the early 1840s he taught instead that an individual messiah would work through the nation to bring the new age to the rest of humanity.22 But whether Poland was to be the agent of apocalyptic transformation or the vehicle for a personal messiah, the link between the nation and a dynamic vision of historical time, culminating in a utopia of peace and brotherhood, was spread throughout Mickiewicz’s work. The messianic metaphor thus placed Poland within the divine plan of salvation, imbuing nationalist rhetoric with a teleological (and theological) dynamic that promised both the establishment of universal justice and the reestablishment of the Polish state. The result was a faith in national rebirth that was simultaneously political and religious—and enormously popular. At a time when the restoration of Polish independence through diplomatic or military means seemed impossible, a millenarian faith in national resurrection offered muchneeded hope. Among the literate (still a small segment of the Polish population, but a growing one), national romanticism virtually defined the patriotism of the mid-nineteenth century. Messianic imagery penetrated the literature of the day, much of which still stands at the forefront of the Polish canon. But messianism was not restricted to the lofty domain of the arts; one can find millenarian ideas in everything from political manifestos and newspaper articles to private letters and memoirs, in all three partitions and (particularly) in the emigration.23 This messianism is often presented as evidence that Polish culture was (and is) thoroughly penetrated by Catholicism, to a degree rarely seen in modern Europe. The Christian roots of national messianism are so obvious as to hardly

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require commentary, and most of the authors mentioned above repeatedly affirmed their Catholicism. Some, such as Cieszkowski and Krasiński, were explicitly devout, regularly participating in the Church’s rituals and affirming their allegiance to Rome. They were acutely sensitive to charges of heterodoxy, and both withheld from publication work they feared might offend the Catholic hierarchy. Other messianists were less concerned with the sensitivities of the Church’s official leadership, and some could be overtly anticlerical, but even in these cases the bond with Catholicism was evident. Mickiewicz was condemned by Church leaders and some of his work was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, but he never abandoned Catholicism, and for a while he even believed that Pius IX would be the leader of a great revolution.24 National messianism was at least in part a Catholic interpretation of Poland’s fate, and it provided Catholics with a way to hope for Poland’s future. It was not only Catholic, of course; a thorough genealogy of national messianism would have to consider Saint-Simon and other utopian socialists, and the seminal scholarship of Jadwiga Maurer has demonstrated the Jewish inspiration behind some of Mickiewicz’s work.25 But however complex and multifaceted the intellectual roots of this form of nationalism might have been, the Catholic imagery and vocabulary were there for all to see. Nonetheless, it is worth remembering that the official institutions of the Church vociferously denounced national messianism. Towiański was a pariah, Mickiewicz was publicly reprimanded by the Vatican, Krasiński’s “heretical” work was suppressed, and Cieszkowski’s Our Father was not published until decades after the author’s death.26 As we will see in chapter 6, the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church tended to be ambivalent (at best) toward all national movements in the nineteenth century, so on one level it is not surprising that the messianists would meet with resistance. But something deeper was at work here, because national prophets like Mickiewicz and Krasiński were proposing a dynamic vision of historical progress that challenged some basic Catholic tenets. As Józef Krukowski’s 1875 catechism explained, “The Kingdom of God has already arrived, for we, as Christians, are already members of the Church.” Krukowski still saw a need for the “Church militant” to engage in the world and struggle with Satan, but this battle “has lasted from the beginning and will last until the end of the world.”27 In other words, it was a conflict outside of time and not a historical quest for a terrestrial victory over evil. There is a long-standing Magisterial Catholic teaching that all of us are free to choose the path of sin or salvation, but that we can no more transform the wider flow of history than we can alter the laws of nature. As an anonymous Polish Catholic author put it in 1868, “Human freedom consists of the fact that everyone can believe in God or not, act in accordance with their faith or against it. Freedom does not, however, entail the desire to transform the nature of the

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whole God-given system in accordance with one’s fancy.”28 Actually the “flow of history” is a poor metaphor, because one relatively stable point of Catholic doctrine is a rejection of the idea that history moves progressively toward the establishment of an earthly paradise. This is not a minor point; numerous “heretics” over the centuries have been rebuked (or worse) for advocating the construction of an idealized terrestrial order. Catholicism offers a relatively consistent historiosophy—or rather, it consistently restrains historiosophical speculation. As Benedict XVI put it recently, “The Church has, since the beginning . . . scrutinized the signs of the times and put the faithful on their guard against recurring expressions of messianism which from time to time arise to announce the imminent end of the world. In reality history has to follow its course and this also involves human dramas and natural disasters.” The pope acknowledged that a “plan of salvation” existed, but he explained that this was “already fulfilled [by Christ’s] incarnation, death, and resurrection.”29 In other words, the Kingdom of God on earth (the Church) was already here, so it was heresy to foresee its imminent arrival in the form of a perfected social order. The means for salvation were established by Jesus once and for all, and alongside this profound continuity all historical changes were trivial in comparison. Time, in this scheme, is imagined as eventful but static, and the truth of revelation—embodied and institutionalized by the Church—stands as the central, changeless constant around which all else rotates. Time is chiliastic; that is, it can be imagined as a series of flat lines punctuated by three key moments: (1) the creation and the fall; (2) the coming of Christ and the offer of redemption through Him (via His Church, i.e., His earthly Kingdom); and (3) the second coming of Christ, when time will stop and we will all confront the consequences of our acts. The 1992 Catechism summarized this historiosophy with a clear denunciation of messianism: The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the Kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the “intrinsically perverse” political form of a secular messianism. The Church will enter the glory of the Kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection. The Kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic ascendancy, but only by God’s victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven. God’s triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.30

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This is the message that greeted the Polish messianists. The philosopher and theologian Maksymilian Jakubowicz explained in 1853 that everything existing in time, what he called “temporal life,” is of value and meaning only insofar as it takes us toward the transcendent life of heaven. “It is contrary to common sense to think that humanity might make progress,” he argued, “because [humanity] is created—according to the creative idea of God—with laws, with a destiny, and with a goal for all centuries and places.”31 This is not to deny that some things might change, only that change is epiphenomenal, with the real transformation of the earth to come only after the apocalypse. Piotr Semeneńko was on the front line of the Church’s defense of static sacred time against the challenge posed by Polish millenarianism, and his Resurrectionist order was specifically charged with stopping the spread of national messianism. According to the group’s charter, their goal was to “establish the Kingdom of God in the human soul”—an explicit repudiation of the dream that Poland might contribute to the construction of a divine social or political system.32 Semeneńko argued that all visions of an earthly utopia were the product of a false understanding of Christ, and he rejected “the Christ of the Jews, the Christ of the politicians, the bankers, the democrats, or the socialists, a Messiah who will somehow bring a golden age (or rather, gold for this age), well-being and possessions, happiness, festivities, a paradise on earth, a Kingdom of God too similar to the kingdoms of this world.”33 To be a Catholic, Semeneńko believed, it wasn’t enough to believe in God; it wasn’t enough to accept Jesus Christ in some general sense; it wasn’t even enough to trust in the intercession of saints and the Virgin, to acknowledge original sin, to seek solace in confession, or to fear the threat of eternal damnation. All this was important, but still missed some key points—perhaps the key points that made Catholicism really distinctive in the eyes of its orthodox defenders: that the Church, with its traditions, its institutions, and its hierarchy, was an embodiment of divine revelation, the already existing Kingdom of God on earth; and that salvation could never come on this earth within historical time, but only when time itself was transcended after the final judgment. In 1876 Father Władysław Chotkowski published a commentary on “The Political Ideals of Zygmunt Krasiński” in which he took the poet to task for undermining these central historiosophical and ecclesiological teachings. He condemned as a dangerous Hegelian error the idea that humanity could advance to a new age and (worse) that this would entail the creation of a new Church. Fortunately, wrote Chotkowski, Krasiński came to see his mistake: “Later the soul of the poet shook off those erroneous daydreams, and their place was occupied by a sincere faith that the Catholic Church is eternal; and as the work of divine, not human hands, it has never needed any reform and neither has nor will ever have to undergo essential changes.”34 Father Jan Gnatowski expressed the same idea twenty years later, when he wrote, “Many people may (in fact,

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must) dislike Catholicism, and from many perspectives they can attack it. They can also try to destroy it. The only thing they cannot do is change it.”35 That the Church is unchanging and unchangeable might strike some twenty-first-century Catholics as uncomfortably reactionary, but as we have seen, even the most radical voices of the late twentieth century recognized that the essence of the Church was timeless and stable. This fundamental principle in turn trivializes everything else that happens in human history. Mankind attained the possibility of salvation two millennia ago, and as individuals we are just as close to that objective today as people were immediately after Christ’s resurrection. The same choices between right and wrong, the same virtues and vices, the same forces of good and evil that confronted us then are still with us, and will remain with us to the end of time. The conviction that the truth of the Church was timeless united those with radically opposed views on almost every other matter. For example, Archbishop Zygmunt Feliński, who presided over the Warsaw Archdiocese during the uprising of 1863, claimed that absolute obedience to the Church could never lead to despotism because “the essence of infallibility is immutability, whereas the essence of absolutism is unrestrained willfulness.”36 If one was constrained by the unchanging truths of the faith, in other words, it was impossible to be a tyrant, whereas if one imagined truth to evolve over time, then it was all too easy to fall victim to the delusion that one’s own ideas and values could be imposed upon one’s subjects. “As far as Church discipline is concerned,” Feliński wrote, “let us look carefully at its development in history, and we will be easily convinced that despite undeniable alterations in details, the entirety continually walks in the same majestic steps, preserving all the characteristics that marked the primordial Church.”37 Ironically those who attacked Feliński’s ultramontane views based their arguments on the same principles of timelessness and immutability. The archbishop’s harshest critics were the contributors to the underground magazine Głos Kapłana Polskiego (Voice of the Polish Priest), who renounced ecclesiastical authority because the Church hierarchy supported the “legitimate” rule of the tsar rather than the Polish independence movement. An essay in that magazine from the summer of 1862 argued that Vatican officials were misguided because they failed to grasp the true nature of the Church: Diplomacy and palace politics have brought and will bring no benefits to the Church, unless we understand “the Church” to be just the bishops. The Church of Christ does not need to use Machiavellian excuses, because it is based on the foundations of truth and justice. . . . Truth is eternal, just as God is eternal. The Church, therefore, as the representative of truth on earth must exist eternally. Unfortunately, often personal

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interests and the most greedy objectives conceal sacrilege with the name of God and His holy religion.38 Despite this doctrinal foundation for historical permanence and immutability, however, it became increasingly difficult over the course of the nineteenth century to avoid the concept of progress. Confronted with undeniable advances in human knowledge and technology and surrounded by a European culture increasingly dominated by scientistic ideologies, Catholics had to either find a way to speak the language of progress or withdraw from the public realm. The Catholic Church has long been represented in the writings of both secular liberals and Protestant polemicists as an implacable enemy of all forms of intellectual progress, with Galileo’s infamous excommunication held up as an eternal symbol of Rome’s obscurantism. It was easy enough to find quotations from Catholic texts to support this view; for example, the Catechism of the Council of Trent (which was used well into the twentieth century) taught, “He who is gifted with this heavenly knowledge of faith is free from an inquisitive curiosity. For when God commands us to believe, He does not propose to us to search into His divine judgments, or inquire into their reason and cause, but demands an unchangeable faith, by which the mind rests content in the knowledge of eternal truth.”39 Passages like this can be misleading, however, because they apply only to what are called “mysteries,” what the 1905 Catechism of Pius X defined as “truths above reason which we are to believe even though we cannot comprehend them.” But as the very next line put it, “Mysteries are above, not contrary to reason; and even reason itself persuades us to accept the mysteries. . . . Mysteries cannot be contrary to reason, because the same God who has given us the light of reason has also revealed the mysteries, and He cannot contradict Himself.”40 A century later the revised 1992 Catechism made the same point: “Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth.”41 Read one way, this might seem to imply that the Church would deny intellectual developments or discoveries whenever they threatened to contradict received teachings on a matter of doctrine. Though this has occasionally happened, Catholicism has actually been far more open to science and scholarship than its reputation might suggest. The more typical response to advances in human knowledge, even among the most conservative Catholics, has been to distinguish between substantive and superficial change, between God’s eternal revelation and the ephemera of the human world. The latter can undergo a sort of progress, but the former never will. And because revelation expresses basic truths about the nature and destiny of the human soul, an understanding of how

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the world works will remain fundamentally unchanged despite any shifts in science, technology, economics, political norms, or social forms. Moreover because Catholicism gives equal weight to Scripture and the living tradition of the Church, it remains relatively open to discoveries that question the literal truth of the Bible (for example, one can quite easily be a devout Catholic and an evolutionary biologist). In practice some Catholics have denied advances in science and scholarship as vigorously as the most ardent biblical literalists, but there are plenty of opportunities for the concept of progress to enter Catholicism through the back door (and even the front door). Eleonora Ziemięcka, the ultramontane philosopher and publisher, devoted a great deal of attention to matters of science, reason, and progress. She often expressed a sense of being trapped between her longing for a conservative golden age and her commitment to the modern world of the nineteenth century. In 1843, while reviewing an advice book for mothers, Ziemięcka bemoaned the “false theories of this century” and praised “the superiority of the past.” Nonetheless, she admitted, “It is impossible to return to the past, [and] the progress of learning and the current arousal of passions has made the art of education a much more difficult task.”42 Later that same year she wrote her own book on pedagogy, a landmark text called Thoughts on the Education of Women. In this volume she praised older forms of female education (which she considered to be “in accordance with religion and the character of women”), but she once again acknowledged that times had changed. “The scope of old forms of education,” she wrote, “might be sufficient for our happiness if we lived in another century, in another moment of human civilization—but the growth of intellectual riches, the accepted customs, the progress of enlightenment among men, all that makes our position entirely different from what it once was.” It might be a good thing in theory, Ziemięcka wrote, to return to “the innocence and simplicity of patriarchal times,” when women were not expected to be fully educated, but “that is not within our power; women must also live in this century, must also be nourished by the same elements” as men.43 In an essay written in 1843 Ziemięcka even compared humanity’s collective progress with the struggle for individual salvation: “From the principle that earthly life is a penance leading to the act of salvation, it follows that it must be a constant process of lifting oneself up, a constant process of emancipating oneself from the influence of the body and the earth, an ever stronger manifestation of spirituality, both in individual virtues and in a genuine elevation of institutions. Even despite the flaws and errors of man, after all, one cannot deny progress in historical life.”44 As presented by Ziemięcka, however, none of this was perceived as a challenge to Magisterial orthodoxy: her books received the imprimatur, and under her direction Pielgrzym was recognized as an organ for ultramontane views. In seeming contradiction to her talk of “progress,” she consistently rejected the idea

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that humanity was engaged in a march toward some higher form of society or some loftier state of being. There might be “thousands of historical phases,” she wrote, but these were driven by “acts of Providence” rather than any progressive unfolding of human development. Each one of these phases rested “on consistent data, that is, on truths that more or less reveal themselves to every man in every society.”45 In other words, humans could use their intellectual faculties to strive toward a better understanding of the world, but the world itself remained unchanged; everyone would face the same choices and temptations as always, even if they learned how to design better, more virtuous institutional and social forms. In the very first issue of Pielgrzym in 1842 Ziemięcka established her conservative bona fides. “Novelty,” she wrote, “is a paradox with a most powerful allure; true philosophy ought once and for all to defend itself against that allure, because truth is singular and unchanging.” She went on to argue that “in the sphere of the moral sciences there is no novelty, there can only be a development; everything that constitutes the spiritual foundation of our existence [jestestwo], on which social being [byt] is based, is an expression of the primary revelation and will never change.” She could still talk about the “progress of knowledge,” but she defined this as “the aspiration of mankind to seek, by means of intellect, a grasp of revealed truth.”46 In this way Catholics could claim (or reclaim) the slogans of reason and science. Obviously these two terms are not synonymous; Catholic philosophers have debated the relationship between reason and faith for centuries, and by no means could all (or even most) of that tradition be applied to modern ideas about scientific progress. That said, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reason and science began to flow together. Secular intellectuals deployed the ideology of fin de siècle scientism when accusing Catholics of placing faith over reason, and Catholics in turn evoked their long dedication to reason as a way of countering charges that they were opposed to modern scientific developments.47 Outside strictly philosophical or theological contexts, to be rational was taken to imply an embrace of scientific progress, just as science was taken to represent the triumph of human reason. For example, a contributor to Pielgrzym identified only as “J. K. S.” offered a distinction between “true reason” and “rationalism,” but he used both terms in a way that implied an almost synonymous relationship with science and progress. The former, he wrote, designated the quest for a better understanding of the (unchanging) revealed truths of the universe, whereas the latter marked a futile and hubristic claim to push humanity to higher levels of consciousness and being. Rationalism, argued J. K. S., led to a “perpetual blindness and inspire[d] a resistance to faith.”48 This setting helps us make sense of assertions such as the following, by a contributor to Pielgrzym named Zenonim Ancyporowicz in 1846: “We have no intention of condemning reason. Not at all. We want only to demonstrate that

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faith is higher than [reason]. If we accuse [reason], it is only because it has set itself up in opposition to faith, and often enters into relations with that serpent, which, luring the human race away from the path of obedience, became the reason for its fall and exile from paradise.” For Catholic authors the idea that reason was grounded in faith did not imply a blind acceptance of unverifiable claims; rather “faith” acted here as a synonym for “truth,” the existence of which had to be embraced even when not fully understood. Thus, continued Ancyporowicz, faith led to a sense of “trust and hope,” insofar as it pointed to the possibility of  eventual understanding, whereas reason without faith—that is, without a firm  belief that God’s revealed truth was out there—could lead only to “fear and  doubt.”49 Another contributor put this more clearly, arguing that Christ had already presented us with an image of “order, beauty, and justice,” and all we had to do now was aspire to that unwavering goal. Those who tried to build a vision of progress on human reason alone would have no grounds for distinguishing between positive and detrimental change. Such people, this contributor wrote, “do not care if the novelties they introduce are based on truth or error; in the eyes of these insidious people, a new mistake often means more than a known truth.”50 Obviously the sticking point here was defining what specifically had been “predetermined.” By the late nineteenth century the Church had accepted (for the most part) that scholars in the hard sciences were producing advances that people of faith should celebrate. There was no tension between modern science and faith for people like Gregor Mendel, the Augustinian priest who laid the groundwork for modern genetics in the 1860s, or Georges Lemaitre, the priest who first proposed the Big Bang theory in 1931 and became a friend of Albert Einstein. Although evolution was a bit harder to swallow for some Catholics, even the ultraconservative Pius IX refrained from denouncing The Origin of Species when it appeared, and by the time the Catholic Encyclopedia addressed the issue in 1909 it declared evolution to be “in perfect agreement with the Christian conception of the universe; for Scripture does not tell us in what form the present species of plants and of animals were originally created by God.” The Encyclopedia even recognized that the evolution of the human physical form was “per se not improbable.”51 The notion of scientific progress became problematic within a Catholic framework only when it referred to the fundamental nature of humanity, because this was precisely what was held to be revealed. As Ziemięcka put it in 1841: The nature of humanity corresponds to revealed religion. Humanity develops despite apparent obstacles, develops toward our destiny, develops not in order to attain perfection, not so that in social organization we can realize the Idea of God (as the German philosophers say),

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but rather so that the individual person can become ever purer, ever more independent from the earth. The task of our life is a victory over the body, and by this phrase I do not understand the irrational repudiation of one’s time on earth but rather the subordination of it to spiritual laws, in accordance with the goals of God revealed by religion. She did not deny that social institutions or human self-understanding could improve, but she did insist that dreams of a perfect social order here on earth and the emergence of a “new man” to inhabit it were utopian and contrary to the Magisterium. The most a scholar could do was to “help mankind towards a higher goal, to the development of all the spiritual powers that bring him closer to God.”52 Two decades later Ziemięcka was confident enough to publish a direct attack on one of the giants of her era, Adam Mickiewicz (in a book that earned the imprimatur). The poet’s great error, in Ziemięcka’s opinion, was to imagine that humanity was advancing toward some higher state: “God, wanting to create a rational being, could only have created him rational from the start, rational in his internal configuration.  .  .  . He could not have created him otherwise, for that would have been self-contradictory.”53 In 1862 a short-lived periodical called Pamiętnik Religijno-Moralny posed the question, “Is the Church Opposed to Modern Civilization?” The answer was predictable: “The Church does not condemn that which constitutes genuine material progress in modern civilization; it seeks out and condemns in modern civilization the dominance of material elements over moral and religious elements; it seeks out and condemns the honor paid to matter at the price of a weakening of the respect due to the soul.” Christianity, this author claimed, “presents a perfect accord with reason, and has no opponents other than error and lawlessness.”54 By the last third of the nineteenth century this understanding of progress was so common in Catholic writing as to become a cliché, particularly after the publication in 1879 of Leo XIII’s encyclical Æterni Patris, in which he reaffirmed the necessary reconciliation of reason and faith.55 Catholics, with very few exceptions, were loathe to accept that their battle with liberalism was a struggle against science and progress; instead they consistently tried to shift the dispute to the definition of these terms. In 1902 a certain Father Kolski wrote a two-part essay in Przegląd Katolicki called “Conservatism and Progress,” in which he argued that both of these words had been clouded by “partisan misuse, soaked in false concepts”: “[Because science] from necessity aspires to the truth and to the social ideals on which progressive development depends, . . . Catholicism must accompany it. . . . [The Church] is by no means tied irrevocably to conservatism. It does not inhibit progress, but simply holds progress from going astray, guiding it along a straight path.”56 In the next issue Kolski attacked those liberals who “thrust upon public opinion the conviction that they are indeed the one and only pioneers of progress.”57

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This is not to suggest that Catholic intellectuals of the late nineteenth century were pleased with the way modernity was taking shape—quite the contrary. In 1895 Father Władysław Dębicki composed a small book called The Great Intellectual Bankruptcy in which he offered a bleak portrait of the contemporary world: On the summit of the scholarly Mount Olympus we have extreme skeptics, illusionists and hallucinators [illuzyonistów i hallucynantów], not merely sneering at everything that great men have considered untouchable and holy, but doubting even the reality of the world of the senses (to the study of which they have devoted their lives). Literature and art are fouled by lewdness or by the corrupt weeds of monstrous fads. A hoard of corrupt and cynical dailies feeds off of lies from day to day, seeking out human gullibility, advertising, and sales above all. The cult of mammon, perversity, quackery, and trade is reaching an unprecedented level. Millions of human beings are trudging along with an emptiness of mind and heart, without principles, without moral goals and without inhibitions, as cold as if they were dead. There are never enough insane asylums, the jails are overflowing, gaming houses and taverns are flourishing, the number of suicides is growing with every year. And aside from all that—or rather, underneath all that—at the bestial lower depths of society the hundred-headed hydra of anarchy is sowing destruction and death.58 Despite this horrifying portrait, Dębicki still hoped that he could “in some small way contribute to the establishment of peace between intellect and faith,” because he was convinced that the crisis of modernity was a product of what he called “modern extreme skepticism,” which in turn rested on a false dichotomy between religion and progress. All these terrible problems could be solved if people would just recognize that the Church provided the best means for cultivating knowledge that would serve mankind rather than destroy it.59 A similar tone was struck in a book published in 1901 with the neutral title Achievements and Illusions: Progress in the 19th Century, by the prominent Catholic writer Józef Milewski. “To negate the existence and the possibility of progress is an exaggeration,” he wrote. “.  .  . but the spirit of innovation, which so easily ravages the  attainments and monuments of the past, is prepared to support every change—and without evidence that this change is for the better, this becomes a blind leap.” Like Dębicki, Milewski combined a biting critique of the status quo with a tribute to the basic principles of progress, science, and development.60 These Catholic authors did not want to portray themselves as simple reactionaries, and they denied that they aspired to turn the clock back and negate the

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accomplishments of the nineteenth century. They were trying, in their own way, to be progressive even as they denounced the modern world. Confusing this issue was the fact that as Catholics tried to rescue the words progress, science, and reason, the word modernity itself became increasingly troublesome. The explicit antimodernism that grew during the nineteenth century culminated during the papacy of Pius X, when the entire Church descended into the witch hunt against modernism described in chapter 1. But how genuinely antimodern was this wave of antimodernism? Or to be more precise, did antimodernism entail a repudiation of progress? As it turns out, even in this most explicitly reactionary era in Catholic history there was still room to imagine a dynamic forward flow of historical time. During the First Vatican Council (1869–70) the bishops made an important doctrinal pronouncement that got lost in the controversy surrounding the assertion of papal infallibility. In the text De Fide et Ecclesia they stated, “If anyone says that the one true God, our Creator and Lord, cannot be known with certainty by  the natural light of reason, by means of things that are made, let him be anathema.”61 This was in fact a familiar argument that can be traced back at least to St. Thomas Aquinas, who was enjoying a revival among Catholic intellectuals at the time. Against this backdrop the deeper significance of the antimodernist campaign becomes clear. The people who eventually came to be called “Catholic modernists” all shared a desire to turn away from the Thomism of documents like De Fide et Ecclesia and Æterni Patris. They wanted to establish a clear distinction between reason and faith, with the former being the domain of science and the latter the domain of religion. George Tyrrell, for example, rejected Thomist epistemology in an 1899 essay entitled “A Perverted Devotion.” This English Jesuit called on Catholics to adopt a “saner spiritual philosophy, born of a revolt against materialism.” Because of the quixotic attempt to reconcile reason and faith, Tyrrell argued, many people had grown alienated from the Church. Science and reason had chipped away at too many of the foundations of Catholic tradition, forcing people to conclude (if they wished to avoid atheism) that the divine must be radically transcendent. Beyond the human and mutable façade of devotional practice, he claimed, was a divinity that was indeed timeless, but we could only roughly approach Him—never perceive or understand Him— through our earthly institutions and ideas.62 Views like these constituted a profound challenge to Catholic dogma, insofar as they rejected Thomist epistemology, undermined orthodox ecclesiology, and questioned the sanctioned methods of biblical exegesis. In the infamous “Oath against Modernism” required of all priests and Catholic theology teachers from 1910 to 1967 an affirmation of the infallibility of Church dogma was followed immediately by a pledge that “God, the origin and end of all things, can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason from the created world

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(cf. Rom. 1:90), that is, from the visible works of creation, as a cause from its effects, and that, therefore, his existence can also be demonstrated.” Those taking the oath were in no sense to challenge the power of reason and science; quite the contrary, they had to swear “I hold with certainty and sincerely confess that faith is not a blind sentiment of religion welling up from the depths of the subconscious under the impulse of the heart and the motion of a will trained to morality; but faith is a genuine assent of the intellect to truth received by hearing from an external source.”63 If one pares away the hyperbole and invective it becomes clear that the Vatican was not actually trying to retreat into a reactionary, obscurantist fortress. Instead (perhaps ironically), Pius X’s campaign is best understood as a desperate attempt to remain plugged into the intellectual life of the twentieth century by reclaiming terms like reason and science for the Church, terms that were increasingly treated as the exclusive property of secular liberals. The attempt was irredeemably tainted by the paranoid search for hidden enemies, but it nonetheless serves as evidence that the leaders of the Church wanted to hold on to the vocabulary of modern intellectual life at a time when reason had become the touchstone of truth. The Thomist epistemology formulated in De Fide et Ecclesia and defended in Lamentabili Sane Exitu can thus be seen as the philosophical foundation of the Church’s effort to engage with the world. As Pius X saw it, people like Tyrrell were banishing religion from the realm of reason and withdrawing into a shell of transcendence and mysticism. To avoid that fate, and indirectly to support the Church’s social and political agenda, the pope needed to ground faith in reason and science. To cede these terms to liberalism was, in the context of early twentieth-century Europe, to ensure marginalization. This focus on the rational and scientific basis of faith became one of the most prominent themes of Catholic rhetoric in the years leading up to World War I. For example, in 1908 Archbishop Józef Pelczar of Przemyśl summoned a diocesan synod in order to declare modernism “an error against the faith” and to denounce anyone who might question that God’s existence could be rationally proven.64 Pelczar wrote a book a few years later in which he explained why it was heretical to suggest that dogma was grounded in “religious sentiment” or to imagine that “God speaks directly to the soul.” If that were true, he argued, then the Church would lack stability and cease serving as the rock that Jesus described in Matthew 16:18. Instead it would appear as “nothing more than a human creation that requires re-creation and reform as the centuries go by.” Pelczar believed that only reason, as something eternal and absolute, could support a genuine Church.65 On a totally different register the editors of the popular Catholic weekly Posiew published a letter that same year from a certain Stanisław Siedlarek, who was identified as a peasant from Czyżew (a small town near Białystok). Though written in a folksy style, the argument was the same as that employed in Vatican texts of the day:

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There are plenty of moles here who destroy the teachings of the Lord Jesus and His Church. They call themselves wise, but in my opinion they are very foolish. They claim that science has already proven that it isn’t necessary to believe in anything. But to my peasant reasoning, this science only proved that it isn’t necessary to plant fools, because they sprout up all on their own. What sort of science would it be if it undermined the Holy Faith? After all, I say to myself, true science and true faith come from God, from the highest wisdom, so they can’t contradict each other.66 The case of Szczepan Jeleński demonstrates the centrality of these convictions about religion and faith. Jeleński was a famous mathematician and logician whose books are still in print today, but in 1907 he ventured into a different field with a volume entitled The New Current.67 Here he purported to summarize the innovative ideas then circulating among West European Catholics, but he managed to spin those ideas in a way that inoculated him against the antimodernist campaign. Although he advocated “perpetual transformation and improvement in accordance with the conditions and needs of the times,” he made it clear that he did so in order to more effectively preach the eternal and unchanging truth. Instead of distinguishing between a mystical faith and an earthly reason, he wanted the Church to “enter entirely into the sphere of contemporary thought” and “accept fully the spirit of the times.” To successfully evangelize among modern Europeans, Jeleński believed, it was necessary to meet them on their own terms. He even urged his coreligionists to “move once and for all into the ranks of those opposed to the existing social order” and embrace “the creation of a better future and progress in accordance with the ideas of Christ as the earthly goal of our religion.”68 To be sure, these were extremely controversial claims, and Jeleński did not win the support of the Polish hierarchy, but neither did he face any public denunciations (which is noteworthy given the atmosphere at the time). For all his reformism Jeleński stayed within the limits of orthodoxy by confirming that faith could engage with “contemporary thought” on the common ground of reason. As long as these boundaries were acknowledged it was surprisingly easy for Catholics to deploy the slogan of progress, though when doing so they almost always paired their historiosophical optimism with a critique of liberal modernity. In a 1905 book called Where Are We Headed? (published by an eminently respectable Catholic publishing house in Lwów), Father Adam Kopyciński reiterated all the familiar complaints about modernity: it was corrupted by a “survival of the fittest” ideology, it denied religion and undermined social norms, and ultimately it reduced humanity to its animal nature. But Kopyciński saw no reason to be pessimistic about the future. Progress, he believed, would eventually take mankind beyond its current mess.

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Society is marching forward, crushing many of the systems of the past and introducing ever newer, ever greater changes. Most worthy of pity are those who are engulfed by fear that the Church will not be able to survive this crisis, because, standing on directly opposed principles, it has entered into a struggle for life or death with modern society and in that struggle it will fall. How petty, how shortsighted, how ignorant! They do not know, or do not want to know, that the Church has prepared for these extreme changes, which are just the mature fruits of the Gospels in the social sphere, and that the Church will lead society to that new future, which will rest on general freedom. In this new future the Church alone will guarantee social welfare, honor, and peace, and also an abundance of supernatural life. . . . It is hard to understand those who do not see that God, who guides the world and humanity, truly wants such progress. There existed a foundation to both human nature and Christianity that could not change, argued Kopyciński, but “from this one cannot derive the conclusion that the immutability of the Church and the stability of its principles means the same as stagnation or death.”69 When in 1905 the Catholic magazine Przegląd Powszechny surveyed its readers about “the most important challenges facing Catholicism today,” many of the respondents discussed the idea of progress. For example, Franciszek Morawski used both evolution and progress in his contribution, arguing, “In the great march of the Christian idea in the Church and in Catholic society, its continuous evolution becomes evident. Such progress in applying eternal truth to the needs of the moment exists in Catholicism, despite the denials of the doubters.” Morawski recognized that the “essence of the Church” could never change, but he maintained that this essence “cannot be equated with the general Catholic community, which is diverse in its makeup—in a word, human.”70 Another contributor, Professor Kazimierz Łyskowski, argued, “It is appropriate to call on Catholics today, as they formulate their objectives, to take into account new trends in human relations and to take advantage of all the discoveries that science has brought.” He considered “stagnation” to be a grave danger, but he was comforted that “today’s Catholic worldview . . . entirely accepts the slogan of progress.” What distinguished these two authors (and all the early twentiethcentury Catholic proponents of progress) from their secular counterparts was their conviction that the Church embodied a truth that did not change over time, and that progress could move humanity forward but it could never lead to any sort of earthly utopia. Łyskowski adroitly used the latter argument to criticize both conservatives and socialists at the same time, writing that “lex naturalis is not some sort of codex, but only a sense that God placed in our soul,” so it

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followed that “a permanent system of human relations can never be discovered or introduced.” In other words, it was equally false to state that today’s world should be preserved without change, or that progress could ever generate a world that would not change. Catholic progress, as represented in all these texts, was simultaneously significant and irrelevant, because it led to improvements in many areas of life while never really altering the fundamental “natural law” that God established at creation nor bringing us any closer to (or any further away from) the salvation that Jesus offered for all humanity at all times.71 Discussions of social progress therefore were possible in officially sanctioned Catholic forums, but references to social or political change could always lead to controversy (as we will see in the next chapter). Much safer was to focus on progress in science and scholarship. Father Józef Kaczmarczyk wrote a book in 1908 (that is, after Pius X denounced the modernists) called The Catholic Religion and Progress in which he went to great lengths to keep his comments within the boundaries of orthodoxy. Even the title page emphasized this: here we learn that the text began as a sermon for the feast day of St. Jan Kanty (a.k.a. John Cantius) delivered in the church of St. Anna’s in Kraków, that it was then printed in Gazeta Kościelna (The Church Gazette), and that before publication as a book it received a nihil obstat from the diocesan censor and an imprimatur from the bishop. Because Cantius is the patron saint of students, teachers, and priests, the very origin of this book spoke to the union between reason and faith. In Kaczmarczyk’s presentation the Church was not the enemy of progress, but its source. “Not only is there no discord between the Catholic religion and progress,” he wrote, “but from the very nature and content of that religion, it follows that it alone can be the true foundation of healthy civilization and progress.” In explaining the sort of progress he had in mind Kaczmarczyk addressed the relationship between the Church and scientific discovery. He claimed that over the centuries the Church had been the sponsor, inspiration, and guardian of science and learning in all disciplines, and that faith gave scholarship its “historic mission” to lead humanity forward and to illuminate the cardinal truths of Christianity.72 Probably the most influential advocate of Catholic progress around the turn of the century was Archbishop (now Saint) Józef Bilczewski of Lwów. Bilczewski was born in a Galician village not far from the home town of Karol Wojtyła, and like the future pope he studied at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. After a few years of parish work he spent two years abroad studying theology in Vienna, Rome, and Paris, and ultimately obtained (in 1890) a doctorate from Jagiellonian University on the basis of a dissertation entitled Christian Archeology vis-à-vis the History of the Church and Dogma.73 He worked for a decade at Lwów University, during which time he wrote his second major scholarly work, The Eucharist in the Light of the Oldest Written, Iconographic, and Epigraphic Sources (1898).74 This training would serve him well after the start of the twentieth

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century, when exegesis and Church history were propelled to the vortex of the modernist crisis by the critical biblical studies of scholars in Western Europe. He advanced rapidly in Lwów, becoming head of the Theology Department and, in June of 1900, rector of the university. He did not hold that position for long; only six months later he was named archbishop of Lwów, an unconventionally rapid rise to one of the most important posts in the Galician Church. Given his background it was no surprise when Bilczewski opened the 1900– 1901 academic year of Lwów University by giving a speech on progress in the modern world. He began with words that would have been applauded by any secular liberal: The 18th century closed with the cry of “more life, more light, more freedom!” The 19th century picked up those slogans and inscribed them as an emblem on the page that it was to fill out in the history of humanity. All-around progress—that is [the 19th century’s] characteristic trait, its distinctive physiology. No other century can equal it in this regard, no other can display such a rich harvest of intellectual output, such profound theoretical scientific discoveries, and the application of these to practical goals. In a word, no other century accomplished as much as [the 19th century] in that perpetual march and ascent of society to the summit that we call civilization. There was, Bilczewski admitted in passing, a negative side to the nineteenth century as well, but rather than dwell on this he preferred to concentrate on “the freedom of scientific research, because that is a great accomplishment of civilization.” Above all he urged his audience not to fear “the progress of civilization,” because advances in knowledge could never harm the Church. There were (and perhaps there still are) shortsighted people who, faced with the triumph of science, have feared for (and still fear for) the fate of religion. For me, every step that advances science is a victory for truth over error, light over darkness. I know that many among the apostles of the human gospels are found in the ranks of the decisive enemies of the Divine Gospel. But what of it? Truth is truth even in the mouths of those who blaspheme, just as gold is always gold even in the hands of a criminal who abuses it. So, in the name of religion I declare: O people of knowledge, do not claim that the Church talks mainly about holiness while you, with a great voice, summon the light. Those slogans, after all, are not mutually exclusive, but complementary. So go forward, pulling the chariot of science. Tear apart the curtain of nature’s secrets every day. In the name of the Church, I wish you new triumphs, certain that

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after traversing the broad fields of human knowledge by various paths, you will find yourselves one day united with your alleged enemies at the foot of He who said, “I am the way, the truth, and the light.”75 All of this was unimpeachably orthodox, but for precisely this reason Bilczewski illustrates how easy it was at the start of the twentieth century to talk about progress within a Catholic framework. Even when he criticized the negative side of modern life Bilczewski did not retreat to a static vision of historical time; instead he tried to Christianize the dynamism of progress, to claim terms like reason, science, knowledge, and even enlightenment for the Church. Lwów’s other archbishop at the time, the head of the Armenian-Rite Catholic Church in Poland, Józef Teodorowicz, was equally committed to the Christianization of progressive historical time. Revealingly Teodorowicz has been appropriated as a progenitor by both the Polish chapter of the Society of Pius X (an excommunicated splinter group affiliated with Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre) and the reformists at Tygodnik Powszechny.76 This not only demonstrates the potential of creative intellectual genealogy, but also the curious combination of conservative cultural values and progressive historiosophy that characterized so many Catholics of Teodorowicz’s day. His inaugural pastoral letter to the Armenian-Rite clergy in 1901 was strikingly similar to the one prepared by Bilczewski a few months earlier. “If a priest wants to have an impact on his times,” he wrote, “he must take into account its trends and postulates.” He continued, “Once you gain a knowledge of your times, you will often be convinced that amid the great despair and confusion of the century, the thread of eternal truth rises up.”77 Though there was never any doubt about the orthodoxy and fidelity of Teodorowicz or Bilczewski, they did express reservations about the extremism of the antimodern crusade. In fact they sent a joint letter to the pope calling for Benigni’s removal and for an end to the witch hunts.78 It was easy enough, however, for them to continue propagating their views; as with so many other Catholics at the time, the opening provided for “reason” by the Vatican’s Thomist philosophy slid easily toward “science,” and from there to “progress.” In Teodorowicz’s 1907 book, On Modernism, he repeated Pius X’s attacks on the “pessimism” and “agnosticism” of those who would deny the possibility of rationally proving the existence of God and the legitimacy of the Christian faith. Nonetheless, he did not want the prevalence of such skepticism to undermine all that the modern world had to offer. To remain within the strictures of the time he made creative use of a pair of words that are nearly synonymous in Polish: modernizm and nowoczesność (from Slavic roots meaning “new times”). Although they are essentially synonyms, Teodorowicz used the former as a negative appellation and the latter as a positive one. He endorsed the attempt to “dress the teachings of the Gospels in modern [nowoczesne] garments and accommodate them to

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modern [nowoczesne] needs.” Even though the truth would never change, “the Church, losing nothing from its deposit of faith, is always progressing, always developing, always assimilating new domains, like the mustard seed from the Gospels that grows into a massive tree. It is always old and always young and new.” Teodorowicz praised Pius X for his condemnation of modernizm, but he also recalled that the pope had “legitimated the healthy aspirations of progress in religious knowledge. . . . That is not modernism [modernizm] but only a healthy understanding of the modern [nowoczesna] method.”79 That same year (1907) Teodorowicz published a small book called Catholicism and Civilization, in which he described two dangers facing the Church: “modernism” and “conservatism.” Whereas the former was “uncritical” in its embrace of new intellectual trends, the archbishop wrote, the latter “mixes up with the religious question things that have no connection to it, and thereby inhibits the freedom of the development of civilization and culture, which for its own evolution is, however, necessary.” He tried to give his progressive program a stamp of approval by translating Pius X’s famous slogan “Omnia instaurare in Christo” with the verb odnowić (renew)—a plausible rendering, but the conventional English version using “restore” comes closer to the original sense.80 Bilczewski and Teodorowicz represented one possible Catholic approach to modernity at the turn of the century, but by no means did all their coreligionists share their enthusiasm for progress and science. Indeed, Teodorowicz implied as much by criticizing “conservatism” within the Church, and Bilczewski complained about “shortsighted people” who did not understand the promise of modern learning. They might have been referring to their colleague from the diocese of Tarnów, Bishop Leon Wałęga, who said in a pastoral letter in 1912 that “the priest demands from modern man that he place his reason without reservations under the teachings of the Church, and his will under the divine law.”81 It was possible to endorse progress and intellectual striving within the boundaries of Catholicism, but it was not necessary to do so. Father Józef Stagraczyński, writing in his popular 1908 homiletic guide, warned the faithful, “If the world offers us its wisdom, we cry out to it with anger: your light is darkness, your wisdom is foolishness! The Lord gives wisdom, and from His mouth comes awareness and knowledge.”82 In another sermon Stagraczyński instructed his audience, “Guard attentively against everything that undermines faith, that leads to a loss of faith. Do not read bad newspapers and books, do not spend time with people who deride religious matters, with people who seem to be educated, from a higher estate, but yet without faith. They are doubters. Beware! Guard against this!”83 In a sermon for the Feast of the Holy Trinity he even suggested that blind faith was the ideal and thoughtful inquiry a grave danger: “If man could grasp the essence of God, then God would no longer be God, or man would be God. . . . Man alone is for himself the greatest puzzle and mystery; and

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so why would anyone be surprised that God resides in an inaccessible mystery. . . . Therefore the first teaching that today’s holiday presents to us is this: believe and do not ask questions [wierz a nie badaj].”84 Both Stagraczyński’s pessimistic authoritarianism and Teodorowicz’s optimistic fondness for progress coexisted within Polish Catholicism throughout the twentieth century. The former was strengthened at times of trauma or crisis (of which there were many), and the latter was bolstered by every new scientific discovery and by the need for priests to speak to an increasingly urbanized, educated, skeptical flock. In the aftermath of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the establishment of a secular, multicultural democracy in Poland, the more pessimistic tendency seemed dominant. Even Archbishop Teodorowicz acknowledged in 1921: Our epoch has withdrawn from Christ. Like the prodigal son, it has cast away the warm home of Christian culture in which it was born and raised. Like the prodigal son it has lived off the remains of its paternal fortune; it has lived off the slogans of justice, love, brotherhood and freedom, which it took from the maternal home of Christianity and the Gospels. But it has squandered all that . . . wasting its parental fortune on all kinds of debauchery. Today it has lost everything.85 This mood prevailed throughout the interwar years. For example, Father Ildefons Bobicz from the village of Iwje (in today’s Belarus) lamented in 1933, “In the world things are bad, very bad! Worse than they have been for a long time. Crisis! Poverty! Misery!”86 When in 1932 the monastery at Częstochowa marked the 550th anniversary of its acquisition of the sacred Black Madonna icon, the Pauline Fathers found little to celebrate. In a booklet published for the occasion, pilgrims were told, “We are living through exceptionally difficult times. They say that there haven’t been such times in ages. People are trying harder to attain happiness, they think up various discoveries, improvements, they want the world to be better, yet meanwhile the opposite happens. There has never been such sadness, so many sins and crimes, as there are today.”87 By 1939, as war once again drew near, a popular devotional magazine declared, “We are living through the most tragic days of human history. Man, poisoned by the hellish and forbidden fruits of a demonic culture, is dying. He is dying morally, for all eternity. He is dying physically in the fire of revolution and war, sparked by the culture-demon. The human race is dying.”88 With attitudes like these growing more and more common in the interwar years, it became difficult to speak about progress or to imagine that history was moving forward in any way. Even a political moderate like Wojciech Korfanty, the leader of the Christian Democratic Party in interwar Poland, began to doubt

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that progress was possible. In 1927 he endorsed the idea of evolution but stripped it of any implication of growth, development, or improvement: Life always constitutes a moment in a never-ending evolution, in which institutions and human societies move from the distant past to the present, carrying in themselves the embryo of death. Everything that begins in the world carries inside itself the beginning of the end. That evolution does not necessarily constitute either progress or decline. It constitutes, instead, a curved line on the graph of time and history, which rises up and then falls—but the life that is drawn [by this line] does not stop for even a moment.89 Catholics like Korfanty could talk about “movement,” but it was becoming harder to speak of “progress.” He eventually came to believe that humanity was “falling to the level of the animals, not differing from them in any way,” and insofar as he occasionally mentioned his commitment to “genuine progress,” he did not seem to perceive much of it in the world around him.90 In a 1934 essay called “Man and History” he confessed with resignation, “The scenes and costumes change, and we have the impression that people are changing, but basically that’s an illusion.”91 Presiding over the Roman Catholic Church in Poland throughout this interwar years was Primate August Hlond, who received his post in 1924 in part because the relatively moderate Pius XI wanted to blunt the extreme pessimism that was already becoming evident among Polish Catholics. In a pastoral letter just prior to his promotion (while still a bishop in Silesia, not coincidentally one of Poland’s most industrialized regions) Hlond had written, “True culture stands for progress, and above all moral progress, which can take place only on a foundation of faith. . . . So let us not be afraid that somehow religion might hold back the parade of culture. Let us be convinced, instead, that precisely with religiosity will we blaze the trail of true progress.” Hlond seemed somewhat less daunted by the social and economic changes taking place around him; in fact, he thought that the Church should be able to do just as well in modern cities as in traditional rural strongholds. As he put it, “Just as religiosity can blossom in an agricultural country with either primitive or progressive [postępowy, a significant word choice] methods of cultivating the land, so it can and should blossom in industrial zones, even the busiest ones.”92 Once elevated to the office of primate, Hlond continued to insist that “it is not the Church’s role to hold back the parade of humanity” or to somehow push mankind back “to yesterday’s systems.” Precisely because the truth of the Church stood outside of time, it should not even concern itself directly with the “technical reconstruction of societies [or with] political transformations,” focusing instead on spiritual and moral issues.93 But Hlond

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was no isolationist; he believed that Catholics “ought to be familiar with modern political thought and with the changes taking place in the world; they ought to take from them that which is fresh, vital, creative.”94 Elsewhere he wrote that the Church “recognizes everything that is new, progressive, cultured, as long as it does not quarrel with Christ, with divine law and with the ethics of the Gospels. [The Church] does not long for old forms of life, for its inspiration is not taken from time, but from the documents of its founding.”95 Despite Hlond’s efforts, however, visions of historical decline or stagnation remained common among Polish Catholics all the way to the Second World War (and beyond). These conflicting historiosophies were evident in a joint pastoral letter from the entire Episcopate in 1934, which reads (even more than usual) like something written by a committee. On the one hand, Hlond’s voice can be heard in the affirmation that the Church can coexist in peace with the modern world and that “human constructs . . . are by their very essence temporary and mutable.” The Church “does not fear historical change,” the letter assured the faithful. “[So] let us not mourn that which, as a human construct, has indeed outlived its usefulness.” The remainder of the letter, on the other hand, conveyed a much darker message: fear of the “moral revolution” that “freed humanity from dependency on God”; fear of a moral order in which “everything was allowed for everyone” and in which the virtues of “modesty, shame, self-control, asceticism, marital fidelity” were lost.96 This text exemplifies the tensions that characterized Polish Catholicism, (and Catholicism more generally), before the Second World War. On the one hand, a wide array of social, economic, and cultural developments seemed to be undermining the Church at every turn and leading humanity down into decadence and depravity; on the other hand, both Thomist epistemology and the need to remain relevant to modern audiences pushed Catholics to affirm that there were no necessary contradictions between faith and reason, religion and science, the Church and the modern world. The antinomy between “progress” and “decay” should not be seen as a contradiction; rather, these two poles represented the different moods that delineated the contours of Catholic thought and speech at the time. The antimodernist campaign had set some limits by insisting that faith could never be said to negate reason or science, but within these boundaries a creative tension between historiosophical pessimism and optimism defined Catholic intellectual life throughout the mid-twentieth century. As in so many aspects of Catholic life, World War II and its aftermath upset that awkward equilibrium. The utter depravity on display during the war appeared to confirm the worst prophesies about modernity’s potential consequences, and the communist takeover was viewed by most in the clergy (and a great many in the laity as well) with fear. Nonetheless, by the late 1940s there was a widespread desire to build a better world out of the ashes of wartime ruin, and the ideological climate in Poland made it more difficult than ever to

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question the benefits of change in the abstract or to doubt the forward march of history. Progress, even more than before, seemed to be an obligatory slogan. This cultural moment culminated for Catholics with the Second Vatican Council, where the word modernity itself was officially rehabilitated. Though many observers would still categorize the Polish Church as conservative, this label became increasingly imprecise. While continuing to express reservations about many twentieth-century cultural developments, and while repudiating the communists’ particular variant of progress, priests and lay activists in Poland found it necessary to carry out their battles inside a discursive field demarcated by a dynamic view of historical time. Although it is true, as Jan Kubik has shown, that the Church confronted the authorities of the Polish People’s Republic with a rival vocabulary that eventually assumed the mantle of legitimacy and authenticity, on a deeper level it was Catholicism that had to accommodate the historiosophy of modernity and progress.97 Some postwar Catholics not only accepted a progressive historical dynamic, but embraced it with enthusiasm. At the forefront of the effort to define a Catholic modernity and a Catholic progress was, not surprisingly, Tygodnik Powszechny. From its inaugural issue to the present day, this periodical has tried to advance a form of religiosity that its editors considered more in keeping with the needs and attitudes of the present and (more important) the rapidly approaching future. Father Jan Piwowarczyk, one of the magazine’s founders and editors, echoed the familiar refrain “Europe in the 20th century has ceased to be Christian,” but he also insisted that this state of affairs was not an inevitable by-product of modernization. He maintained that the postwar world needed faith more than ever before, and that “there is no divide between the ‘Christian world’ and the ‘modern world.’”98 A more elaborate exposition of this argument came from Antoni Gołubiew in a 1946 essay entitled “The Myth of the 19th Century and Christian Culture.” The myth he had in mind was the “anthropocentrism” that had until recently, he claimed, dominated European culture, leading to individualism, moral relativism, laissez-faire liberalism, and more generally a “pagan” society. Faced with such a world, Gołubiew wrote, many Catholics had mistakenly retreated into “the catacombs,” pronouncing anathemas on modernity and getting labeled in return as backward, provincial, and ultimately irrelevant. Those who did not take this option became superficial Catholics who attended mass on the holidays but hid—or forgot—their religion at all other times. Thankfully all that was over, Gołubiew concluded; the horrors of Nazism, World War II, and the atomic bomb had “undermined the ‘progressive’ structure of naturalism’s cultural optimism” and now “the myths of the 19th century lie in ruins.” The scare quotes he put around the word progressive were significant: he was not leading up to a reactionary argument in favor of retreating from dynamic historical time altogether; instead he announced that at long last the way was clear for

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Christianity to emerge from the catacombs and participate in the creation of a new and better kind of progress.99 By the 1960s Jerzy Turowicz could announce, “[Vatican II] marks the end of the era of anti-modernism.” Catholics, he believed, could finally get beyond their “fear” of modernity and show that they were still relevant to a world that was rapidly moving forward.100 Tygodnik Powszechny frequently charged those opposed to the Council’s reforms with trying to escape history’s forward momentum. For example, in 1966 Father Marek Rucz repudiated the “Baroque Church” in which people clung to old rituals without attempting to bring their faith “into the world.” These sorts of Catholics, he wrote, “abandon contemporary life and sink into history. And thus comes to pass the tragic break in religion between life and God. Contemporary existence and God are both left at the threshold of the Church: contemporary existence when we go in, and God when we come out.” The solution, for Rucz, was twofold: God had to be rescued from the confines of the chapel, and the modern world had to be allowed in.101 A decade later Marek Skwarnicki would complain that too many Catholics had responded to secularism by “locking the Church up, so to speak, behind defensive walls.” It was time, he felt, for the Church to “revise its own stance vis-à-vis contemporary social and cultural phenomena.”102 Passages like these were common; one could pick up almost any issue of Tygodnik Powszechny and find a call for Catholics to leave the sheltered spaces of the church hall and join the world in its march toward the future. Terms like history, backwardness, pre- and postconciliar (przed- i posoborowy), and of course progress point to Tygodnik Powszechny’s tendency to view bothpeople and ideas with a dynamic understanding of historical time. Zofia Starowieyska-Morstinowa wrote in 1946, “It is obvious to us Catholics today that history makes sense, and must make sense; that time is not merely a static reflection of eternity. . . . Rather, it is growth and development, and its advance is progress, in the sense of acquiring new values.”103 The doctrinal considerations confronted by earlier Catholic progressives, however, continued to constrain how the future could be envisioned and given meaning. Specifically, the fundamental truths of Christianity had to be somehow walled off from the forces of change (as the modernists in the early twentieth century had allegedly failed to do), and the march of time could not be imagined as a finite process leading to an earthly utopia in which injustice—that is, sin—would be transcended (the heresy of the messianists of the nineteenth century). Jacek Woźniakowski demonstrated how to finesse these issues in 1946 with an essay called simply “Progress?” (with a prominent question mark). Here he confirmed the belief that humans had and would always have “a flawed human nature,” but he also believed “in [humanity’s] potential for magnificent personal development.” Woźniakowski did not acknowledge any contradiction between the permanence

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of sin and the possibility of advancement; in fact he believed that “understanding mankind dynamically” within a Catholic context allowed him to give “the word ‘progress’ an entirely different meaning than it has for the materialists.” The latter, in his view, saw all problems as structural or material and believed that they would be solved if the artificial social constraints and distortions were lifted. In contrast, Woźniakowski considered sin to be ever present and irresolvable within terrestrial time, but he nonetheless maintained that a constant awareness of this imperfection could motivate people to strive for always incomplete improvements, never letting the idea of “perfect” get in the way of “better.” The resulting combination of humility and a desire for positive change gave Catholicism, in Woźniakowski’s view, a unique perspective on modernity. He was offering progress without an end-point and a modernity that could never be imagined as the end of history.104 Once again we see the distinguishing characteristic of Catholic progress: a vision of significant improvement that nonetheless brings humanity no closer to perfection because the only legitimate path to a stable state was salvation, and the means to that end had already been established. Tensions between the Episcopate (particularly Primate Wyszyński) and the supporters of reform were always just below the surface, a conflict that is all too easy to cast as a struggle between modernity and tradition, reform and conservation, change and stagnation. That is how the Tygodnik Powszechny circle saw the situation. Father Józef Tischner, a frequent contributor to the paper, later recalled that he and his colleagues “did not consider [Wyszyński] to be a person who appreciated contemporary culture or understood the need for scientific development.”105 There was undeniably some truth to this depiction, and to a certain extent the two mutually constitutive poles of continuity and change continued to demarcate the boundaries of Catholicism in the postwar era just as they had before 1939. However, polemical descriptions like backward or even conservative both exaggerate and mischaracterize the fissures within the Polish Church. Even before Vatican II it had become untenable to oppose progress explicitly or to declare war on modernity as such. On the contrary, even the most traditional bishops had to find ways of speaking within the vocabulary of the modern world, which placed some constraints on how vigorously they could oppose aggiornamento. Those who did not approve of Tygodnik Powszechny’s message found it necessary to fight their battles on the reformists’ home turf. Upon returning to Poland from wartime exile, Cardinal Hlond declared, “We do not fear modernity, or social change, or a popular form of government, as long as the immutable principles of Christian morality are respected.” Theism and materialism could never be reconciled, he added, but on a wide range of other issues the Church was prepared to support “the development of civilization.”106 The entire Episcopate echoed these sentiments in a pastoral letter read in every parish in Poland during Lent in 1946:

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Systems can and ought to be transformed, because life is the development of and the aspiration toward ideals. But changes ought not to squander religious values or take place in defiance of immutable moral laws. Neither the Church, nor Catholic culture, nor the Christian traditions of the nation will hamper the march toward a more perfect form of existence—quite the contrary, they will always support progress, knowledge, and a healthy evolution in the conditions of life.107 The basic ideas expressed here were not entirely new, but the terminology (with references to concepts like development, evolution, transformation, and “a more perfect form of existence”) reflected the atmosphere of the late 1940s. We cannot know—and it really does not matter—whether the bishops were drawing upon this phraseology instrumentally, or whether they had genuinely come to accept that historical time was progressive. Both strategic reasoning (a desire not to be perceived as backward and irrelevant) and a genuine sense that the world was moving forward could be seen in a letter that Bishop Wyszyński sent to the priests of his diocese shortly before his elevation to the primacy. “Times of rapid change in the world are coming,” he wrote. “Let us keep up with them. Let us, the sons of the ‘Way,’ not fall behind like camp followers of the world’s progress. We must lead the century in the path of Christ—the father of the coming century—and not fall behind.”108 At the start of the postwar era, then, even the highest dignitaries of the Church spoke in terms of dynamic historical time, unwilling to concede that the left owned this terrain. The papacy of John XXIII would only intensify this trend. In 1960 the Polish Episcopate declared, “We firmly reject the accusation that we are somehow ‘backward.’ We in no way wish for a return to the bygone (and not always good) social forms of the middle ages. We look calmly to the future.”109 By 1968 the bishops would even write that progress had not gone far enough: “The current progress of the world in the economic and technical fields has not been accompanied by a corresponding spiritual progress.” Strict philosophical materialism, the bishops believed, was not progress but regression, because the loss of God would leave people with a sense of “emptiness” that made them “useless for society.” For all these reasons, the Episcopate pledged to fight against the trend toward secularism, but they were careful not to allow this to imply a repudiation of progress: It is worthwhile to be clearly aware of the aforementioned causes of secularization, but it is not necessary to exaggerate or succumb to the fear that of necessity they must threaten the faith. For above all, the changes in the economic, scientific, and social fields that have taken place in our times (and which often push forward, as a by-product, the

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process of secularization) bring humanity much good, which the Church sincerely values.110 At about the same time Wyszyński wrote, “Christ stands at the head of the ranks aspiring to perpetual progress. He fertilizes all ideals, social movements and systemic transformations, even those not carried out in His name.”111 By the late 1960s, in other words, the bishops were not only affirming their own progressive bona fides, they were appropriating for Jesus the accomplishments of those outside the Church. To be sure, some bishops and priests were unapologetically conservative or even reactionary, in the sense of explicitly repudiating both the desirability and the possibility of genuine progress. Their voices can be heard as soon as we dig just a bit below the published texts of the Church and the official pronouncements of the Episcopate. For example, Bishop Franciszek Jop of Opole said in 1970 (in a sermon recorded by the state authorities) that the very idea of progress was just a “sterile, unending discussion, a production of words, the pursuit of novelty, changes that undermine everything that was and is.”112 Even more outspoken was Bishop Ignacy Tokarczuk of Przemyśl, who said during a 1971 sermon that progress was just an illusion caused by a few technological marvels: “Despite these achievements,” he said, “we see how badly ill contemporary humanity is.”113 A year later Tokarczuk lamented, “Human life today is penetrated with the poison of sin,” and he explicitly held up the interwar years as a model to which he wanted to return. He recognized that material life had been harder in the 1930s, but he noted, “Despite all the difficult conditions, there were not as many suicides, particularly among young people, as there are today.” Significantly, Tokarczuk did not blame communism for the sorry state of the world. He pulled examples from a variety of sites, commenting on violence in American cities, the terrorist attacks at the Munich Olympics, and urban disorder in Poland. In general he saw around him a godless society that had degenerated into a “cave of thieves,” and he was convinced that “on a global scale, from year to year, the situation is definitely getting worse.”114 Tokarczuk implicitly challenged the mandate of Vatican II to adjust pastoral work to the needs and expectations of the contemporary world: In our day only the Church proclaims to us that truth which is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. For truth is not a glove which one can change every day, or a fashion that is one way today and another tomorrow. If truth is truth, then it is unchanging, it is always the same. The Church does not pay attention to fashion or whether someone likes it or not, whether they call it progressive or call it reactionary, backward. The Church proclaims its truth, truth about God and man, truth about the meaning of human life.115

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Wyszyński himself was famously skeptical about the modern world, though usually he was more careful with his words than was Tokarczuk. His archdiocesan office released a typed pastoral newsletter in 1975 with a message of despair: Man has become spiritually diminished [karleje się]. Internally bruised, he is not able to manage the powers of nature that he has discovered. He sows death. With a weak will and a weak character, he is unable to kneel before God or to exert control over himself; he succumbs to sensuality; he is buried in matter. He is unable to preserve social order, to be responsible for the lives of others. He is unable to solve the difficulties of the coexistence of social groups and nations.116 Sentiments like these existed within the Church—perhaps they even dominated—but in published texts such dark visions were subtly but significantly reframed so as to preserve a point of opening for some version of progress. Loyal Catholics were not supposed to openly disagree with the Vatican, so in the 1970s the idea of accommodating to the modern world was routinely parroted. As the pastoral program of the Warsaw Archdiocese for the 1975–76 liturgical year put it, “Since the historical situation in which man lives is undergoing persistent changes (after all, man himself is changing—his mentality, his style of life, etc.), so must the Church, in carrying out the commands of the Lord, bring forward from the unchanging treasury of Divine Revelation the values that are relevant to a particular period of time.”117 At least rhetorically the answer to secular progress was not to go backward or remain in place but to baptize the future, to show modern humanity that the Church offered them a path forward that brought real, not illusory, progress. The label conservative is thus a bit misleading, because even when advocating moral principles that some would consider at odds with the late twentieth-century world, very few Catholics were openly talking about conserving any kind of status quo, much less “going back.” Rather, most at least claimed that they wanted to go forward in a different way. Embodying this message was Archbishop Karol Cardinal Wojtyła. He was probably the most enthusiastic supporter of Vatican II among the Polish bishops, and he was without a doubt the most effective member of the hierarchy when it came to communicating to the young people of the 1960s and 1970s. One key to his success in this regard was his willingness to recognize progress in the terrestrial realm. In 1968 he lauded space flight as the sort of thing that “expressed the true nature of mankind,” because what distinguished humans from the rest of creation was that we were “always seeking and always transcending the threshold of previous accomplishments.”118 Wojtyła did not merely accept the idea of progress; he valorized it. In a New Year’s Eve sermon recorded by the state authorities in 1974 he said, “The plan of God for saving mankind, which has the

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perspective of eternity, is simultaneously tied to the earthly well-being of man. In the plan of salvation one finds progress, the honor of mankind, his freedom, his earthly welfare in various areas.”119 Despite comments like these, however, we must be careful before positioning Wojtyła too firmly alongside Tygodnik Powszechny. At the sermon he gave upon being ordained as archbishop of Kraków in 1964 he gently chastised young people for ignoring tradition: “[That word] seems to us to have the ring of the past alone, it seems to speak of that which died, yet somehow still remains in our memories. But no, my dear ones, no. Tradition is that which was great, true, and good—and thus it is worthy of living on. Tradition is that which gives birth to new life.”120 Along the same lines he once cautioned a youth group that progress “is obviously the most positive and valuable idea—but when it is raised to the rank of a deity [bożyszcza], when it is given an absolute, unqualified significance, an unqualified value, then it is not in its place.” Only God and the Church constituted such absolutes, he said, and as such they stood beyond all progressive change.121 Holding together this appreciation of both progress and tradition was a much deeper dichotomy that encompassed virtually the entirety of Catholicism in Poland, from Bishop Tokarczuk to Tygodnik Powszechny: a distinction between the mutable and even progressive terrestrial sphere and the unchanging spiritual sphere. We saw in chapter 2 how this duality allowed reformers in the 1960s to advocate ecclesiological change, but the utility of this reasoning extended a lot further. A sermon by a parish priest from the small town of Łubowo made this point clearly in 1966, informing the parishioners that “the totality of the truths of the faith and the principles of morality remain and will remain the same through all the centuries,” but “the forms of human life and the conditions in which it develops change.” The great challenge and dilemma for the Church in the modern age, he concluded, was to figure out what precisely was subject to progress and what was not.122 A month later a priest from Warsaw pointed out that Jesus had “created a Church not limited to the chosen people, but a Church for people using many languages. A Church not locked up within one epoch of human history, but existing for every culture and accommodating to the needs of every stage of human history.”123 As suggested here, the Church was supposed to be flexible over time and across cultures, but it was also supposed to be an unchanging rock that could guide all these disparate peoples across the many eras of history. The tensions emerging from this perspective were captured by a sermon from a Wrocław priest in 1967: “The Church gives to the world, but it also takes from the world. It transforms the world with everything that in the Church is from God, but it succumbs itself to influences from elements of cultural change. Christ did not foresee a separation of his Church from the world.”124 Or, as the liturgical program of the Warsaw Archdiocese for 1977–78 put it, “The evangelizing mission given to the Church transcends time; it relates to all people

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of all eras and places. This state of affairs means that the fundamental constituent elements of pastoral service are always relevant and unchanging, and therefore must be always present.”125 As long as the question was simply how to delineate the mutable from the immutable, conversation across the Catholic spectrum remained possible. In the 1980s, however, as the communist state began to seem less frightening, this common ground began to crumble. Explicitly conservative priests became increasingly outspoken, and the overt denial of progress went from being a quiet conviction to a public stance. One of the earliest priests to deny that progress of any kind was ever desirable was Father Mieczysław Brzozowski from Lublin. In 1981, in a sermon he composed to respond to the release of Miloš Forman’s film adaptation of the musical Hair, Brzozowski complained that 1960s youth culture was vulgar, decadent, and sinful. The hippies, he said, managed to corrupt everything they touched: “Alongside the noble struggle with militarism, [they promote] drug abuse; alongside selfless heroism, vulgar pansexualism [panseksualizm]; alongside concern for mankind, a surprising facility for giving pain to one’s closest friends and family.” All things considered, concluded Brzozowski, “the hippy movement was just one episode in the long chain of tragic human mistakes,” a chain that defined human history more generally: The existence of evil in the world is too obvious not to perceive. Thus new forces aiming at universal transformation and renewal are constantly being born. . . . At the foundation of all of these slogans and the movements (ideologies) born from them lies an honorable aspiration for a general change of the conditions of life and an elimination of the bitterly obvious effects of the existing evils. Yet experience teaches us that none of the heretofore existing social, economic, or political movements have managed to eliminate evil from the surface of the earth. Worse, many of them degenerated and became the cause of new tragic suffering.126 A year later Brzozowski composed an essay for the start of the 1982–83 liturgical year in which he urged his fellow priests to warn their parishioners against the “exaggerated trust of contemporary man in his own strength” and the tendency to believe “that economic and technological progress can transform the face of the earth.” The true Christian never succumbs to despair, he concluded, but neither should one imagine that anything rooted in this earth could ever generate meaningful progress.127 By the late 1980s it was increasingly common to hear sermons urging the faithful to set themselves in opposition to the modern world. In July 1989, one month after the elections that brought an end to communist rule, Father Józef

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Krętosz told his flock, “The contemporary world needs Christians, who, deciding to become a sign of negation [znak sprzeciwu], will defend the law of God in the life of individuals and of entire societies.”128 The following summer Father Stanisław Chmielewski from the town of Otorowo in western Poland described the entire twentieth century as “an increasingly violent drive towards modernity [nowoczesność],” which was “enslaving” people rather than bringing any meaningful improvements.129 The systemic changes of 1989 were not depicted in many of the sermons of that period as a change for the better—if anything, the 1990s actually undermined a belief in progress among many of the clergy because the collapse of communism failed to bring about a clear victory for Christianity. Already in the annual homiletic program for 1990–91 the bishops worried that “the process of secularization in recent years [had] wreaked havoc with Christian customs.”130 Concern over the endurance of those customs led to the formation (or perhaps merely surfacing) of an extremely vocal reactionary faction within the Church, one that repudiated the very idea of adjusting to changes in the world or accepting that meaningful progress was possible. As summed up succinctly by Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, “accommodating to the world is collaborating with evil,” because “not one iota, not one line” of Christian teaching could be legitimately changed.131 We have seen how the immutability of Christianity could be presented as the guiding star that made secular progress acceptable; in Rydzyk’s hands it became the justification for a much more far-reaching conservatism. Rydzyk does not define Catholicism in Poland today. Most Poles continue to consider themselves Catholics even as they reject such extremism; in fact, belief in the progressive movement of historical time is probably just as pervasive in Poland today as it was a half-century ago. Catholicism ultimately proved capable of providing space for both static and dynamic historiosophies, thanks largely to the dualistic distinction between a malleable earth and an unchanging God. For nearly the entire twentieth century those who would expand the realm of immutability to the secular sphere have been challenged loudly enough to ensure that they would never be able to define Polish Catholicism more generally, and this has allowed successive generations of Poles to remain Catholic and modern at the same time. But if the most thorough antimodernists have failed to completely set the terms of debate within Catholicism, neither have those who wanted to make  peace with modernity. The concept of dynamic historical time could be tweaked so as to fit within a Catholic framework, but it would always be qualified and limited by Magisterial teachings that described a chiliastic vision of punctuated (not progressive) time. Many of the keywords of modernity would eventually find a place within Catholicism, but only after they were stripped of most of their historiosophical implications. By the late twentieth century a Catholic could believe in progress, but only if the Kingdom of God remained outside of history.

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The Person and Society

In the 1905 Catechism there is a passage that some Catholics today would find awkward: “The Tenth Commandment instructs us to be satisfied with the state in which God has placed us, and to bear poverty patiently should God have placed us in that condition.”1 The dark tone of otherworldliness that I explored in chapter 2 was reflected in the teaching that the poor should quietly endure their lot, looking to heaven for an end to their suffering. Long after Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), which outlined a distinctively Catholic critique of industrial capitalism, homilies in Poland (and elsewhere) continued to urge passivity and prayer in the face of poverty, avoiding the theme of social reform. But this situation would change with surprising rapidity, and by the midtwentieth century Polish Catholic politicians, social activists, and priests were almost unanimous in their hostility to the socioeconomic status quo. Terms like social injustice and exploitation became commonplace in Catholic rhetoric even before World War II, eventually congealing into a comprehensive social vision that challenged both the market economies of the West and the state planning of the Soviet Union. The intellectual foundation for what is sometimes called “social Catholicism” was in fact well established in Poland very early in the twentieth century, and no later than elsewhere in Europe. Just as Catholics found a way to talk about progress, they began to imagine ways of endowing the future with improved social and economic forms. Translating all this into a meaningful social movement was another matter, but even in this regard Catholicism equipped many Poles with a vocabulary of social criticism that helped them make sense of—and propose solutions for—a wide variety of grievances and injustices. Whether discussing sharecropping peasants or sweatshop laborers, the nineteenth-century Polish clergy and the early Catholic press tended to place a much higher value on social stability than on social justice. Bishop Jan Paweł Woronicz, for example, chastised the peasants of the Warsaw diocese in 1828, “Do not look to others who have better plots of land, but remain willingly on the 118

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one that fate has given you. Be observant, modest, and obedient to the powers placed above you. Carry out faithfully everything that your religion and your estate demands of you.”2 More than half a century later, an almost identical message appeared in Father Józef Krukowski’s popular homiletic collection. “Stick with one position, and don’t try to find anything better,” he instructed the faithful, “because usually one seeks something better and ends up with something worse. . . . If you have some sort of hardship to bear, remember that there is no corner on earth on which there are no crosses.”3 This personal advice was paired with a broader social vision that naturalized economic privation. Krukowski considered any attempt to end poverty “a violation of natural, divine, and human law,”4 and a priest from southeastern Galicia told his congregation in 1891 that economic inequality was eternal: Poverty here, poverty there, poverty everywhere. . . . We cannot wish away that poverty; we cannot pray away that poverty; it is, after all, our destiny that we must endure it—everyone without exception. Since it is so, my dear ones, since we cannot be free from poverty, we can at least try to make it lighter, so that thorns do not wound so deeply and painfully. And is there a means to alleviate poverty? Oh, there is! There is an ingenious and tested means, summed up in these words: “The Lord did everything right.” Speaking clearly, the one and only cure for poverty of every kind is to completely subordinate yourself to the will of God.5 Archbishop Feliński was more specific in rejecting any attempt at economic reform. He instructed an audience in 1890, “The Lord Jesus did not command anyone to sacrifice his wealth, nor did he empower anyone to take anyone else’s [wealth]. Instead, he confirmed the differences between the estates and decisively supported obedience toward all authority as coming from God. He called for no changes or revolutions in any state system.”6 The archbishop acknowledged that Jesus advocated charity—indeed, he and his peers often emphasized the need to give to the poor—but he interpreted this as a means of demonstrating the virtue of the giver rather than a way to ameliorate the fate of the receiver. Considering a proposal to tax the wealthy in order to improve the lot of the poor, Feliński told a congregation in 1885 that if a rich man refuses to assist the less fortunate, “he truly sins and will answer for his inaction before God. No one, however, has a right to take from him the property he justly possesses, in order to give it to the poor.” Doing so would “transform a duty for the rich into a right for the poor. . . . With the commandment ‘do not steal,’ the Lord God sanctified the principle of property in the consciousness of the faithful and gave it His highest sanction.”7 Whenever the poor demonstrated dissatisfaction with their social status, the nineteenth-century Polish Catholic clergy used its moral authority to put them

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back in their place. A dramatic example of this came in 1861, when about 20 percent of the peasants in the Polish territories of the Russian Empire participated in a wave of agrarian strikes.8 Archbishop Antoni Fijałkowski of Warsaw instructed the priests under his authority, “Devote great effort to inspire and sustain among our honest peasants trust for the owners, wherever [that trust] has been shaken.”9 Bishop Michał Marszewski of Kujawy-Kalisz responded to the strikes with a pastoral letter urging the peasants not to listen to the “deceptive whispers” promoting “insubordination and disobedience, or driving a wedge between [them] and the landed citizens.” He instructed the peasants how to respond whenever landowners offered any concessions: “Recognize Divine Providence in this act, recognize the good intentions and the best wishes of your lords, recognize their concern and their efforts to please you. . . . Depend on your lords for everything. They rule over you with prudence and charity, they think about your fate—[and you should] just sincerely respect and love them.”10 Bishop Maciej Majerczak of Kielce adopted a more strident and aggressive tone: “Damned are those who, instead of peace, quiescence, and obedience sow confusion, discord, impudence, and conflicts, for they are the sons of Satan, delegates from a fiery hell into which they are trying to drag others. Stop listening to them—you are not to seek advice in the tavern, over a glass, while drunk, but in church, where the Lord Jesus is, where His Holy mother is, where the cross and the icons are.” For good measure Bishop Majerczak instructed priests to read this letter at mass for three Sundays in a row, “and if it be deemed useful, give [the text] to the most reasonable among the peasants.”11 We should avoid the temptation to interpret this stance as merely an expression of class interest on the part of a Catholic hierarchy that was still tied to an old landed elite. Whatever class loyalty the clergy felt toward the nobility was ideological rather than familial or personal. In Orthodox Russia and Protestant Prussia the Catholic Church did not provide many opportunities for social advancement, and the clergy was drawn overwhelmingly from the poor (or from the déclassé landless nobility). Even in Galicia, a study of priests who were ordained between 1868 and 1918 showed that 56.9 percent were from peasant families and only 0.8 percent were from the nobility (with the remaining coming from the towns, mostly from the poorer households).12 Class loyalty might have explained the attitudes of some of the bishops, but not most of them. Archbishop Feliński was even willing to admit that the landowning nobility was doomed, and that with time they would “blend into the masses of the nation by drowning in the depths of the emancipated citizen, where personal service wins out over lineage.”13 Nor can we explain Catholic social conservatism in terms of institutional self-defense. The Church lost nearly all of its wealth and power in the Russian and Prussian partitions, and much of it in Galicia as well. The clergy had little to gain (in an earthly sense) from preaching quiescence as a response to social inequalities and inequities.

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The clergy’s opposition to social reform, I would argue, was grounded more in theology and ideology than in material interests. The Church was caught up in a self-reinforcing cluster of ideas that were very hard to break out of: the combination of an authoritarian ecclesiology, a strict morality that pointed away from this life and toward the next, and an understanding of historical time that did not yet have a place for meaningful change. The reasoning should be familiar by now; as Eleonora Ziemięcka put it succinctly in 1841, “Social perfection will never exist, since the earth is not the fatherland of man.”14 With the homilies of the nineteenth century directing attention outward to heaven and inward to the sins of the individual, poverty could be perceived only as a “cross” that should be welcomed as a means of encouraging virtue and piety. Christians have always been fond of citing Mark 10:25 (“It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God”) when discussing the issue of poverty, but in the nineteenth century this line was read quite differently than it is today. Krukowski considered this passage in a sermon in 1875, turning it into a commentary on the blessings of destitution. “Is poverty the greatest evil?” he asked. “Not at all, since it guides people more certainly to heaven than does wealth.” In Krukowski’s view, material deprivation led to humility, trust in God, and honesty, whereas wealth often caused people to become egoistic, dishonest, greedy, and lazy.15 Elsewhere he wrote that riches could have been distributed in a more even manner, but “the most wise God deliberately divided His gifts unequally, so that the poor could learn patience and place their trust in God, and so that the rich could use the gifts granted them to support the poor, and in that way earn for themselves a treasury for eternity.”16 Father Zygmunt Golian echoed this message in a sermon in 1858, in which he said that God used both wealth and poverty in his pedagogical plan: So you want to know why some, in poverty, are nourished by bread sprinkled with tears, and others have abundant luxuries? . . . Is it because Divine Providence is more concerned about some than about others, that He loves some more than others? No, my dear ones, it is precisely because He is concerned about everyone and mercifully wants everyone to accomplish what He has prepared for them, in his love. And knowing that for some, poverty, sadness, sickness, and suffering will be more helpful for attaining those goals, while for others wealth, freedom, and health [will be more helpful], he gives everyone what they need to accomplish their goals. In guiding us toward these objectives, Golian concluded, God “does not have earthly well-being as a goal, because our destiny does not lie in such things. He guides us in this life as if in transit, in transit to the eternal well-being that has been set as our final goal.”17

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If the world was as God wished it to be, then it was foolhardy to try to change it in any systemic way. People could and did turn to the Church for alms, and doubtlessly many Catholics were motivated by their faith to give material aid to the poor, but one would search in vain for a nineteenth-century Polish Catholic theory of social reform. As Krukowski put it, “So how to avoid the frightening misery of the masses, that which increases the number of the impoverished dayby-day? Aside from work, the Church knows only one effective method and that is Christian mercy and generosity.”18 Elsewhere in Europe, however, Catholics were starting to grapple with the problem of poverty in more far-reaching ways. People like Frederic Ozanam, the founder of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, and Franz von Baader, an early nineteenth-century Catholic philosopher, were critiquing industrial market economies even before Marx did, urging their fellow Catholics to end their passivity vis-à-vis these new forms of human misery.19 Archbishop Pierre Giraud of Cambrai gave some legitimacy to these concerns in 1845 with a pastoral letter entitled “The Law of Labor,” and Bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler of Mainz brought social Catholicism into the mainstream with his 1864 book, The Labor Question and Christianity. Ketteler offered a religious justification for labor unions, cooperatives, minimum wage laws, and worker-protection legislation, and he repudiated the idea that poverty and exploitation were to be quiescently accepted as the will of God.20 This line of social criticism reached its fruition on May 15, 1891, when Pope Leo XIII released the encyclical Rerum Novarum. To this day Catholics celebrate this seminal text, with its proclamation “Some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class.” Though affirming that property was a natural right, that social hierarchies were inevitable, and that “to suffer and endure is the lot of humanity,” Leo nonetheless sent shockwaves through the Catholic world when he argued, “As effects follow their cause, so is it just and right that the results of labor should belong to those who have bestowed their labor.” With this one line Leo baptized the labor theory of value and the concept of exploitation and set the stage for the emergence of a Christian social movement. He coined a slogan that is still utilized today when he wrote that employees should “respect in every man his dignity as a person ennobled by Christian character. . . . To misuse men as though they were things in the pursuit of gain, or to value them solely for their physical powers—that is truly shameful and inhuman.” The category of “dignity” would be elaborated in the century that followed Rerum Novarum, but already in 1891 the pope established the fundamental point that it was a sin to treat human labor as just another commodity to buy at the lowest possible price. Even more noteworthy (in a Catholic context) was Leo’s argument that the sin  of commodification was more than just an individual transgression. The economic order of the modern world cultivated evil, the pope believed, so only

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collective action (through the instruments of the state) could “save unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money-making.” He denounced the idea that contractual freedom was an absolute value, arguing that governments should step in to protect those too weak to bargain for what ought to be their basic human rights. “There underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man,” Leo wrote, “namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice.”21 Several historians have claimed that Rerum Novarum had little or no impact in Poland until several decades after its release.22 This is not quite correct. Although Leo XIII’s message was resisted by some prominent bishops, there was in fact a great deal of variation from diocese to diocese. The most outspoken opposition to social reform can be seen in the archdiocese of Poznań-Gniezno. When Archbishop Floryan Stablewski addressed the Catholic Society of Polish Workers in Poznań in 1895 there was no hint that his views had been touched by the pope’s recent pronouncements. Stablewski did suggest that workers might obtain some happiness on earth if they were virtuous and industrious, but mostly he tried to turn their attention to the life to come: My Dear Sons! God also summons you to strive for a better lot in the future when He says, “Seek first the Kingdom of God and his justice, and the rest will be given to you.” In these few words you are presented with the entire catechism: what you are to do to improve your lot, become happier on this earth, and above all guarantee the salvation of your soul.  .  .  . Even though your brows continue to be drenched in sweat, remember what faith commands and remain true to the beautiful traditions of your ancestors. The blessing of God will ensure that your cares will pass, and that under the banner of labor you will arrive at a better lot. God will not abandon you, and will lead you to that beautiful land where there awaits for you a reward for your deeds.23 Two months later Archbishop Stablewski issued a lengthy pastoral letter discussing poverty, but his only actual proposal was to encourage people to “love one another” and follow the “models and inspiration” of Jesus. “Earth will never be transformed into heaven,” he wrote, “and the times of heavenly joy lost because of sin will never return. Christ the Lord did not come down to earth in order to satisfy all our terrestrial needs and desires, in order to create a kingdom of happiness on earth. His calling was far more lofty.”24 Perhaps Rerum Novarum

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inspired Stablewski to address the question of poverty, but the way he did so gave no hint that he had absorbed the substance of Leo XIII’s famous encyclical. Przewodnik Katolicki was the leading Polish-language Catholic weekly in Stablewski’s archdiocese, and its articles on the social question in the 1890s could have been written a half century earlier. In 1895, for example, the magazine complained that workers had fallen into the “abyss of entertainment and consumption.” This anonymous author believed that people needed to work harder because “whoever gives himself up to work has no time for entertainment, and divides his time sensibly between work and rest.”25 A few months later Przewodnik Katolicki refuted the charge that workers were suffering because of abusive bosses or unjust conditions of labor. Individual owners did indeed commit sins, the magazine acknowledged, but the problem was moral rather than systemic. The loss of Christian love and the erosion of faith that came with modernity “cannot be replaced either by increased wages, or decreased working hours, or health-care plans.”26 Another contributor to the magazine (also in 1895) maintained that even asking about the justice of social status and wealth would bring this reply from God: Am I not the Lord, to Whom all people ought to be subordinate and obedient? Am I to ask every person what I am to do with him, how I am to guide him and where I am to place him? Do I not have the power to do with him whatever I wish? Some I raise up and others I strike down, because that is what I want; some I give life and from others I take it, because I want to; some I give happiness and from others I take it, because that is my will, because I am the Lord who rules all.27 Józef Stagraczyński’s popular homiletic collection of 1908 (published in Poznań) similarly encouraged the poor to embrace their status. “Be glad that you live in poverty,” he wrote, “and that you must seek for yourself a piece of bread at the doors of strangers; be glad, and do not look with a jealous eye and a painful heart on those who are wealthy, for like a wild flower all their wealth and all their splendor will bring death to them in the end.”28 Whenever a poor person suffered, Stagraczyński suggested, he or she should cry out “O, how happy I am that I can follow Jesus on his path of thorns.”29 Anyone blessed with the “grace of faith” would “endure poverty with the joy of a good conscience, a hundred times happier than those who live in golden palaces.”30 Stagraczyński even offered the motto “Poverty is happiness [Ubóstwo jest szczęśliwością].”31 In contrast to the message exemplified by Stablewski and Stagraczyński, Rerum Novarum seemed to resonate in Habsburg Galicia. This is paradoxical, because that region had little industry, an extremely conservative landed elite, an ephemeral socialist movement, and a cultural climate that earned it a reputation

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as a backwater of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. If elsewhere in Europe social Catholicism emerged together with industrial capitalism, among the Poles the opposite seems to have been the case. Perhaps this was because the Galician Catholics had close contacts with their Viennese counterparts, among whom a Christian social movement was growing rapidly. Or perhaps the lack of a strong socialist party in Galicia allowed Catholics there to devote less energy to denouncing the left and more to the development of their own social theories. For whatever reason, by 1897 Kraków’s Przegląd Powszechny would have anticipated few rebuttals when it described Rerum Novarum as “the most important document of the 19th century.”32 Four years earlier, in July 1893, several hundred of Galicia’s most prominent priests and lay activists had gathered in Kraków for the Catholic Convention (Wiec Katolicki), at which experts on various social issues spoke about the Church’s new approach to economic injustice. A follow-up gathering was held in Lwów two years later, drawing about two thousand people. Each conference was attended by Galicia’s bishops, and Leo XIII himself blessed the initiative.33 In announcing the 1893 conference, the organizers said that the pope’s “great encyclicals” had inspired them to look upon the world in a new way, and now their task was to figure out “what to demand, what must be changed, what to strive for, and what to avoid.”34 Although there were some dissenting voices, the overwhelming majority shared the views expressed by Father Adam Kopyciński, a delegate to the Galician assembly, who argued, “The social question, as it presents itself today, cannot be satisfactorily solved purely from a religious-moral position, to the exclusion of its economic side.” Kopyciński was no leftist, and he placed the blame for the current state of affairs on the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and a general “taste for a misconceived liberty,” but his primary point was that labor must not be treated as a commodity and “capitalists” should not be allowed to “take in millions in profit while doing nothing.”35 Kopyciński’s antiliberal social critique was typical at the Catholic Convention. Father Jan Gnatowski blamed the suffering of the workers on liberalism, which in his opinion only gave people “the freedom to starve to death,” and he called on the state to assume the role of “the arbitrator of the material concerns of society” and to “defend against exploitation and oppression.”36 A delegate to the Galician assembly with the quintessentially Habsburg name Herman Czecz de Lindenwald maintained that all the problems faced by the poor could be traced to a common source: “an excess of freedom.” In Lindenwald’s view, to allow the weak the “freedom” to compete with the strong “means the same as saying to the wolf and the lamb, ‘you are equal, and if you have a dispute between yourselves, you can work it out and resolve it according to your own strengths.’” There was vigorous debate from the floor following Lindenwald’s remarks, and some of the comments reflected support for laissez-faire views. Such voices, however, were clearly in the minority.37

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Few advocated Rerum Novarum more enthusiastically than Archbishop Józef Bilczewski of Lwów, whose sermons were described by a contemporary as “Leo XIII speaking Polish.”38 Even in his inaugural sermon as archbishop in 1901 Bilczewski called upon the clergy to “go to the people [idźcie w lud],” to focus pastoral care on the workers and peasants who had “grievances against other social classes.” He warned against the “doctrines of demagogues,” but he nonetheless advocated a populist form of Catholic social activism that would have been unimaginable even a few decades earlier.39 The archbishop criticized the  otherworldliness and social disengagement that he perceived among the clergy of his archdiocese, instructing his priests in 1908, “Work inside the church alone does not suffice today. We must add social work, striving to illuminate and improve the material existence of our parishioners and to remove all the forms of abuse to which the economically weaker often succumb.”40 That same year he challenged all Catholics, clergy and laity alike, to see their mission in both spiritual and material terms. “And did the saints only care for the soul?” he asked. “Did they forget about multiplying bread for the people, about earthly well being?”41 On another occasion he even implied that the rituals of the Church were of secondary importance: “The Holy Mass, the sacraments, and prayers are essential, but only as a means to enable us to carry out that which is the essence of religion: that we never do evil to anyone, but on the contrary, that with love for God everyone does as much good as the grace of God grants us power to do.”42 Underpinning Bilczewski’s worldview was an understanding of property that was in line with the views of Leo XIII but sharply at odds with the message that most of the Polish clergy had been presenting to that point. In his very first pastoral letter he challenged the concept of unqualified property rights, arguing instead that “the ultimate Master of all earthly goods is God, and the owner has, strictly speaking, only a lease from God, and must pay his rent.”43 That “rent” was not mere charity; it was justice: Bilczewski believed that “all privileges and acquisitions not in accord with justice cannot be lasting, and in the end they will always bring harm to the entire society.” Because of this, Christian governments were obliged to “eliminate from the law everything that is harmful, based on egoism, beneficial only for a few capitalists and harmful for the millions of the working masses, and thus for the general welfare.” But government could not accomplish everything, Bilczewski acknowledged; in order for workers to fight for their rights (and the archbishop did indeed use the word fight) it was essential that “all working strata join together at the soonest possible moment into professional associations based on Christian justice.”44 Tying together the dynamic historiosophy discussed in chapter 3 with his ambitious social agenda, Bilczewski tried to position the Church (together with the working class) on the side of progress:

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It is a lie that the Church looks unfavorably on social progress, on the fact that the lower strata are winning for themselves civil and social rights. The Church, though unmovable, constantly moves, and it does not at all intend to turn back the river of history toward the source from which it providentially flows. It does not at all satisfy the Church that something is old in order to affirm that it is good; nor does a mark of novelty suffice to reject something as evil. Rather, the Church accepts the world’s modern organization, its modern ideas and aspirations, its modern desires. It is concerned only to preserve the eternal rule of truth and justice, to rescue unimpeachable customs, to differentiate progress from error and apostasy, and finally to force the world to pull back from the precipice of barbarism.45 That precipice was, for Bilczewski, socialism—and that brings us to another key aspect of Catholic social thought. Although antiliberal and socially radical, those who propagated Rerum Novarum were equally hostile toward the other major ideology that opposed laissez-faire economics: socialism. Bilczewski, for example, described socialism as “the greatest crime against society, against the people, against the workers, and a most fatal moral plague which will bring death to the soul, destroy and dissolve everything that humanity heretofore has recognized as holy.” It was actually quite surprising when he qualified this denunciation by chastising those “who place all the guilt for today’s social disturbances on the socialists, arguing that before they came along there was peace and all was right with the world. This is not true.” He even acknowledged, “Not everything in socialism is a lie.”46 That Bilczewski managed to perceive anything good about socialism was a huge step. Obviously the programmatic atheism of the socialists was irreconcilable with Catholicism, but there seemed to be something deeper at work. The level of invective directed at the socialists was far more intense than that directed against any other foe, suggesting that socialism represented in the Catholic imagination not just an opponent, but a mortal enemy. At the Catholic Convention in Lwów in 1895 Dr. Józef Milewski labeled socialists “immoral agitators” who “sowed the seeds of hatred toward the entire social order” and purveyed “deceptive promises and hopes” to the poor.47 The Poznań magazine Przewodnik Katolicki used even stronger language, claiming that the socialists “taught hatred, jealousy, and contempt for those of higher status, even if they are the most virtuous people; [the socialists] enflame one estate against another; they want to overturn the entire world order; they want to abolish all laws and  duties.” The only people who could follow such an ideology, this author claimed, were “the refuse of society, depraved people with twisted minds and diseased hearts.”48 The Catholic economist Dr. Leopold Caro was particularly upset that some people were trying to depict Jesus as a proto-socialist. “Not only

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was Christ not a socialist,” he wrote, “but socialism has nothing in common with Christianity. It is, certainly, a healthy reaction against the Manchester doctrine, but that healthy, ethical element has most emphatically been washed away.”49 With time the Catholic response to socialism and communism became increasingly shrill, eventually enabling Father Jan Kiciński to ask his parish in Poznań: Are not the teachings of communism born from hell, and is not the devil the father of the communists and those like them, for whom human life is nothing, the suffering of people nothing, sin and crime nothing, human virtue nothing, the greatest holiness nothing, the Most Holy God himself nothing? . . . Are they still people—everyone asks with fear—or are they not rather beasts and demons in human form? And from such monstrosities and barbarians some would dare expect a better future, a heaven on earth, the reform of material existence. . . . Everyone, everyone ought to pledge in unison to use all honorable means to engage in a struggle without mercy against godless, bloody communism.50 Given this level of hysteria it is clear that something more than a mere ideological dispute was involved, and I will explore that broader set of fears in chapter 7. For now suffice it to say that social Catholicism maintained a very high defensive wall on its left flank. Significantly, the only priest who tried to engage in sympathetic dialogue with the socialists prior to World War I was Antoni Szech—and we saw what happened to him. Szech’s social views, taken in isolation, differed little from those of Bilczewski. Like the archbishop, Szech argued that “it was necessary to begin with the principle that the Church desires human happiness, here and in heaven.”51 Whenever the clergy defended the status quo, he lamented, they were “presenting a God who is a supporter of crime, an ally of tyrants, an accomplice of wrongdoers, an enemy of everything that is great and beautiful and lofty, a God of prisoners and debased slaves, not people, a God of tyrants and oppressors, and not free and upright men.”52 Szech called on his fellow priests to shed this legacy and “step forward courageously as defenders of the people,” recognizing that the existing social order “did not descend from heaven, nor was it revealed by God.”53 His oratorical flair led him to state his views more colorfully than most, but the substance of his social vision was not an insurmountable problem on its own. He crossed a line, however, when he wrote: Whoever believes that socialism will heal this or that wound, and that with [socialism] humanity will be better off—whoever believes in that, and counts on it, and sees no other path—that person may, that person

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ought to become a socialist. For a Catholic, if he believes in God and loves Christ, in any case must necessarily seek a way out for humanity from this hell into which it has been plunged. I am not saying that every Catholic must be a socialist. But every Catholic ought to desire, with all his heart and all his soul . . . to escape from this hell and lead humanity out of it. And if he sees no other road than socialism, let him be a socialist. Better that than be a supporter of the current “order.”54 Szech always insisted that he was not a socialist himself, and that he only considered socialism “better than nothing.” When he discussed exploitation he drew from Leo XIII more than from Marx, and he always stressed that class struggle was a bad thing because it demonized the rich rather than saving them. He preferred a Christian doctrine of universal love, and he took it upon himself to evangelize that message to the socialists, working with them to achieve common goals while steering them away from hatred.55 This goal left Szech almost completely isolated. I have found only one specifically Catholic defense of his outreach, written under a cryptonym in 1907. This author thought that Szech should be praised for trying to “take elements harmful for society, as the socialists are because of their excesses, and turn them into useful elements, working according to the ideas of the Church to spread the central commandment of love.”56 A much more common response was provided by Father Jan Gnatowski, who believed that socialism was superfluous after Rerum Novarum. These two ideologies were not really similar, he wrote, because Catholics “often say ‘give!’ but never ‘take!’” The rapacious nature of socialism would bring only “violence, murder, poisoning the heart and slicing the veins of the fatherland . . . [as well as] death to the fatherland, to faith, to freedom, to culture.”57 As these denunciations illustrate, however, even the most vociferous fin de siècle attacks on socialism were invariably paired with a critique of capitalism, indicating how important it was for Catholics to carve out an ideological space just for themselves between Marx and the marketplace.58 Józef Milewski, even as he delivered the antisocialist diatribe cited earlier, insisted that he opposed socialism “not out of fear of agitation, nor in the name of the class interests of the owners, nor from some alleged dislike of those strata that are trying to obtain better living conditions.” Rather, Milewski claimed that universal love was his only motivation, as he sought a position equidistant from both liberalism and socialism. Both of those ideologies, he argued, were “one-sided” and “destructive for social development.” Socialism, he believed, transformed the individual into “a means, a tool for some objective,” whereas capitalism elevated the individual to the point where he “considers himself to be the entire aim of his activities, when absolute egoism begins to eat away at and consume social feeling.”59

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The importance of Rerum Novarum and the movement it spawned should be neither overstated nor understated. On the one hand, by the start of the twentieth century a great many priests and lay intellectuals took up Leo XIII’s challenge, formulating a comprehensive critique of capitalism that was similar to the one posed by socialism, but framed entirely by the discursive boundaries of Catholicism. It would become harder and harder to label the Church part of the status quo’s superstructure (though socialists would obviously keep trying to do so). On the other hand, enthusiasm for the new social Gospel was far from universal. Most of the parish priests were willing to read encyclicals by bishops like Bilczewski and even introduce some of those themes into their own sermons. Translating those ideas into action, however, was another matter altogether. If Rerum Novarum was to have any broader impact the Church needed to become much more than just a sacramental institution and get directly involved in social work, labor organizing, and even politics. As one of the participants at the 1899 Catholic Convention put it: Today we must develop the banner of action [czyn]. This is the whole secret of success for the future. The slogan of action! . . . Let us go forward, let us proclaim loudly our Catholic proposals, let us make of them today an electoral slogan, let us demand them so loudly that everyone, everywhere will have to hear us, and as a result of these slogans our ranks for action will grow.  .  .  . In this struggle for Catholic organization no true Catholic ought to stand aside. Active participation is one of the most holy duties of every faithful son of the Church and the Fatherland.60 The call to get out of the sacristy and engage with the world was very common in the early twentieth century.61 At the most basic level this injunction could take the form of a call to “live the faith.” For example, Cecylia Plater-Zyberkówna wrote in 1899 that there was a difference between “false piety” and “true piety.” The former depended on “carrying out many religious practices, sitting in church, reciting long prayers, fasting, and taking long pilgrimages.” True piety, in contrast, required one “to live according to God [żyć po Bożemu].”62 This phrase was typical of sermons and devotional texts, and it required only a little elaboration to take on political implications. In the aforementioned survey from 1905 that asked prominent Galicians “What particular tasks does Catholicism have to achieve today in Poland?” nearly every respondent mentioned the need for active outreach to the working class. While the overwhelming majority of the industrial workers in Poland would have been nominally Roman Catholic, they were viewed by many respondents as having drifted away from the faith by entering the cities, which were typically depicted as swamps of temptation with

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woefully underdeveloped pastoral support. Obviously the timing of that particular survey mattered (the Revolution of 1905 was under way just across the border in the Russian partition), but the near unanimity was nonetheless striking. In his reply Archbishop Bilczewski maintained, “The essence of Catholicism does not consist of saying prayers, attending mass, and creating some sort of insurance policy for the afterlife.” Instead, that “essence” was expressed by living a virtuous personal life and by “conscientiously fulfilling one’s civic obligations.”63 Archbishop Teodorowicz was more explicit, warning, “If the clergy overlooks the current crisis taking place among the people, if it sleeps, then the enemy will come and spread ill-will. A clergy closed up in the sacristy, neglecting the manifestations of life and social and political development among the people, will be evicted by seditious agitators from that very sacristy.”64 The problem of the clergy remaining “confined to the sacristy” was also emphasized in the responses submitted by members of the laity. Dr. Henryk Jordan, a famous obstetrician and child welfare activist, wrote, “In our materialistic times, work inside the Church does not suffice . . . [so it is necessary that] the broad mass of the people, who cannot be satisfied with assurances about happiness in the afterlife . . . see that those who are taking care of their afterlife are not ignoring the needs of their corporeal life.”65 To accomplish this task, Franciszek Morawski believed, the clergy needed to “investigate the life of the Catholic masses, understand their language, their feelings, their means of expressing those feelings.”66 Even the most conservative responses, such as the one from Count Krzysztof Mieroszewski, accepted Archbishop Bilczewski’s slogan that in order to counter the influence of the socialists “it is necessary to go the people [wchodzić w lud].”67 Dr. Rudolf Sikorski summarized the overwhelming consensus with the succinct declaration, “Faith without deeds is dead.”68 Unfortunately, drumming up (and sustaining) this sort of Catholic activism was a lot harder than formulating a critical theory of liberal capitalism. The first and most intractable obstacle was the clergy itself, because few priests were willing to transform themselves into social activists. Father Kazimierz Zimmermann, a professor at Jagiellonian University who spent part of his career in Germany and thus was familiar with the social Catholic movement there, complained that most Polish priests had a “marked tendency toward quietism,” leading workers to believe “that the Church stands on the side of their privileged exploiters, and that it tries to influence the workers who listen to its teachings to accept all forms of the capitalist system, to be obedient to [the owners] and to the authorities, and to be glad for the promise of heaven whenever they suffer injustice.” This was the wrong message, Zimmermann insisted. Proclaiming the Gospels, celebrating the Holy Sacraments, and in general strict pastoral work will always be the first and primary task of the

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pastor, but whoever demands that the clergy limit itself to celebrating the Holy Sacraments, conducting services, teaching the catechism, delivering lessons, managing Church properties—such a person demonstrates his lack of understanding for the spirit of Christianity, and in general shows the narrowness of his understanding. Moreover, such a person insults the work and the intentions of the Savior, belittles the clergy, destroys Catholicism—for he restrains its ability to show its vitality vis-à-vis the most important task for Catholicism today: solving the social question!69 Priests did occasionally go through the motions of organizing their parishioners into self-help groups, labor unions, or credit co-ops, but few of these halfhearted undertakings amounted to much. Even in these cases clerical organizers tended to redirect the efforts of these groups back toward spiritual or sacramental projects. For example, the Catholic Society of Polish Workers, created in Poznań by Father Antoni Stychel in 1893, was one of the few such organizations to gain a large membership (around thirty thousand by World War I). Those who sought help with low wages or bad working conditions, however, had to look elsewhere: Stychel said that the two primary goals of the Society were guarding against the encroachments of Lutheranism and “protecting workers laboring in factories from the loss of their faith and virtue.”70 In the Russian partition, restrictive association laws made even this sort of organizing nearly impossible until after the Revolution of 1905, when Father Marceli Godlewski created the Society of Christian Workers. This group gained about twenty thousand members within a year and grew steadily in 1907 (estimates of its ultimate size range from 60,000 to 100,000), but it too was ultimately bogged down by the passivity of the clergy. To get the bishops to approve the Society, Godlewski included a provision that every local chapter would have a “patron” from the clergy who would set the agenda, chair all meetings, and control all finances. With so much riding on the dedication and initiative of the parish priests, the Society collapsed almost as quickly as it emerged, falling to a mere twenty active chapters by World War I. Moreover, Father Godlewski was charged by his superiors with “modernism” solely because his organizational efforts took him beyond the role traditionally reserved for the clergy. These accusations were dismissed by Rome, but the very fact that they were leveled in the first place is indicative of the atmosphere in the Russian partition of Poland at that time.71 In Galicia the Catholic social movement got off to a slow start, despite those Catholic conventions in the 1890s. The Catholic-National Party was created in 1898 with the support of the bishops, and it campaigned in the elections of 1900 on a platform of moderate social reforms. After failing to win any seats, however, it folded.72 The Polish Labor Union for Christian Workers was created in Kraków

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in 1906, but it grew to only about eight thousand members before collapsing shortly before the First World War. Like Godlewski’s group in Warsaw, this organization was entirely dependent upon clerical leadership, and it faced the additional hurdle of recruiting members from the minuscule industrial labor force of the Kraków area.73 There were several other aborted organizational efforts: the Polish People’s Center formed in 1905, only to fall apart two years later, and the Polish Christian-Social Party was created in 1908 but dissolved in 1910 (with a whopping fifteen hundred members). Despite all these failures, Galicia did eventually become home to a mass-membership Catholic social movement, thanks (not surprisingly) to the efforts of Archbishop Bilczewski. The CatholicSocial Union, which he launched in 1904, was modeled explicitly on Ludwig Windthorst’s Volksverein in Germany. According to its founding text, this group was to strive for “a change in the social relations of Galicia in the spirit of Christian and national principles.” It got off to a slow start, with only seven hundred members after a year of operation, but thanks to the active support of Bilczewski and Bishop Pelczar of Przemyśl (who personally wrote the statute for his local chapter in 1906), the party had 150,000 members by 1911. But even this promising undertaking ultimately failed when the Austrian government shut it down with the outbreak of World War I.74 To really build a mass political or social movement, many activists recognized, it was necessary for the laity to be engaged as never before, with plenty of space for lay initiative and even leadership. Father Zimmerman argued, “The conscious workers want to represent their just interests vis-à-vis the other members of society. . . . They want to be adults in society, the members of which ought to accept their equal rights in theory and in reality, as partners reaching agreements that will regulate their interests, as co-producers, as mature, normal citizens in the state and in society.”75 A handful of others echoed this theme. In a readers’ survey conducted by Przegląd Powszechny in 1905, Professor Marian Zdziechowski predicted that “clericalism” and “exclusivity” would prevent the Church from reaching a wider audience, and Professor Włodzimierz Czerkawski agreed: “The clergy must engage in public affairs not with commands but with their moral influence; they must take advantage of the trust they inspire and not their rights, and finally they must work among the ranks [u dołu], and not try to occupy a leading position.”76 Unfortunately (as we saw in chapter 1), this view challenged the dominant ecclesiology of the day. The clergy was rarely willing to allow members of the laity to take a leading role in any sort of Church-affiliated organization. In August 1908 a diocesan synod of Przemyśl passed a resolution acknowledging that some members of the clergy retained “certain prejudices” against straying from their strictly defined spiritual functions. The synod resolved to shed this attitude, recognizing that if they “approached people with love” and performed

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good works on their behalf, then God’s work would be done. That said, the synod cautioned that social work had to be conducted through a “well planned and strong organization,” and that priests needed to hold leadership positions lest dangerous ideas supplant true Catholic teachings. “Above all, let social action be strictly Catholic,” the Przemyśl clergy wrote, “that is, let it be in accordance with the teachings of Christ the Lord, let it be subordinated in all things to clerical authority and let it follow the directions that the Vicar of Christ proclaims through the bishops. Otherwise, it might easily cross the boundary that separates it from socialism and radicalism.”77 Even those who tried to adopt a more open attitude toward the laity often ended up falling back on familiar models of authority. Archbishop Teodorowicz called on his fellow priests to “go to the people, not in the sense of just speaking about them, but also speaking with them.” This image of dialogue, however, broke down very quickly: “If we do not want to perish, let us educate [kształćmy, literally ‘form’] the people so that they feel and think that they are one with us, even as they remain in their sphere; let us go to the people not in order to dissolve into a great mass and lose ourselves, but rather to bring the people toward us without losing ourselves.”78 Archbishop Aleksander Kakowski of Warsaw eagerly called on the priests of his diocese to get involved in public life, but he used some powerful metaphors to ensure that doing so would not weaken their status or their leadership: Just as Christ, though he was God, remained a man, acted like a man, felt like a man, suffered like a man; so does the priest, though he is a pastor, remain a citizen and is supposed to act like a citizen, suffer like a citizen. All those priests and lay people who believe that pastoral and civic activity contradict each other and mutually preclude each other have a superficial understanding; for just as it is a given for a Catholic that two natures—divine and human—are united in Christ, so also is it given and understood that pastoral and civic duties are united in a priest.79 If the parish priest was to be compared to Christ Himself, and if civic duties were akin to the human embodiment of God, then it was hard indeed to imagine the laity in any position of leadership within a Catholic institution. Under the best of circumstances, transforming the Polish Church into a source of social activism would have taken a lot of time and effort. The tumult of World War I and the restoration of an independent Poland contributed to this undertaking in some ways, but these events were just as likely to reinforce the conviction that the sacred and the social were entirely separate, particularly when juxtaposed with the lingering homiletic trends described in chapter 2. One priest told his congregation on Christmas Day, 1919, that they should

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“show contempt for wealth” and concentrate only on spiritual rewards. Hard work was a good thing “because laziness would be a sin,” but one should never use labor as a means to get ahead: “Work because you were created for work— but do not allow your earnings to enter into your thoughts, your heart.”80 The popular interwar preacher Ireneusz Kmiecik propagated a message that would have been familiar to Catholic audiences from a generation earlier. “Health, possessions, family, even life itself is all foolishness when set against the salvation of the soul,” he wrote in 1930.81 When confronted with people who were dissatisfied with their lives, Kmiecik responded that they lacked “a spirit of penance, since so many do not perceive their own sins and the resulting need for difficulties and hardships.”82 A cynic would point out that priests could easily dismiss worldly concerns because they did not experience as much material hardship as their parishioners. In the interwar years an entry-level parish priest earned about 200 złoty per month, plus up to 200 more złoty (if needed) for room and board. This compares to 130 złoty (with no living stipend) for an entry-level schoolteacher. Priests earned on average about twice what state civil servants earned, even accounting for the hierarchy of experience and rank. In addition, parish priests were able to retain some of the fees and donations that the Church received, and they occasionally benefited from Church landholdings.83 Priests were certainly not wealthy, but they were less materially vulnerable than most of their parishioners. It seems reasonable to suspect that their position might have made some of them a bit less acutely aware of the day-to-day struggles of the poor, but it would be simplistic to ascribe the otherworldliness of interwar sermons to a callous disregard for, much less ignorance of, human suffering. After all, someone earning twice as much as a civil servant in the Second Republic was hardly prosperous, and nearly all the priests came from very modest backgrounds. They had plenty of opportunities to experience poverty, but the configuration of Polish Catholicism at the time provided few means for them to translate that experience into a sense of social injustice. For whatever reasons, most members of the clergy were reluctant to get involved in social activism in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1936 Archbishop Aleksander Cardinal Kakowski of Warsaw still had to remind his priests, “[Do] not wait until [the people] come to you. Go to them first with comfort, advice, suggestions, help, donations both personal and communal. Go the factories, to the basements, to the attics. Be hunters and fishermen of human souls!”84 Unfortunately, there were not very many of these clerical anglers, and the ones that did get involved were not catching very many fish. Though there were several explicitly Christian worker organizations, none of them became large enough to rival the dominant socialist unions, and though the members of the latter were mostly Roman Catholics, their level of devotional practice (not to mention their fealty

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to the Magisterium) was very low. The Poznan-based Catholic Society of Polish Workers, which had briefly boasted thirty thousand members prior to World War I, hovered between ten thousand and twenty thousand during the interwar years. As before the War, every chapter was led by a priest, and the organization focused on spiritual uplift more than conventional union activism. The Warsawbased Society of Christian Workers was somewhat more successful, with about forty thousand members by the early 1930s.85 On a national level there were several competing labor alliances. The socialist-backed Union of Trade Unions had about 400,000 members in 1930, and the nationalist, right-wing Polish Trade Union was close behind at 350,000. In contrast, the Christian Trade Union, created in 1921 in an attempt to unite regional Catholic worker organizations, reached only about 100,000 members. Significantly, the nationalist Polish Trade Union drew a lot of support from Roman Catholic workers but included in its program a denunciation of the use of “religious slogans and the dignity of the clergy for partisan political goals.” For their part the hierarchy continued to insist that priests hold leadership roles in every officially sanctioned Catholic organization, and they ensured that the Church as an institution kept its distance from all secular unions.86 The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in interwar Poland was much more committed to a group called Catholic Action than it was to any labor organization. Pius XI promoted this initiative in 1922 with his encyclical Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, but it took until 1930 for various local and regional Catholic lay organizations to unite and form Poland’s Akcja Katolicka. The goal of this organization, as Pius XI put it, was to combat the errors of modernism, spread the true teachings of the Church, and “reawaken that spirit of faith, of supernatural love, and of Christian discipline, which alone can bring to these principles correct understanding, and can lead to their observance.”87 This undertaking was a clear success, enrolling half a million members in Poland by 1936 and nearly 750,000 by the outbreak of World War II. However, much of this growth came at the expense of even more vibrant local groups, most of which were forced to close down and fold their activities into the centrally controlled movement.88 It was precisely the level of control that made Catholic Action appealing to the hierarchy. Bishop August Hlond of Katowice (two years before he would be named primate) used a revealing argument to urge the laity of his diocese to join this new movement: [Catholic Action] is nothing other than an act of Catholic rebirth, carried out systematically and with unity by lay people in union with and dependent upon the Church, and in its spirit. . . . Since Catholic Action is an essential component of the evangelical work of the Church, it must necessarily conform in its activities to the program [of the

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Church], and depend upon the Church hierarchy. . . . No one can use the Catholic label without the approval and the knowledge of a bishop, just as no one can carry out a Catholic initiative without his permission. This union with the Church is, for Catholic Action, the source of its blessing and its fruitfulness, and a disciplined dependency upon the Church will guard Catholic Action from dispersing its strength and diverting onto tracks along which Catholic thought may not go.89 In 1930 one of the leaders of the Catholic Action movement, Father Antoni Szymański, summarized the goals of the organization in a small book that received the nihil obstat and the imprimatur. He reminded his readers that only the clergy could carry out the salvific work of the Church, but things had gotten so bad in modern Europe that extreme measures had to be taken. “It is not surprising,” he wrote, “that in these difficult conditions for the Holy Faith, the Supreme Authority has called the soldiers to the ranks—which he would not do, were it not for the unusual danger—so that under his leadership and that of the bishops, they would take part in the hierarchical apostolic mission.” There were even some areas in which the laity should act on their own—for example, in family life, in politics, in the economy, in cultural production—but even then lay Catholics were “not entirely independent from the teaching and governing authority of the Church.”90 Catholic Action did eventually grow into a mass movement. By encouraging increased attendance at mass and by organizing pilgrimages, processions, rosary recitations, and other sacramentals, Catholic Action got people involved in the faith in a new way, doubtless setting the stage for the gradual opening of the Church’s ecclesiology that would follow in the second half of the twentieth century. And through the meetings, classes, and periodicals sponsored by this movement more people were exposed to the official teachings of the Church, including documents like Rerum Novarum. This process was further advanced by the rapid development of a mass-market Catholic press. When the Vatican hosted an exhibition of Catholic periodicals from around the world in 1936, fifty out of the three hundred publications on display were from Poland. Obviously not all of those newspapers and magazines had identical agendas, but on the issues discussed in this chapter they spoke with a single voice. And a loud voice it was: by that time the combined print run of the Catholic dailies in Poland was over one million, and for the devotional periodicals, over two million. Altogether Catholic titles made up nearly one-third of all the periodicals published in interwar Poland (measured by print runs). The most popular magazine was the devotional Rycerz Niepokalanej (The Knight of the Immaculate), which had a print run of 600,000. The general-interest illustrated weekly Przewodnik Katolicki (The Catholic Guide) was sent to about 200,000 people each week.

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During the last few years before World War II an even more popular daily newspaper emerged, Mały Dziennik (The Little Daily) which offered sensationalist stories and a very strong dose of anti-Semitism; it had a print run of 300,000. Even small provincial diocesan papers had runs of eight thousand to ten thousand.91 The development of the Catholic media could be considered a form of Catholic activism, and it probably did more to propagate the sanctioned ideas and concepts of Catholicism than any other form of pastoral work. It was not, however, what those who wanted the Church to work for social equality and equity had in mind when they urged the faithful to become more engaged in public life. Given the sacramental nature of Catholic Action, the anemic growth of the Christian trade unions, and the enduring blame-the-victim homiletic tradition, it is tempting to conclude that Rerum Novarum had only a limited impact in Poland. But change penetrated more deeply than is obvious at first glance. As already mentioned, a great deal of credit goes to Archbishop Bilczewski, who continued to promote his ideas on the social question until his death in 1923. A few months after Poland declared independence he issued a pastoral letter in which he affirmed, “Our Poland is supposed to be democratic, that is, popular [ludowa].” The Church, he wrote, should not support the continuation of old forms of economic exploitation and social stratification.92 Bilczewski’s worldview enjoyed a great deal of support within the Episcopate, particularly after the publication in 1931 of Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, which paid homage to Leo XIII. That same year Cardinal Hlond created the Primate’s Social Council, a body of distinguished Catholic intellectuals under the chairmanship of Father Antoni Szymański, the rector of the Catholic University of Lublin.93 Szymański believed, “It is true that Satan circulates among people and spreads moral evil among them, but it is also true that, to a large degree, poverty, misery, and oppression cause dissatisfaction, ferment, and moral decline.” The Church, Szymański believed, had a duty to alleviate all this suffering; indeed, he wrote that social activism “flowed spontaneously from [the Church’s] divine mission.”94 Such engagement should work to put an end to “proletarianism,” which Szymański defined (in language strikingly reminiscent of Marx) as the condition of owning nothing but one’s own labor power, which one then had to sell in order to survive.95 Another member of the Primate’s Social Council was an economist (and convert from Judaism) named Leopold Caro. Though he accepted that “inequality between people is unavoidable, and no social reforms will manage to eliminate it, because it stems from the essence of human nature and the laws of heredity,” and though he considered “the cross of life—that is, suffering and faith” to be essential to Catholicism, he also believed that capitalism “could lead to no result other than permanent misery and crisis.”96 Instead of the “political economy” taught by liberals, Caro proposed a “social economy” that

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would incorporate ethics alongside “hard science.” The Christian economist, Caro believed, had to allow morality to guide his reasoning so that he could both describe the existing world and show the path to a better one.97 Elsewhere he presciently proposed the slogan solidarism as the motto for the Catholic social movement, explaining his neologism with an English phrase, “cooperation not competition.” Caro argued, “Solidarism will not allow individuals to be treated as means to an end, or for the benefit of other, wealthier individuals (as liberalism practices without scruples) or for the benefit of the whole (as extreme socialism advocates).”98 Working from these principles, the Primate’s Social Council would eventually call for the compulsory redistribution of wealth and property, the cultivation of strong labor unions, state support for small business, a legally mandated “family wage,” the abolition of factory barracks in exchange for decent working-class housing, and financial assistance for the unemployed. They even declared, “In a system that bases its economic and social relations on the principles of unrestrained and unorganized free competition, the conditions are lacking for a satisfactory resolution of the question of hired labor.”99 The influence of the Social Council was evident when the Episcopate passed the following resolution at their First Plenary Synod, held in Częstochowa in 1936: Catholics ought to take part in great numbers in shaping and repairing social relations according to the principles of justice and love, removing hatred and class struggle and making it easier for everyone to find work and the means for an adequate existence. Among other things, it is  necessary to strive to arrange relations between employers and employees in the spirit of Catholic social principles, to remove unemployment and homelessness, and to improve the difficult conditions of the countryside, of the workers, and of the proletariat.100 A year later, in 1937, the Episcopate released a joint pastoral letter in which they affirmed, “The restructuring of current social relations is necessary. It is not true that [the Church] has allied itself with forms that have survived too long and must be changed.” They still expressed concern that social change be carried out “without new injustices, sins, revolutions, violent coups, or pointless devastation,” yet they nonetheless believed that the creation of a new social order was “necessary and urgent” and they accepted that such changes “inherently” led to sacrifices.101 With the bishops endorsing social reform, the Catholic press followed suit. An author going only by the name of “Janusz” wrote in Posiew in July 1933 that even though the Kingdom of God was not to be understood as an earthly utopia, the Church nonetheless “played an active role in everyday concerns.” Moreover, the Church “did not merely support acts of charity, but strove for fundamental

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changes in [social] relations, eliminating the misery and exploitation of every worker, whether in the office, the factory, or the field.”102 The largest circulation Catholic illustrated weekly from the interwar years, Przewodnik Katolicki, abandoned its initial quietism as early as 1922. “They say that the earth cannot be helped,” wrote a certain Father Jehliczki, “because it is a veritable hell and will always remain such. Others say that a veritable heaven can be created on earth. I think that neither are right. The earth is neither heaven nor hell, just the earth, and this is how it will always remain. But it is possible to improve that world, to help bring good fortune to the poor, and it is worth our effort to do so.”103 To be sure, this attitude did nothing to reduce Przewodnik Katolicki’s contempt for socialism. An anonymous editorial in 1935 quipped, “Out of one hundred socalled Bolsheviks there is one idealistic Bolshevik, 39 criminals, and 60 idiots.”104 Yet this disdain could easily be accompanied by a thoughtful consideration of a whole range of radical economic projects. The periodical of the Łomża diocese even took the name Life and Labor (Życie i Praca) to signify its social orientation. Looking back in 1929 on the legacy of Rerum Novarum, this magazine wrote that Leo XIII had mobilized the authority of the Church against “godless capitalism,” demonstrating that it was “scandalous and inhumane to abuse people as if they were objects from which to make profit.”105 Even the staid pages of Nowa Bibljoteka Kaznodziejska would eventually preach the gospel of social Catholicism. For example, in 1933 Father Rudolf Tomanek from the town of Cieszyń offered a sermon summarizing the history of the Church’s struggle against “the ruthless exploitation of the working strata by modern international mammonism” and against “the oppression of millions by merciless capital.” He told the story of how the ideas of Bishop Ketteler in the 1840s culminated in the work of “the great social pope [wielki papież społeczny],” Leo XIII.106 The most direct embodiment of all these ideas was the Christian Democratic Party (or Chadecja, from the initials Ch.D.). The 1925 party program complained about the “extreme enrichment of businessmen at the expense of the working masses, who are often exploited and live in misery,” and demanded “a resolution that can only be achieved by way of a far reaching social reconstruction, as already indicated in the Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum.”107 At first glance the Chadecja appeared to be another failure for social Catholicism: from a high of 6.3 percent of the election of 1922, the party fell to 3.6 percent in both 1928 and 1930. The marginality of the party was somewhat mitigated, however, by the personal stature of its leader, Wojciech Korfanty.108 His centrist position gave him outsized importance in the complex coalition politics of 1918–26, and his uncompromising opposition to Józef Piłsudski’s authoritarian tendencies gained him a great deal of respect (as well as arrest in 1930 and exile in 1935). As the son of a Silesian coal miner, Korfanty knew the problems of the modern industrial working class from the inside, and with each

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passing year his attacks on liberal capitalism grew more strident. “For us,” he wrote, “capitalism is the greatest evil and the misfortune of humanity, and therefore we must constantly work to remove it and replace it with a Christian system.”109 In an article commemorating the fortieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum in 1931, Korfanty wrote that liberalism was based on two things: the commodification of human labor and the regulation of all prices by the rules of supply and demand. “Both those principles are pagan,” he wrote, “and contrary to Christian concepts, because they remove all religious influences from social life and its institutions.”110 He even questioned whether the danger of socialism was really as bad as some made it out to be. He wondered whether some members of the wealthy elite, whom he described as “the beneficiaries of a regime in Poland that is shaking at its foundations,” were “consciously and deliberately exaggerating the extent of this danger? Might they be abusing the power of Catholicism to sustain the rotten regime and its injustices, under the pretext of struggling with communism?”111 Views like these did not generate open controversy within the Polish Church, even though many priests continued to preach that it was a supreme virtue to patiently endure poverty and suffering. The imbalance was striking: on the one side were the advocates of social Catholicism, who received imprimaturs for their books and got invited to serve on the Primate’s Social Council. On the other side were the many members of the parish clergy who have left us no explicit polemics but who offered a homiletic message at odds with the reformist agenda of the Christian Democrats. Despite the failure to create a significant social or political movement to advance the ideas of Rerum Novarum, there is no doubt that Polish Catholicism in the 1930s had changed a great deal since the 1880s. Ideas that would have been marginal (at best) at the end of the nineteenth century had become entirely accepted, even mainstream, by the Second World War. Even someone like Ireneusz Kmiecik, though usually prone to construe injustice and misery as expressions of God’s will, preached that it was wrong “to want to hold private property without any restrictions, without any obligations. We must remember that God is the Lord and owner of all property, and man is only a temporary manager who is required to manage it according to the will of God.” By the 1930s Kmiecik had integrated criticism of these “temporary managers” into his sermons, alongside his more familiar complaints about lazy peasants and immoral workers.112 Profound transformations often involve a seemingly subtle shift in the bounds of the permissible, a normalization of what had been unspeakable or a quiet repudiation of what was once commonplace. In this case, interwar Polish Catholicism had room for far-reaching critiques of the socioeconomic status quo, and the once common injunction to endure injustice quietly was slowly being pushed to the outer edges of the mainstream.

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Because the Church was so vehemently anticommunist in the 1940s and 1950s, the early years of the cold war tended to obscure Catholicism’s own critique of liberal capitalism. With the United States as the new standard-bearer for the anticommunist crusade, Pius XII’s Vatican softened the sharper edges of its anticapitalist critique, and in many countries the Church became one of the key defenders of the existing order. In Poland, though, the leading voices of Catholicism struggled to demonstrate that their religion offered a vision of social change nearly as revolutionary as the one being introduced by the Soviet-backed regime. At a time when the overwhelming majority of Poles longed for both national independence and far-reaching systemic change, the Church’s claim to represent a third position that was equidistant from both communism and capitalism might well have resonated. Unfortunately, the struggle for power in the 1940s and 1950s was anything but a popularity contest, and few Catholics played a role in shaping the contours of the new order. Nonetheless, the Polish People’s Republic turned out to be an excellent setting for deepening the penetration of social Catholicism. Despite the programmatic overlap between Catholicism and communism on many socioeconomic issues, their mutual antipathy in the late 1940s was intense. To be sure, a few priests and lay activists tried to build bridges to the state authorities after the war, evoking texts like Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno for justification. In 1946 the State Publishing Institute released a book called Radical Catholics by Father Henryk Weryński, a military chaplain and the pastor of the garrison church of St. Agnieszka’s in Kraków, and an informant for the Security Service. He believed that Catholics had to “find a common language with those who took the left lane,” and that this should be easy because “Leo XIII and Pius XI gave us a clear program of a radical type in the social and economic sphere.”113 Weryński was not alone: by some estimates about 10 percent of the priests joined the communism-sponsored Union of Warriors for Freedom and Democracy (which had its own Clerical Section). Even more influential for a while was the lay Catholic organization PAX, led by a curious figure named Bolesław Piasecki, who had been an activist on the furthest fringe of the right during the 1930s and the leader of a radical nationalist partisan unit during World War II, but who spent the postwar years trying (with almost no success) to establish a public space for a pro-communist, lay Catholic counterweight to the Episcopate.114 Though historians today often assume that the members of these groups were motivated by either corruption or blackmail, we must not entirely dismiss arguments like Weryński’s. The line between hypocritical intellectual cover and genuine conviction is always indistinct, and nearly always inaccessible to the historian. In any case, for the 90 percent of the clergy who did not follow that path, the Stalinists’ unconcealed and increasingly aggressive assault on the Church—not to mention their programmatic atheism—precluded any sort of rapprochement.

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The bishops tended to depict socialism as an unadulterated evil, but their contempt for consumerism, capitalism, and liberalism was no less intense. “The aspiration of man for social progress,” Stefan Wyszyński wrote in a pastoral letter in 1946, “the desire to earn respect for himself regardless of estate, profession, line of work, education and wealth, is universal. . . . This corresponds to the aspiration of the Church, which for centuries has told you about the lofty dignity of the smallest child.” The very title of the letter, “On the Christian Emancipation of Man,” exemplified his attempt to appropriate and redefine the vocabulary of the twentieth-century left (much as Catholics developed their own concept of progress).115 When the communists ratcheted up their campaign against religion, the Episcopate responded by reminding the faithful of the Church’s bona fides as a force for radical change. They wrote, “[Catholicism] was not and is not tied to any capitalist economic system, because such a system is not compatible with Catholic social teachings. Moreover, the Episcopate supports every healthy social reform.”116 Even after Wyszyński had been imprisoned by the communists, he wrote in his diary, “I consider the rebuilding of the socio-economic structure to be necessary, just as all those who, for ages, have struggled in Poland for ‘social justice.’ I do not predict at this moment what sort of socio-economic system Poland needs. I know that the [previous system] could not remain, that social peace, a precondition for inner freedom, demanded economic change.”117 In the attempt to find a distinctively Christian argument for radical social change, many Catholic intellectuals in Poland became enamored with a new theological and philosophical school of thought known as “personalism.” First emerging in France in the 1930s in the neo-Thomistic philosophy of Jacques Maritain, personalism remained controversial in the West even as it generated widespread and sometimes paradoxical enthusiasm in Poland. Actually, even more important than Maritain along the Vistula was his younger and more radical colleague, Emmanuel Mounier, whose work has been appropriated (sometimes directly, often secondhand) by generations of Polish Catholics of widely diverging ideological and theological perspectives. As the label suggests, Maritain and Mounier’s key term was the person, a notion they developed to counter what they saw as the excessive materialism of the liberals and the socialists on the one hand and the excessive otherworldliness of some Christians on the other. Mournier located the person at the intersection of matter and consciousness—physicality and spirituality—and contended that humans could not be fully understood without reference to both these realms of existence. His Trinitarian Christianity was evident when he clarified that “the individual human being is not a crossroads where several participations in general realities meet (matter, ideas, etc.), but an indissoluble whole, of which the unity is prior to the multiplicity because it is rooted in the absolute. . . . Man is a body in the same degree that he is a spirit, wholly body and wholly spirit.” The “absolute” in which

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our personhood is grounded (Mounier did not insist upon calling it God, so as to reach non-Christian readers) is an embodiment of both truth and freedom, both the objective and the subjective, both nature and will. As creations made in this divine image, Mounier believed, we too are constituted by these tensions, and we risk dehumanization whenever we try to resolve the “the unending struggle” at the core of our being, whenever we attempt to deny the fundamental human dialectic. Not only would such a resolution be unsustainable, but the very attempt would impoverish one or the other aspect of our nature. From this philosophical premise, Mounier developed a theory of social and political engagement. He believed that because of our dual position as both subjects (willful, autonomous, and self-aware agents) and objects (the products of biological, social, and spiritual processes), we can realize our personhood only by opening ourselves to others. “In its inner experience,” he wrote, “the person is a presence directed towards the world and other persons, mingled among them in universal space. Other persons do not limit it, they enable it to be and to grow. . . . I have no existence, save insofar as I exist for others, and that to be is, in the final analysis, to love.” Using this set of claims as the foundation for social theory marked a subtle but consequential shift in Catholic thought. Most of the texts of social Catholicism based the imperative for social justice on a Thomist theology of property, according to which God is the source of all wealth and humans merely manage it in His name. From ownership comes duty, and from the performance of this duty comes social justice. In other words, moral obligation derives from one’s relationship to property. Mounier, in contrast, focused on another strain in Catholic thought (also present in Rerum Novarum) by basing his theory of justice on the intrinsic moral worth of the person. He argued that only by reaching out to others with love could a person realize the fullness of being, because subjectivity was intertwined with objectivity (and vice versa), because individuality was inextricable from sociability. This philosophical system reconceptualized social virtue as an expression of interpersonal bonds rather than the fulfillment of a proprietary obligation. In Mounier’s work, the field of metaphors shifted from the economic to the social and from the hierarchical to the fraternal. For Mounier the social engagement needed for the realization of our personhood could never be constituted as an abstract allegiance to a class, a nation, or even all of humanity; rather, it had to retain a recognition of and respect for each person’s “dignity” (another of his key terms). The personalist approach to public engagement, he wrote, was built on this formula: “The significance of every person is such that he is irreplaceable in the position he occupies in the world of persons. Such is the majestic status of the person, endowing it with the dignity of a universe; and yet also its humility, for in this dignity each person is equivalent to every other, and persons are more numerous than the stars.” Mounier thus

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used the word dignity to formulate an overarching rubric for adjudicating a whole range of political, social, and economic issues. He did not provide a comprehensive ideology so much as a metric for assessing one’s public commitments, a means of formulating solutions to particular social, political, or economic problems. The primary goal, he believed, was to never violate the dignity of any person, whether through totalistic ideologies (of the left or the right) or the commodification of liberal capitalism. He was skeptical of any quest for final or absolute resolutions because of his conviction that human life was defined by irresolvable dialectics, and he feared that those who pursued “utopias” would invariably sacrifice persons at the altar of “the people.” This made him implacably hostile to fascism (he joined the French Resistance during the war and was arrested by Vichy authorities) and to Stalinism, but cautiously open to the reformist ambitions of democratic socialism. He believed that, on a certain level, property was a “concrete requirement of personality,” but he also argued that “the disorders of this century are too intimate and obstinate to be eliminated without reversing the engines, without a profound revision of values, a reorganization of systems and a replacement of those who occupy the most socially responsible places.” He called this sort of change “revolutionary” and acknowledged that the Marxist critique of capitalism and parliamentary democracy “is on the whole unanswerable: many of the rights that the liberal State grants to its citizens are abrogated by the facts of their economic and social existence. The parliamentary machine of the State is already little more than a survival: its wheels are revolving in a void; its orators sow the wind and reap the whirlwind. Political democracy needs to be wholly reorganized in relation to an effectual economic democracy adapted to the contemporary systems of production.”118 Wojciech Korfanty was the first prominent exponent of Mounier’s ideas in Poland. In 1936, the same year Mounier published his seminal work, Le Manifeste au service du personnalisme, the leader of the Chadecja began to write about “the person” (osobowość, literally “personhood”) as a combination of “spirit and matter, inextricably intertwined with each other.” This integrated whole, in Korfanty’s opinion, was undermined when, in a capitalist society, “man ceased to be a person, and is only material for the capitalist and the brutal tyrant.”119 A few other interwar thinkers explored personalist ideas, but it was the experience of Nazi and Soviet occupation that really pushed these concepts into the forefront of Catholic thought in Poland. In 1943 a group of exiled Polish Christian Democrats held a conference in London to articulate their goals for the postwar world, and they affirmed that “the highest value on earth is the person of the individual human [osoba indywidualnego człowieka], an autonomous spiritual individual, endowed with free will and called to eternal life with God.” The specific political and economic propositions of these mostly lay activists (centralized state planning, full employment, a range of worker protection programs,

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democratic political institutions) differed little from those proposed by the secular left at the time. Borrowing Mounier’s vocabulary, they formulated a program of social and political reforms that ceded little to the communists in terms of antipathy toward capitalism, while simultaneously upholding personal dignity as a means of avoiding the danger of what they called “totalism.”120 Not surprisingly, one of the primary vehicles for Polish personalism was the progressive Catholic magazine Tygodnik Powszechny. Father Jan Piwowarczyk (1889–1959), an editor of Tygodnik Powszechny during its first few years, drew upon the work of Mounier and embraced the label of personalism to describe the magazine’s agenda. In the interwar years Piwowarczyk had been an important figure in the Chadecja, writing several books on Catholic social policy and preparing a new translation of Rerum Novarum in 1931.121 After the war he worked hard to balance his opposition to the new Stalinist regime with his equally fervent antipathy toward liberal capitalism. He was probably correct in noticing, in 1946, that most Poles shared this stance: “I will begin with an assertion that, it seems, is uncontroversial today: no thinking person in Poland seriously wants to return to economic liberalism, with its anarchy of production and consumption, its cartels and trusts.”122 Later he wrote, “If Marxism is foreign to us, then American capitalism, as a product of materialism, is equally foreign to  us.”123 Piwowarczyk even granted that socialism was grounded in a “noble ethos,” though (like Mounier) he criticized Marxists for their utopianism and for denying “true human nature.” He clarified this last phrase by arguing that the socialists, in repudiating the soul, could perceive humans only as biological organisms, and this in turn led them to negate “spiritual freedom” and impose an empty, materialistic collectivism that quashed the genuine interpersonal bonds that ought to hold societies together.124 This last idea was explained in greater depth in a 1947 article by Józef Marian Święcicki: The aspiration to freedom flows from the fact that man is a person, that is, he is destined for higher, eternal tasks that transcend beyond the temporal plane. He cannot, therefore, be held back from that destiny by anyone, not even society, and all the more so he cannot be treated as a thing, as an animal, as a mere means leading to a designated goal (even a social goal). At the same time man is a social being, and viewing his nature in this light we see that he is obliged to subordinate his interests to the welfare of the whole. Drawing explicitly from Mounier, Święcicki wrote that such an integrated approach would harmonize the idea of “justice” (a social concept) with the principle of “freedom” (an individual concept).125 From this foundation, the

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contributors to Tygodnik Powszechny developed a worldview that prioritized the social without merely echoing the socialists and elevated liberty without endorsing liberalism. The editor after Piwowarczyk’s death in 1959, Jerzy Turowicz, played a key role in elaborating this philosophy. In an essay written  many years later to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights, Turowicz offered what could be considered a manifesto of Polish personalism. Here he argued, “There is no task more important today than the struggle for the respect of human rights on a global and a national scale,” a claim he defended with quintessential personalist reasoning: “The point of departure must be the conviction that man—every man—is in a certain sense the only value in the entire earthly reality.” He quickly insisted, though, that valuing the person in this way was not the same as “individualism,” which he considered an impoverished liberal notion that provided no way of accommodating the fact that “man is a social being.”126 It is hardly surprising that so many of those at Tygodnik Powszechny paid homage to personalism; more striking is the way the two key concepts of dignity (godność) and the person (osoba) came to penetrate the rhetoric of the entire Polish Church, including those who would disagree with Piwowarczyk and Turowicz on so many other issues. In the West there is a tendency to associate personalism with the movement that culminated in liberation theology, but in Poland its impact (or appropriation) was far broader. As we saw in chapter 2, the postwar era saw a gradual (though never complete) relaxation of the otherworldly emphasis on spiritual salvation that dominated homiletic writing in the nineteenth century and early twentieth. The slogan dignity turned out to be particularly helpful in this regard, because it allowed even the most conservative clerics to attack communism without resorting to a liberal discourse of individual rights, and it facilitated a form of worldly social engagement that did not promote materialistic needs and desires. For example, the short-lived revival of  Rycerz Niepokalanej (an interwar devotional weekly once published by St. Maksymilian Kolbe) promoted a style of religiosity that was the opposite of Tygodnik Powszechny’s in most regards, but it too cast Catholicism as a means of protecting the integration of the terrestrial and the spiritual. A utilitarian, purely materialistic ethic, the magazine asserted in 1946, had to be joined with the Christian idea of love in order to ensure that the pursuit of social justice never undermined the dignity of the person. Such violations were likely whenever a social ideology denied the complex totality of our existence and focused purely on our material nature. “Social life demands a great creative act of Christian love by society and by every Christian,” an anonymous editorialist wrote; without this “people will be set against each other like competitors” and true social bonds will be impossible.127 In addition to equating the communists with their

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capitalist foes, this piece demonstrated a simultaneous commitment to both social engagement and spirituality, to both body and soul. Though it would be an exaggeration to label Wyszyński a personalist (he was far too committed to the nation to endorse Mounier’s universalism), the primate nonetheless accepted the rehabilitation of the body and adopted the slogan of personal dignity as his own. In a fascinating example of how a vocabulary originating in one ideological context can spin off into another, Wyszyński used the keywords of personalism to defend a somewhat prudish asceticism. In 1946 he issued a very familiar diatribe against cultural decadence, sexual immorality, and unrestrained desire. He justified his attack, however, by arguing that what he called “sexualism” cast the human person as a purely physical object of desire, thus “denigrating the human body.” Only Christianity, he believed, recognized the totality of body and soul.128 Much later, in one of his last sermons, he expressed his concern that Poles were gaining excessive material comforts, but in defending this position he evoked justice and the common good instead of railing against physicality as such: Let your home appliances also be modest, particularly in comparison to the living conditions of so many poor families. Considering that Poland is still in the period of post-war rebuilding and social reconstruction, it is necessary to observe the principle of social equality. It would be contrary to the principles of social justice if some citizens lived beyond the means of their milieu, and others looked on them with jealous or suspicious eyes. That social equality of community life should be governed by the principle of “to everyone according to the possibilities of our national existence.” In Poland there must not be too many rich people, nor citizens who are impoverished in a degrading manner.129 In the papers of the Pastoral Department of the Warsaw Archdiocese we find many denunciations of those who “degrade [themselves] by satisfying [their] urges” and “seek support in idols (money, recognition from others, sex, a career).”130 However, whereas once priests would have called on the faithful to shun these earthly concerns in favor of more spiritual pursuits, by the second half of the twentieth century these old sins were condemned as violations of “personal dignity” and “social responsibility.” In 1976 the archdiocese instructed priests to be on guard against materialism because “material things were created by God for the use of all people, so that they would have the means necessary to preserve life, health, their good names, freedom, and so that they would be able to strive to realize their eternal destiny.”131 Two years later an anonymous archdiocesan official reported that state propaganda was hindering the effort to spread

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this message by misrepresenting the Church as otherworldly and disengaged from human concerns: Marxist ideology, adopting a thesis about the anti-humanist character of religion, emphasizes with particular force that accepting a transcendent sphere weakens the earthly engagement of man in building a better world and shaping more just interpersonal relations, and thus stands in the way of genuine human progress and social emancipation. There is no doubt that pastoral work ought to effectively repudiate such a view, presenting the full and positive Christian doctrine in this regard.132 By the late 1970s even conservative bishops like Zygmunt Kamiński of Lublin would preach, “Every man in and of himself is the highest value. . . . I believe that the Church, the state, all social organizations, the mass media, ought to serve man, to help in his development.”133 In another sermon the next year Kamiński delivered a familiar jeremiad against consumption and decadence but added a significant twist at the end by urging his listeners to repudiate “wealth and mastery over the world. Man, man is first in the hierarchy of values. He, and not production to attain wealth, not production to attain mastery over the world, but man, man. His life, his development is a great good, which both production and money should serve. Everything should serve him, and not be against him, nor alongside him, but for him.”134 Whereas once the dichotomies were earth/ heaven, man/God, and body/soul, by the second half of the twentieth century they had been juggled so that humans (body and spirit), God, and service were on one side, and “the world” stood in for all that undermined the fullness and integrity of our personhood, our humanity. To affirm that “man in and of himself is the highest value” might sound like a liberal claim, but in the Polish Church it certainly was not. By then the holistic concept of the person had penetrated deeply enough that a reference to man (człowiek, a term without quite as much gendered baggage as its English corollary) was understood in Catholic circles to refer to the spirit as well as the body. By the 1960s and 1970s Polish Catholics could speak approvingly of “human rights” in this context. The Second Vatican Council doubtlessly played a role here, with its stress on what Gaudium et Spes labeled “Christian humanism.” That momentous 1965 text, the Pastoral Constitution of the postconciliar Church, summoned the faithful to build “a better world based upon truth and justice” and proclaimed, “We are witnesses of the birth of a new humanism, one in which man is defined first of all by his responsibility to his brothers and to history.”135 In Poland the vocabulary of Gaudium et Spes penetrated quickly, albeit not always with the consequences that the theologians at the Council might have imagined. In 1968 the Polish Episcopate praised the United Nations Universal Declaration

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of Human Rights for its “humanism,” but they complained that the document was nonetheless flawed because it defended “individual rights” rather than “human dignity.” The bishops believed that Christianity, much better than any secular ideology, could “ensure man against the denigration of his dignity,” because only the Church “shows the equality of everyone vis-à-vis God, and rejects views propagated by totalitarian systems according to which there exist fundamental differences among men based on belonging to different races, nationalities, social classes or on affirming different worldviews or different political convictions.” Above all, the Church could promote humanism while still guarding against the “cult of the individual,” against “the temptation of placing oneself or others in the place of God, considering man to be an absolute value.”136 With this reasoning at its disposal, the Church tried throughout the 1970s to promote itself as the ideal standard-bearer for the cause of human rights in Poland. The 1971 pastoral program in the Archdiocese of Warsaw was focused on “respect for the human person always and everywhere,” and in 1975 the archdiocese launched a three-year program devoted explicitly to the promotion of Christian humanism.137 We will see later how this rhetoric enabled the formation of some surprising political alliances between Catholic and secular anticommunists. Karol Wojtyła was yet again at the forefront of a new rhetorical and philosophical style, becoming the most influential proponent of personalism and Christian humanism in Poland. During his pontificate he often puzzled observers in the West, who could not figure out if he was an archconservative (given his stances on gender and sexuality) or some odd sort of radical (given his socioeconomic views). The American theologian Avery Cardinal Dulles got it right when he wrote that personalism was “the one concept that could serve as a key to unlock what is distinctive to this pope as a thinker.”138 Wojtyła captured the various strains of Polish personalism, exemplifying how this philosophy could speak to everyone, from a conservative like Wyszyński to a reformist like Turowicz, allowing all of them to appropriate John Paul II as their own and partially explaining the pope’s unparalleled popularity in his homeland. He had the charisma and tact to appeal to diverse audiences, but even his skills would not have been adequate had the ground not already been set. In the Poland of the young Father Wojtyła both Catholic social engagement (of one sort or another) and the infrastructure of personalism made it possible to bring these ideological strands together.139 Long before his elevation to the papacy Karol Wojtyła promoted the ideas of personalism. In 1972, for example, he told a group of young people at a retreat in St. Anne’s church in Kraków that preserving “the dignity of the human person” was one of the key goals of Christianity. The person, he continued, was a being “whose entire greatness is derived ultimately from a relationship with God,” but

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at the same time “the divine life of man [życie Boże człowieka] is always a participation in the community of the People of God.”140 In other words, the person was embedded in both the divine and the social, both the transcendent and the terrestrial. But even in the early 1970s Wojtyła was taking personalism down a different path than it would follow in much of Western Europe and (even more) in Central and South America. In 1974 he met with a group of Latin American bishops during a synod in Rome and learned about their efforts to attack the root causes of poverty and exploitation. Relating these conversations in a sermon back in Kraków, he spoke sympathetically about their efforts and accepted the vital need to create a Christian alternative to predatory capitalism and imperialism. Nonetheless, he thought that the circumstances in Poland were different. Although all Catholics wanted to promote “human rights,” he said, in the Latin American case these were predominantly “material” rights, whereas in Poland they fell “in the spiritual sphere: the spiritual freedom of man, the freedom of the human soul, the freedom of conscience, the freedom of religion.”141 In a sermon recorded by the Security Services a few days later, Cardinal Wojtyła said: We understood well that the act of human emancipation is multifaceted. It involves not only emancipating man from material misery, from the unjust social, political, and economic structures that cause such misery, but it also involves the emancipation of man in the spiritual sense, from all forms of limitation, from all forms of spiritual slavery. It also involves matters like the freedom of conscience and the freedom of religion. The Church places and must place these matters, these great struggles for emancipating man, on equal footing with the struggle for social justice in the area of earthly, economic welfare. For man is a cohesive whole, of soul and of body, and one cannot emancipate his body while enslaving his soul.142 Wojtyła was not disagreeing (yet) with his Latin American colleagues; whether in Poland or Columbia or France, personalism was directed simultaneously against both secular leftists who denied mankind’s spirituality and against an otherworldly model of religiosity that ignored material needs and social injustice. The question was one of emphasis, and that depended on the context. In Central and South America, where a powerful and wealthy Catholic establishment had a blemished history of supporting right-wing authoritarian regimes, personalism provided the rhetorical infrastructure for the famous “option for the poor.” The Latin American bishops made headlines around the world when they proclaimed, during their 1968 conference in Medellín, Columbia, that the Church had a duty to “energetically denounce the abuses and unjust consequences of the excessive inequalities between poor and rich, weak and

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powerful.” They urged the clergy, “Be certain that our preaching, liturgy and catechesis take into account the social and community dimensions of Christianity.”143 As monumental as this declaration was for the Latin American Church, such a text would have been uncontroversial in Poland at that time. Primate Wyszyński’s Church was undeniably conservative in many ways, but it had long since shed any sort of alliance, tacit or explicit, with any wealthy elite—which, in any case, hardly existed in communist Poland. Hostility to capitalism and a commitment to social equity (or even equality) were points on which the communist regime, the Church, and the secular opposition in Poland could all agree. In this way personalism served primarily to bring spirituality back into the discussion. In a New Year’s Day sermon in 1968 Wojtyła offered a prayer “that everywhere human rights will be preserved; that they will be realized in life, and not just as formulated on paper, declared in constitutions.” He prayed for peace based on “a respect for the rights that ensue from human dignity.”144 Such language would have been familiar to readers of Tygodnik Powszechny, but for many secular dissidents it came as a revelation. Since at least the end of the nineteenth century an almost impenetrable divide had existed between the left and the Church, reinforced by the former’s anticlericalism and the latter’s nationalism and anti-Semitism. With Wyszyński in charge of the Polish Church these old tensions were sure to remain; he tended to view the disputes between secular dissidents and the communist state as a domestic squabble between slightly different enemies of the Church. But Wojtyła was something new: a cleric who could speak the language of human rights and support causes once championed mainly by the left. Wojtyła even said in 1974 that his goals were “freedom, equality, and brotherhood.145 In 1977 one of the most prominent dissidents, Adam Michnik, published an underground book in which he called for “dialogue” between the Church and the left, expressing his admiration for the ways Catholics had “defended human rights” during the communist era.146 With people like Michnik picking up the concept of dignity and people like Wojtyła propagating the idea of rights, the vocabularies of the secular opposition and the Church were converging. Indeed, one historian has described a “civic Church” (Kościół obywatelski) emerging in the late 1970s, as more and more Poles turned to Catholicism for a space within which to construct the sort of civil society that was otherwise unavailable in the Polish People’s Republic.147 With the election of Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II in 1978, the keywords of personalism and social Catholicism became more pronounced than ever before. John Paul dedicated his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, to his vision of Christian humanism. He referred to dignity twenty-four times in this single text and characterized redemption as an “affirmation of the body given life by the Spirit.” In caring for the body, he wrote, governments should measure every policy “from the point of view of the objective and inviolable rights of man.” He even

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evoked the Marxist concept of alienation, which he defined as the transformation of the integrated person into “the slave of things, the slave of economic systems, the slave of production, the slave of his own products.”148 John Paul’s next two encyclicals, Dives in Misericordia (1980) and Laborem Exercens (1981), both promised to clarify the arguments made in Redemptor Hominis. The former proposed an “anthropocentric” form of Christianity that would integrate with (but of course not supplant) the existing “theocentrism” that in his view had sometimes distorted Catholic thought.149 In Laborem Exercens, issued on the ninetieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, John Paul II taught (in a passage that could have come from either Marx or Mounier) that human labor should be perceived as a means to realize the fullness of our humanity, and not merely as a means to earn money or produce material objects. What the pope called “the error of economism” occurred whenever a worker was objectified or commodified, “treated on the same level as the whole complex of the material means of production, as an instrument and not in accordance with the true dignity of his work.” The duty of the Church was to uphold “the principle of the priority of labor over capital” and “to call attention to the dignity and rights of those who work, to condemn situations in which that dignity and those rights are violated, and to help . . . ensure authentic progress by man and society.”150 Biblioteka Kaznodziejska urged Polish priests to summarize Laborem Exercens for their congregations and offered a model written by Father Marion Piątkowski of Poznań (who would go on to become Poland’s leading expert on exorcism). Piątkowski wrote that Catholics must become “the defenders of people, the defenders of the victimized and the degraded, everyone who has been denied human rights. Defenders even of those who degraded themselves through sin.” His specific polemical target would have been clear to his listeners when he condemned those who, “with frightening contempt, send thousands of people to their destruction in order to make manifest insane ideologies and to realize unbridled pride. Man is for them a slave and a convict, a labor force and ‘cannon fodder.’”151 In other contexts these lines could have been an attack on capitalism, but in Poland the reference to “insane ideologies” was unambiguous. If we keep in mind this distinctly Polish polemical setting, we can better understand the pope’s later condemnation of liberation theology, a move that led many in the West to label him a conservative pontiff. He had long used personalism to attack both capitalism and socialism, but for him the latter loomed larger than the former. In Laborem Exercens he defended the idea of private property as a “right,” and he insisted that “in no way can labor be opposed to capital or capital to labor, and still less can the actual people behind these concepts be opposed to each other.”152 Liberation theology erred on precisely this point, he believed, leading to the denunciation of the movement in 1984.153 That bitter controversy is tangential to our story insofar as it provoked only limited

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discussion in Poland, but the very fact that this was the case is revealing. In Latin America texts like Laborem Exercens were striking because of their uncompromising denunciation of capitalism, and against that backdrop John Paul’s attempt to discipline the liberation theologians seemed inconsistent. In Poland, where affirmations of social Catholicism were routine and where the “option for the poor” seemed like common sense for Catholics, the tendency was to focus on John Paul’s defense of human rights and his opposition to Soviet-style socialism. The Catholic radicals of Latin America, insofar they were even noticed in Poland, were usually dismissed as naïve fellow travelers who deserved the response they got from the Vatican. It was particularly poignant for Poles that Laborem Exercens was published in 1981, only one year after the creation of Solidarity. Just weeks after John Paul II released his encyclical the delegates of the new union held their first convention, at which they passed a program illustrating how far Catholic personalism had penetrated: Respect for the person must be the basis of action: the state must serve people instead of dominating them. . . . Labor is made for people and finds its meaning when it corresponds to human needs. Our national renewal must be based upon a proper reordering of these objectives. In determining its activity, Solidarity turns to the values of Christian ethics, our national working class tradition, and the democratic tradition of the world of labor. John Paul II’s encyclical on human labor is a fresh source of encouragement. As a mass organization of the working people, Solidarity is also a movement for the moral rebirth of the people.154 Doubtless not all the convention delegates (much less the broader union membership) grasped the significance of these words, but with this declaration Solidarity became yet another conduit for spreading the terminology and reasoning of Catholic personalism. The social theories long debated within the Church came fully into the public sphere with the Solidarity movement, and they would remain a feature of Catholic rhetoric throughout the tumultuous 1980s and the ensuing birth of a capitalist Poland. Given this background it should have surprised no one when the Episcopate announced in 1990 that the pastoral theme for the coming year (the first one after the fall of communism) would be “evangelizing the working people.” Introducing the new theme, Father Władysław Basista of Wrocław preached that labor “serves to create bonds between people, it serves social development and the improvement of the common good.” If a particular social or economic order did not meet this goal, he continued, then it was “derived from sin” and should be

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resisted.155 The unsubtle warning in this sermon was made much more forcefully a year later, when John Paul issued his encyclical Centesimus Annus, commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Rerum Novarum. His concern that the fall of communism would lead to capitalist triumphalism was explicit: “In particular, I wish this teaching to be made known and applied in the countries which, following the collapse of ‘Real Socialism,’ are experiencing a serious lack of direction in the work of rebuilding. The Western countries, in turn, run the risk of seeing this collapse as a one-sided victory of their own economic system, and thereby failing to make necessary corrections in that system.” Socialism had failed, in the pope’s opinion, because it turned out to be nothing more than “state capitalism,” a system that commodified human beings as thoroughly as the liberal West did. He called instead for “a society of free work, of enterprise and of participation. Such a society is not directed against the market, but demands that the market be appropriately controlled by the forces of society and by the State, so as to guarantee that the basic needs of the whole of society are satisfied. . . . It is unacceptable to say that the defeat of so-called ‘Real Socialism’ leaves capitalism as the only model of economic organization.”156 In 1991 John Paul II could still express optimism that the world would turn to the Church’s social teachings for models as they dismantled the communist regimes. By the end of his life, however, he seemed to fear that this was not likely to happen in the foreseeable future. When he landed in Krakow for a visit in August 2002 he said, “I know that many Polish families (particularly those with many children), that many of the unemployed and those of an advanced age bear no small share of the costs for the socio-economic transformations. I want to say to them that I share spiritually in their burden and fate. I share their joy and suffering, the plans and efforts to build a better future. Every day I support their good intentions with fervent prayers.” These lines were widely quoted by the Polish media at the time, and the consensus was that they constituted a quiet repudiation of the neoliberalism that had been determining economic and social policies in the pope’s homeland. John Paul seemed to be saying that all he had to offer were prayers; his specific socioeconomic proposals had been cast aside in Poland as casually as they had been in the rest of the world, and the “dignity of the person” seemed less secure than ever before. When, in 1999, the Polish Episcopate completed an abridged and edited version of the new Catholic catechism, they did not conceal their disappointment that after the fall of communism, dangerous theories and practices regarding the relationship of man toward material welfare began circulating. Profit has been regarded as the norm and the final goal of economic activity. Competition is regarded as the highest economic law. Economic life became dominated by de-personified economic forces. The mechanistic

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force of the free market became the decisive element in economic life. State intervention is questioned. The role of the welfare state or the social state has decreased. In society, self interest is preferred above the common welfare. We have before us a predatory and wild capitalism.157 The weekly broadsheet Niedziela identified a “crisis in American capitalism” already in 2002 and prophesied the eventual need for ever greater state control over the U.S. economy.158 Politically active priests (particularly those affiliated with the far right) regularly warn today against the onslaught of rapacious capitalism, against (as Father Czesław Bartnik, a professor at the Catholic University of Lublin, calls it) the “neoliberal atheist center” that is supposedly trying to spread unbelief by making material forces the only considerations in setting economic policy. Bartnik is convinced that the enemies of the faith, “in close union with the American-Jewish lobby,” have prevented Poland from seeking out a “third way” between capitalism and socialism. I will explore the anti-Semitism and conspiratorial paranoia of this message later; for now I just want to note that in Poland it is the far right that is the most outspoken in support of (as Bartnik puts it) “the spirit of equality, Catholic social teaching, social love, cooperation, the protection of life, the dignity of the human person, the preservation of the ethics of the Gospels, the family, labor, the primacy of the person over capital, a service state, an atmosphere giving everyone a purpose in life, a free market but with state regulations.”159 In a volume edited by Mirosław Piotrowski, a parliamentary delegate for the neofascist League of Polish Families, we find an essay by Father Stanisław Kowalczyk describing the economic system in Poland as “demagogic and unethical” because “the just state cannot deviate from social love. Subordinating ethics to politics or economics deviates from the requirements of humanism and personalism.”160 This is not to suggest that the far right has taken exclusive ownership of social Catholicism. What is striking about the Polish Church today is precisely the degree to which the personalist critique of liberal capitalism has penetrated almost everywhere. Archbishop Józef Życiński, widely recognized as the most prominent representative of “open” or “progressive” Catholicism, preached in 1998, “Our Christian obligation is to build a better, more humane world through our presence in social life.”161 Elsewhere he wrote that the goal of the Church was to promote the idea that “the dignity of man is more important than business.”162 A leading figure in the ecumenical movement in Poland, Father Wacław Hryniewicz, insisted in 2003 that “religion demands social engagement”; he took satisfaction in the fact that “the new sensitivity toward the role of religion has an ever more humanistic quality.” The Church, he believed, would never “close its eyes to the concrete situation of people, particularly those who are pushed to the margins of society. It appeals for solidarity and justice in inter-personal relations. It

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warns against the danger of dehumanization and the reduction of man to the level of an object.”163 Perhaps nowhere else has the Church’s critique of capitalism established such an uncontested hegemony among Catholics, whatever their political orientation. Even liberal Catholics (and there are indeed those who would use this label) endorse a form of liberalism that owes far more to T. H. Green and Maynard Keynes than to Herbert Spencer and Milton Friedman. The dreams of social Catholicism remain unrealized, but the terminology and values expressed in a long string of proclamations, from Rerum Novarum to Centesimus annus, have come to delineate common sense for most Polish Catholics.

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Politics

Prior to the First World War the Roman Catholic clergy in Poland (with very few exceptions) promoted the concept of legitimacy as if it were a theological as well as a political principle. The faithful were taught that they should respect secular authority despite the fact that most Poles were under the control of non-Catholic rulers. As Father Adam Kopyciński put it in 1905, “Love above, reverence below—these are the two angels that guard society. . . . The people not only obey the authorities, but love them. And love from subordinates draws out benevolence from the authorities toward the people.”1 Elsewhere the Church was able to justify rebellion, but only against revolutionary governments that undermined the Catholic understanding of legitimacy by basing sovereignty on the will of the people rather than the will of God. In nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, however, the Poles were the ones challenging hereditary monarchies, with slogans about the people and the nation, and in these cases the Church authorities stood alongside the tsars and kaisers. When the state challenged Church institutions or clerical authority, the response was decisive and uncompromising (as during Bismarck’s Kulturkampf or the repeated Russian attempts to limit ecclesiastical authority), but such moments did little to erode the general commitment to obedience and political docility found in sermons, pastoral letters, and the Catholic press in partitioned Poland.2 All this would change at the end of the nineteenth century. More and more Catholics discovered a point of entry into modern politics, using representative government to defend God’s will rather than shunning all manifestations of liberal democracy. The sharp dichotomy between opposition to illegitimate rule and obedience to legitimate authority came to be seen as overly simplistic, and a Catholic politics of dissent within parliamentary forms took shape. Meanwhile, the Polish Church began to face liberal and socialist opponents who were seen as far more dangerous than the Orthodox tsars or the Protestant kaisers. These political foes seemed to grow stronger as the twentieth century progressed. Most members of the clergy were upset by the secular approach to civil rights expressed by the Polish 158

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Constitution of 1921, and they greeted the government of Marshal Józef Piłsudski with thinly veiled hostility. World War II and its aftermath made the Polish Church’s relationship to political authority even more difficult, as Catholics faced a regime that was committed (at least in theory) to the eradication of organized religion. Even the postcommunist system that emerged after 1989 seemed to many in the Polish Church to be merely the exchange of one form of secularism for another. In response to this long sequence of challenges, a much more combative form of Catholic political engagement took shape in Poland. It was difficult for many Catholics to accept the indeterminacy inherent in liberal democracy, and nearly impossible to consider religion a purely private matter. Nonetheless, Catholic priests and politicians were increasingly prone to embrace the practices and some of the principles of democracy, even as they rejected secular liberalism. Prior to World War II some Polish Catholics were even arguing that liberty was necessary to defend against authoritarian dangers from both the left and the right. Afterward others would go even further, finding a way to push slogans about “the will of the people” inside the rhetorical boundaries of Catholicism. If one began with the presumption that Poland was essentially and necessarily Catholic, it followed that any deviation from the Church’s teachings was both sinful and antidemocratic. Catholic political commentators were initially reluctant to utilize arguments based on electoral strength; since the difference between right and wrong could never be established by human legislation, in an ideal Catholic polity it should not matter whether the faithful were in the majority or not. After World War II, however, many Catholics equated the Polish people with the Polish Church, thus making it possible to erase any difference between the popular will and God’s will. With this development Catholic politics became thoroughly “democratic,” albeit in a distinctive way. After Vatican II Catholics all over the world have found ways of sustaining their faith even while embracing the indeterminacy of the democratic process and accepting the principle of popular sovereignty.3 Although such trends are very weakly represented in Poland, the Church there has proven no less capable of entering the world of modern politics. Any Christian theory of political dissent must contend with several problematic biblical passages. The most unambiguous instruction in this regard in the New Testament comes from Romans 13:1–2: “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.” Even more popular in the homiletic literature is Mark 12:15–17, in which some opponents of Jesus tried to goad him into an act of explicit political disobedience by asking whether it was proper to pay taxes. According to the Gospel, “Jesus knew their hypocrisy. ‘Why are you trying to trap me?’ he asked. ‘Bring me a denarius and

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let me look at it.’ They brought the coin, and he asked them, ‘Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription?’ ‘Caesar’s,’ they replied. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.’4 For many centuries this was interpreted by most Catholic theologians as an injunction to obey political authorities under almost all circumstances. Provisions were made for resistance whenever a ruler ordered someone to commit an obvious sin, but even in those cases the bar for disobedience was set very high. As the sixteenth-century Catechism of the Council of Trent put it: The honor which we render [rulers] is referred to God: it is paid to their exalted dignity, which is derived from and emblematic of the divine power; and in which we recognize a superintending Providence, who has committed to them the administration of the State, and who makes use of them as the ministers of his power. It is not that we respect the profligacy or wickedness of the man, should such moral turpitude debase the lives of public functionaries—no; we revere the authority of God with which they are invested. Therefore it is, and it may appear to some matter of surprise, that, be their sentiments towards us the most inimical, be their hostility the most immitigable, their personal enmity and hostility do not, however, afford a just cause to release us from the duty of submissive respect to their persons and authority.5 This teaching implied that even when Catholics were conquered by people of other faiths, the faithful were to obey their new rulers. Partitioned Poland was no exception, as became clear in 1832, when Pope Gregory XVI issued the encyclical Cum Primum. Writing in the wake of a major Polish national uprising, Gregory reminded the faithful that “the obedience which men are obliged to render to the authorities established by God is an absolute precept which no one can violate, except if by chance something is commanded which runs counter to the laws of God or of the Church.”6 As the century wore on the Vatican grew somewhat more sympathetic to the Polish national cause, but no less fond of active political resistance. As late as 1894 Pope Leo XIII sent a letter to the Polish bishops in which he reminded the Poles that they “ought to make supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings for their rulers; that they ought to submit to the holy discipline of the state, abstain from the societies and machinations of the wicked and do nothing seditious; that they ought to devote themselves to the maintenance of a tranquil peace in justice.”7 The Polish hierarchy, with very few exceptions, followed these papal injunctions. Shortly after the 1830 rebellion the administrator of the Warsaw Archdiocese, Archdeacon Adam Paszkowicz, released a one-page handbill to be posted throughout the city. Here he described what had just transpired as “a rebellion

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and an insurrection against the rightful Monarch,” and he gave thanks to God for returning to power “His visible delegate on earth, His Excellency the Tsar and King, and Beloved of our Lord.” Paszkowicz called on the faithful to obey their legitimate master and urged all priests to use the pulpit “to establish peace in social life, based on the laws of God and good conscience.”8 In 1857, in his first pastoral letter as archbishop of Warsaw, Antoni Melchior Fijałkowski cited Mark 12 in a set of instructions to the priests of his diocese: “Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s: inculcate this holy principle in the people. Full of respect for the delegated authority of the Monarch, be submissive to the laws and the regulations of the Government.” In fact, he quoted the “Give unto Caesar” line twice in this pastoral letter; in a section addressing the peasants, he cited the text in order to demonstrate that “it is the will of God that, in the unchanging order of this world, some would rule and others would be ruled, some would dictate laws and others would be obligated to carry them out.”9 This sentiment was echoed by Bishop Antoni Gałecki of Kraków in a pastoral letter in 1862: “Be obedient to higher secular authorities, who originate from God. My teaching is not just Christian, it is a teaching revealed by God himself. My dearest ones in Christ! Listen willingly to your superiors, with your obedience lighten their arduous work, and you will be traveling on the right path.”10 Gałecki delivered this message at a particularly difficult moment, because only one year later, in 1863, the Polish national movement launched another major uprising against tsarist rule. The archbishop of Warsaw at the time was Zygmunt Feliński, who earned the lasting enmity of the insurgency’s leadership by vocally opposing the revolt. Aside from a youthful episode when he took part in the Poznań Uprising of 1848, his loyalism was both consistent and consequential. He illustrated this in 1885 by reissuing a series of lectures that he had delivered three decades earlier, in which he warned, “Emancipation has become the slogan of that awful struggle in which a son tries to free himself from the authority of his father, the wife from the husband, the worker from the capitalist, the servant from the lord, the citizen from the government.” Such disobedience was always wrong, “regardless of the internal content of the order, unless a sin is demanded—and even then only passive resistance is appropriate, combined with the respect that a good son would show to an insane father who issues an inappropriate order.”11 In another lecture Feliński went even further than his West European counterparts, arguing, “An active attack on the authorities cannot be justified, generally speaking, by any abuses. Even if the government has illegal origins, that does not give one the right to rebel: since, after all, Providence allowed a revolutionary or conquering government to rule, it has for this reason a right to authority, which, since it comes from the hand of God, must be respected.”12

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Though the published sermons and homiletic guides from nineteenth-century Poland rarely dealt explicitly with politics, they did promote submission in principle. The popular catechism by Father Józef Krukowski described obedience as a central virtue that had been exemplified by Jesus himself: He was obedient to the Holy Virgin Mary and St. Joseph until he was 30 years old. He was obedient to the established secular authorities even though they were at the time pagan; he paid taxes and commanded that Caesar be given what is Caesar’s. And though he harshly rebuked the Pharisees who were learned in scripture, nonetheless he respected their office and commanded the people to listen to their teachings and not follow the example of evil. He respected the Old Testament until the new one arrived.13 In a 1910 handbook for writing sermons about the Virgin Mary, Father Franciszek Walczyński urged priests to instruct their flocks to show deference and obedience “to all forms of spiritual and secular authority” because such rulers “stand in the place of God.” Subalterns should even strive to merge their entire being with those above them: “Demonstrate this obedience to your superiors in deed, willingly and happily carrying out their commands; in judgment, holding the same opinions as your superiors have; in will, not desiring anything other than that which your superiors wish.” Walczyński feared the dire consequences of ignoring these principles. “If even for a moment obedience was withdrawn,” he warned, “there would follow a general breakdown in the family, in the state, in the Church, in all of human society, and there would emerge instead the most horrible willfulness, which would root out from the world justice and love, and the Kingdom of Satan—that eternal enemy of human happiness—would be established on the ruins of the Kingdom of God.”14 The only acts of political opposition approved by Rome were those in defense of the institutional autonomy of the Church itself. Bishop Marceli Gutkowski of Podlasie was a vocal opponent of the 1830 revolt, yet when the tsar issued a decree six years later mandating that all children of mixed marriages be raised in the Eastern Orthodox Church, Gutkowski responded with a surprisingly harsh pastoral letter. “When you hear that you are to give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” he wrote, “we understand this to include only that which does not in any way harm religion and piety. On the other hand, that which is against faith and virtue is a tribute and an extortion payment to the devil, not to Caesar.” To protest the new rules, Gutkowski refused to read any government pronouncements in church. The state authorities first withheld the bishop’s salary, then (in 1840) they arrested him. Rome had supported Gutkowski until his detention, but afterward he was urged to accept an offer to resign in exchange for his release (and exile).15

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A similar pattern was repeated on a much larger scale in the German partition in the 1870s, during the so-called Kulturkampf. In 1873 Chancellor Otto von Bismarck introduced a series of new laws regulating the Catholic Church: clerical positions could be held only by German citizens; priests were required to have a secondary school diploma and at least three years of training at an approved seminary or university; candidates for the priesthood had to pass an exam administered by the state; and the civil authorities were given a veto over every clerical appointment. Bishop Mieczysław Ledóchowski of Poznań, heretofore a highly conservative cleric and a committed loyalist, drew a line in the sand at this point, ordering his priests to ignore the new laws. For this act of defiance he was imprisoned from 1874 to 1876 and then sent into exile in the Vatican. Over the coming years the arrests mounted; by 1881 there were 766 parishes without priests in the Polish regions of Prussia, and in the Gniezno Archdiocese the total number of priests declined from 810 in 1873 to only 450 by 1886.16 Eventually Bismarck abandoned his quixotic campaign against Roman Catholicism, and only then did priests fully recognize the legitimacy of the German state. In contrast to the decisive response to the Kulturkampf, the clergy’s reaction to compulsory Germanization was more muted; that issue, as I will explore more fully in chapter 6, did not usually pass the high standard needed to justify disobedience. Even a rule in 1901 that mandated the exclusive use of German in the schools failed to mobilize the bishops (who ministered, after all, to a linguistically diverse flock). When a student strike broke out in 1906 to protest the language regulations, Archbishop Floryan Stablewski of Gniezno-Poznań responded that children should obey their elders under all circumstances. He did issue a letter of protest over the use of German in catechism classes, but he would not authorize any broader opposition to the denationalization policies.17 In a sense the position of the clergy in the borderlands of the German Empire was not unlike that of their peers in the southwestern United States at the time; in both places priests balanced awkwardly on the line between defending their parishioners and their institutional prerogatives, and serving (often despite themselves) the administrative goals of an expansive state apparatus.18 All things being equal, the Polish-speaking clergy in the German Empire wanted to minister to their parishioners in whatever language best facilitated pastoral work, but unless truly pushed to the wall by heavy-handed regulations, they were not inclined to get involved in nationality politics. Moreover, as James Bjork has shown, in areas where the Catholic laity was linguistically heterogeneous, priests tended (with many exceptions, of course) to resist Germanizing administrators and Polish national activists in equal measure. Insofar as they became politically engaged at all, they usually did so as Catholics rather than as Poles or Germans, with implications that I will explore later.19

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To be sure, some nineteenth-century priests engaged in political opposition, but resistance to state authorities usually carried ecclesiastical as well as legal consequences. For example, during the 1830 uprising Bishop Karol Skórkowski of Kraków defied papal instructions and called on the clergy of his diocese to pray for the success of the revolt. He even provided sanctuary to a rebel general. For his transgressions Skórkowski was removed from office by Pope Gregory XVI and exiled to a Franciscan monastery in Moravia.20 An even more dramatic example came in 1844, when a priest named Piotr Ściegienny attempted to organize an uprising against the tsar, even composing a fake encyclical purporting to be a papal endorsement of his plans. Ściegienny was quickly arrested, exiled to Siberia, and expelled from the priesthood.21 In this environment it was hard indeed to formulate a religious justification for political rebellion, though a few Catholics did try. For example, a national activist, journalist, and poet named Władysław Chotomski published a book in 1867 arguing that a Catholic could, in fact, actively resist an unjust ruler. Chotomski had fought against Prussian forces in 1848 and smuggled arms to support the uprising against Russia in 1863, believing all along that he remained a good Catholic. To justify this standpoint, however, he had to make some narrow terminological distinctions. He insisted, “With a clean conscience, being a true believer in the Roman Catholic faith, one may hold and believe that an entire nation is allowed to rise up. One must merely distinguish between a rebellion [bunt], that is, a revolt [rokosz] against a legitimate government, a revolution per eminentia . . . and a national uprising [powstanie], that is, an attempt to rise from under a yoke imposed by an invader.” The former were forbidden, Chotomski believed, but the latter ought to be allowed. He had to acknowledge that his argument was contrary to previous Catholic commentary on this topic, but he reasoned (somewhat implausibly) that earlier conclusions did not apply because “neither the fathers of the Church, nor any theologian could imagine that there would someday occur a political crime that would deprive an entire nation of independence.”22 The sanctioned voices of the Church were harshly critical of Catholics who got involved with the national resistance movement. Przegląd Katolicki, the most important Catholic periodical in the Russian partition, once complained that the state authorities seemed unwilling to acknowledge the Church’s professions of loyalty to the tsar. “The entire clergy today is supposed to be responsible for the fact that many years ago a few priests took part in the uprising,” the editors wrote, “even though we do not sympathize with the movement of those days, but decisively condemn it, . . . even though our clergy carries out its duties in the most peaceful manner, even though [the Church] is the best force for peace and social order.” The magazine insisted that only “the irreligious and the doubters” would encourage disobedience.23 Not only did Przegląd Katolicki reprint all official government statements and tsarist manifestos (something many Warsaw

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editors managed to avoid doing), but it gave these pronouncements prime place on the front page and set them off with special elegant script.24 The magazine regularly reported on the comings and goings of the royal family, and when Tsar Nicholas fell ill in late 1900 the editors translated reports from the Russian press on the front pages of several issues in a row.25 When Nicholas II visited Warsaw in 1897, Przegląd Katolicki gushed: To the sound of bells from the Catholic churches, amid the boundless crowds consisting of all social strata with the clergy in the lead, His Imperial Majesty made His triumphant entry into our city. Sincere, honest joy enlivened those crowds, as they greeted enthusiastically the Royal couple, for Our Monarch’s visit was met by a genuine trust among the Poles in His Highness’ great goodness, in His justice for all of His subjects, in His lofty sense of respect for our faith and nationality. May God Almighty bless Our Monarch’s gracious steps; let Him reward Him for the goodness, which has won for Him all our hearts.26 This front-page paean to the tsar was marked by a banner headline and extralarge print. Even the margins were set larger than usual, and nothing else appeared on the page. Studying the period 1830–60 (including one major national uprising, two smaller ones, and countless minor conspiracies), one historian has found evidence of only 178 priests who actively contributed to the national resistance movement, out of at least 7,500 Polish clerics engaged in pastoral duties during these three decades.27 That study did not include the largest of all of the Polish revolts, the “January Insurrection” of 1863, but the picture does not change much if we take this episode into account. The leaders of that rebellion asked members of the clergy to take an oath of loyalty to the so-called national government, but only about 10 percent of the 3,200 Polish priests did so (and nearly all of these were clustered in the dioceses of Lublin and Podlasie). To be sure, many priests provided pastoral service to the rebels—saying mass, administering last rites, hearing confessions before battles—but these activities were deemed appropriate by the Church. With self-defeating misunderstanding, the Russian authorities considered even these sacramental acts to be treasonous, leading to the arrest of many priests who did not consider themselves to be rebellious at all (and preparing the ground for twentieth-century publicists who wanted to establish the Church’s patriotic bona fides). The Russians arrested 466 priests (about 2 percent of the 20,629 people detained on suspicion of supporting the insurrection) and executed thirty. Doubtless a great many of those who were swept up by the Russian crackdown were indeed committed to the insurrection, but many others thought they were just performing their pastoral duties.28

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Those priests who did defy their superiors in order to take a more active role in the revolt of 1863 tried to justify their behavior in ways that preserved their fealty to Catholicism. For example, in his first sermon as a chaplain during the rebellion, Father Serafin Szulc said that God would bless the effort “to take up arms for His Holy Church and [the Polish] Fatherland, which always preserved God’s teachings and respected the faith.”29 From 1862 to 1864 an underground newspaper called Głos Kapłana Polskiego (The Voice of the Polish Priest) attempted to rebut the Church hierarchy’s opposition to the uprising and rally the faithful behind the patriotic cause. The essays in this broadsheet were necessarily unsigned, but most of the contributors were priests and the leading editor was Father Karol Mikoszewski, the pastor at St. Aleksander’s Church in Warsaw. Głos Kapłana Polskiego tried to articulate a Catholic justification for rebellion, arguing that God “must have placed in the hands of man and society the right of self defense” and that it was Poland’s holy mission to protect “European civilization,” “the banner of freedom,” and “justice and truth” with whatever means necessary.30 The paper acknowledged that this argument contradicted the position of the bishops, but this only inspired the contributors to work harder to “pull the clergy away from solidarity with certain individuals,” thus “reconciling the nation with the Church.” Those who followed Archbishop Feliński in denouncing the rebellion, one author wrote, were guilty of “open treason and apostasy against the cause of the fatherland” as well as “blindness” about the necessary linkage between the faith and the nation.31 Confronting the legacy of Cum Primum, which still weighed heavily on the Polish faithful three decades after it was issued, Głos Kapłana Polskiego suggested that Gregory XVI’s denunciation had been a meaningless political gesture: “The papal government condemned us as a government, but as the Church of Christ it cried over our misfortune.”32 This reasoning pushed Głos Kapłana Polskiego outside the bounds of Catholic orthodoxy during that ultramontane era, as did Father Mikoszewski’s radical social views and his service in the inner core of the provisional national government. It surely surprised no one when Archbishop Feliński arranged for Mikoszewski to be transferred out of Poland.33 Most of the time there is only minimal dissonance between the ethnographic, ideological, and institutional approaches to religious history, but during the 1863 rebellion there was a cavernous gap between what thousands of Catholics did, what Catholicism taught, and what Catholic authorities attempted to enforce. Individual Catholics (even priests) did support political insurrections in the nineteenth century, but doing so was an unambiguous ecclesiastical transgression. Moreover, nearly all the rank-and-file soldiers of the 1863 uprising would have identified themselves as Catholics, and religious iconography could be seen on everything from battle flags to underground publications. In a certain sense one might even call 1863 a Catholic revolt—but only if one understands

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Catholicism as a marker of ethnic identity or as a vague symbolic vocabulary. If, on the other hand, we define Catholicism either as a theological framework or as a religious institution, then the Polish rebellion was an act of defiance against the Church as well as against the tsarist regime. This distinction between ethnoCatholicism and the institutions of the Church has rarely been as sharp as it was in 1863. Such moments of divergence are usually short-lived, precisely because they indicate serious points of tension that tend to get worked out one way or another. In this case the tension in question was between a style of Polish Catholicism that eschewed political engagement except when the institutions of the Church were directly challenged by secular authorities and modern forms of identity politics that encouraged people to rally around labels of national belonging. This episode illustrates why we must be extremely careful in labeling any instance of political mobilization “religious.” Sometimes a reference to a particular denomination is little more than a synecdoche to be used as a convenient shorthand, a means of easily labeling combatants in struggles motivated primarily by secular concerns. On other occasions religious divisions roughly correspond to ethnonational ones, and devotional sites are targeted because of their ethnic associations. In these instances people might speak of defending their faith, but only insofar as their faith is understood to be coterminous with their community. For example, in the 1990s the Croats of the former Yugoslavia sometimes used Catholic imagery in their war with the (Orthodox) Serbs, but it is doubtful that many of them would have taken up arms for the Church had their specific national community not been involved. On still other occasions politicians might exploit religious imagery cynically in order to rally people to a cause that initially had little to do with religion. All of these cases differ in important ways from instances in which people mobilize for political action because they believe that they are defending the cause of God. All these examples of the relationship between religion and political mobilization are intertwined in practice, with as many configurations as there are individuals involved. The point is that describing an example of political mobilization or conflict as “religious” is fraught with the risk of oversimplification at best, deep misunderstanding at worst. The picture becomes a bit clearer if we follow the distinction I proposed in the introduction between an ethnoreligious community, a religious organization, and a religious discourse. These three can operate independently, and often do, but there is a gravitational pull that holds them loosely together. In 1863 a great many Polish Catholics joined an insurrection crying “For God and Fatherland,” even as the bishops instructed them to do otherwise and even as the ideological and theological constraints of their faith appeared to give them little justification for rebellion. This was hardly a unique example of such divergence,

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but it was nonetheless a point of tension that had to be resolved. People can indefinitely ignore the teachings of their priests, ministers, rabbis, or imams, but when they do so publicly in the name of their religion, they must ultimately deal with the fact that the sanctioned spokespeople for that religion are contradicting them. They must find a way to change the discursive boundaries of their faith or to change their own behavior, or they must admit that a schism (to use the Christian terminology) has taken place. Obviously a certain degree of dissonance can exist within a particular religious worldview—we have seen many examples so far in this book—but the friction between the ethnoreligious community of Polish Catholics and the teachings of the Polish Church had become unsustainable by 1863, and something had to give. In this case Catholic political theology shifted profoundly as the twentieth century approached. By World War I the passivity and loyalism of ultramontane Catholicism in Poland had been largely abandoned, and a much more combative, publicly engaged Church emerged. An efficacious Catholic theory of political dissent depended, ironically, on the decline of the political forms that the Church had promoted for so long. Throughout the long papacy of Pius IX (1846–78), official Church teachings made a sharp distinction between legitimate and illegitimate rule, locating virtually every monarchy in the former category and nearly every democracy in the latter. Political engagement by Catholics as Catholics was facilitated only when this dichotomy was supplanted by a new one that distinguished between institutional forms (which were considered irrelevant) and political substance (which had to be in accord with Christian teachings). With that change, which was formally embraced by Pope Leo XIII in 1885, the choice was no longer just between obedience and submission; instead, the Church was able to strive for the infusion of Christian content into previously anathematized political structures and practices. Since at least the French Revolution, the Church had been confronted with ideologies (and eventually states) that challenged traditional lines of legitimate authority and called into question the very basis of Catholic political theology as it was then understood. As Eleonora Ziemięcka summarized the issue in 1841, it was contrary to the most basic teachings of Catholicism to believe that “human society is the result of any sort of contract, for man came from the hand of God animated by the word—that is, by divine revelation—already possessing a desire for human society.”34 Elsewhere she wrote, “The law is not an imposed, invented creation of any sort of society, not some sort of contract—it is an eternal expression of human morality, the foundation of [mankind’s] duties.”35 Grounding political forms in “natural law” was a central component of Catholic political theology since at least the Enlightenment, and this framed the Church’s response

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to the concept of democracy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Seven decades after Ziemięcka, Father Józef Lubelski would use almost the same phrasing: “According to Catholic teaching, the state is not the result of a corresponding agreement (a social contract) between people—it has its source in the nature of man and thus ultimately in God, who is the Creator of that nature.”36 In the 1930s Primate August Cardinal Hlond taught that “political authority, as such, is not a human creation, not a product of history or of the national will or might, but rather a result of human nature” and thus a part of God’s creation.37 Later still, against the backdrop of the Second Vatican Council, Father Edmund Rosieński of Bydgoszcz composed a sermon arguing for “the existence of natural laws among all peoples, regardless of their level of civilization. . . . All people have the same unchanging human nature, because nature is always the same for everyone.”38 These examples from such divergent contexts could be multiplied many times over. Few themes in Catholic writings and sermons have been as consistent over the past two hundred years (if not longer) as this belief that social and political norms and institutions are grounded in “natural law.” As we saw in chapter 2, Catholic moral theologians usually define sin as a willful repudiation of virtue, and this implies that we are endowed naturally and universally with a moral sensibility that will guide us to virtue unless we deliberately opt to turn our backs on God.39 This belief has ramifications for political theory because it precludes the belief that we are free to govern ourselves however we wish; we might be free to choose between good or evil, but no one can legislate the content of good and evil. As the authors cited above (and many others) have argued, the notion of a “social contract” makes precisely this mistake by implying that the norms of social and political life are established by humans for humans, rather than being rooted in principles that are impervious to interventions from mere mortals. This polemic paints its opponent with far too broad a brush, insofar as most Enlightenment-era political theories were themselves steeped in natural law philosophy.40 Nonetheless, as represented with striking consistency in countless Polish Catholic texts over the past two centuries, Lincoln’s famous “of the people, by the people, for the people” was decisively rejected: the state might be for the people and perhaps even of the people, but its fundamental components were created by God. If we add the ecclesiology explored in chapter 1 to this interpretation of natural law, we get the two cardinal pillars of Catholic political thought. As an anonymous contributor to Tygodnik Katolicki put it in 1868, the Church could support a political theory only “if it is based on sacred principles, if around its system circles the divine law that the Church proclaims.” This author labeled the ideal political system kościołowładztwo (literally, “rule by the Church”), which he took to imply that “God’s law” would inspire and shape secular law, even as priests and state officials remained in their own separate spheres.41 Eleonora

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Ziemięcka summarized four principles that defined this divine foundation of the sociopolitical order: the family, social hierarchy, property, and government. These, she believed, were “inseparable from human society” and “among the things that the Creator preserves unchanged, in the spirit of His creative justice,” and to defy any of them was to defy God Himself.42 There was, to be sure, room for debate among Catholics about what precise political principles followed from God’s natural law, but in the early nineteenth century the authorized voices of the Church were almost unanimous in arguing that if rulers could be selected and unseated by voters, then the whole concept of civil obedience would be cast into doubt, and if power flowed from the people, then it did not emanate from God. A few intellectuals at the time—most famously the French priest Félicité de Lamennais and his colleagues at the short-lived magazine L’Avenir (1830– 32)—had argued that political liberalism could be reconciled with the Catholic faith, but they were firmly silenced by Rome and never attracted significant support.43 Gregory XVI’s 1832 encyclical Mirari Vos, which denounced representative government in the clearest possible terms, paired with Lamennais’s own renunciation of Catholicism in his 1834 book Paroles d’un croyant, seemed to signal a recognition on all sides that one could not be both a Catholic and a democrat.44 The precedent set by Gregory XVI was only strengthened during the thirty-two-year papacy of Pius IX, who came to symbolize and embody nineteenth-century conservatism. With time, however, it became increasingly obvious that the faithful were ignoring the Vatican on this issue; this was another example of the gap between the behavior of ethno-Catholics and the teachings of the institutional Church. Most rank-and-file Italian nationalists, just like their Polish counterparts, considered themselves to be good Catholics even as they worked to create a state based on the power of the people, and in the United States, Germany, France, and elsewhere Catholics participated in political bodies that purported to be based on democratic sovereignty. Theory began to catch up with practice when Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical Immortale Dei in 1885, which finally acknowledged that “no one of the several forms of government is in itself condemned.” Electing one’s rulers was not a problem, in Leo’s view, as long as it was recognized that the governments so created were still constrained by natural law and by God’s will. He followed up on this general statement by urging the faithful to “take part in the conduct of public affairs” in liberal states by promoting Catholic political parties and (most famously) by pushing Catholics in France to “rally around” the Third Republic.45 By encouraging the faithful to carry the Church’s message into public life in liberal states, Leo began reframing the once anathematized institutions of parliamentary politics as a means to spread and enforce the teachings of Christ. For a long time this problem was abstract and irrelevant for most Polish Catholics, particularly those in the Russian Empire. It took two decades for Warsaw’s

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main Catholic periodical, Przegląd Katolicki, to publish a commentary on Immortale Dei, and even then the magazine focused almost exclusively on Leo’s critique of “unbounded freedom, unrestrained equality, and false brotherhood.” Different forms of selecting a leader could be considered, this anonymous author admitted, but “authority itself in no case is given by the people, but by God. . . . If not God, but the people were granted authority, then everyone would be an authority, and no one a subordinate, and universal disorder would ensue.”46 Even on the eve of Polish independence, when the Germans set up a provisional Polish administrative authority known as the Regency Council, Archbishop Aleksander Kakowski of Warsaw issued a pastoral letter in which he warned the faithful “not to deny respect for the nascent Polish authorities [and to] accept their rulings with the submission and discipline that is owed to legitimate authorities.” To do otherwise would be to “sin gravely. . . . Whoever disobeys [the authorities] and fails to respect them, does not love the fatherland.”47 This appeal was particularly apt insofar as Kakowski himself was a member of the Regency Council. But events were already overtaking Kakowski’s evocation (and example) of loyalism. With the gradual expansion of the Austrian franchise laws, the emergence of mass politics in Germany, the creation of the Russian Duma, and ultimately with the establishment of an independent Polish parliamentary system after World War I, Polish Catholics were presented with the opportunities (and dilemmas) already confronted by their coreligionists in places like Italy, France, and the United States. This in turn sparked discussions that went far beyond the old dichotomy between loyalist submission and revolutionary rebellion, ultimately leading to a new style of Polish Catholic politics. For example, the Galician Catholic activist Dr. Józef Milewski gave a speech in Kraków in 1901 entitled “Achievements and Illusions: Progress in the 19th Century” (which was later printed in the magazine Przegląd Polski and then published as a separate volume), in which he surprised his audience by saying that the French Revolution “broke the epoch of soulless political stagnation, leading steadily to the domination in Europe of parliamentarianism, that is, the participation of society in the governance of society. This was a vital attainment and true progress.” Milewski believed that people should no longer consider themselves “subjects,” but instead make themselves into “citizens.” Indeed, it was the “primary political task” of Catholics to “awaken and promote civic consciousness.”48 Writing a year later in another Catholic magazine, Professor Maurycy Straszewski insisted, “The time of feudalism is not going to return, and may God protect us from its return. No ideas are closer to each other than Christianity and democracy. It is only necessary for democracy to become Christian, and then the centrifugal forces within it will be balanced.”49 That last sentence was a significant qualification, and it was the key to Catholic involvement in parliamentary life. The call to make democracy Christian

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would be the point of entry that allowed Catholics as Catholics to participate in modern politics. The problem with liberal parliamentary democracy was not so much that it threatened the marginalization of the Church within a diverse society and polity, but that it negated any necessary bond between politics and faith. It was one thing to live in a state governed by “heretics” (Protestants), “schismatics” (Eastern Orthodox), or even “infidels” (Muslims), but it was quite another to tolerate a system that repudiated the fundamental principle that civil authority emanated from God. Leo XIII’s argument in Immortale Dei was not that Catholics should acknowledge a separation between Church and State; he was merely pointing out that the form of selecting a ruler was of little concern as long as people acknowledged that God—not “the people” or their representatives—was the ultimate source of all power and law. With this in mind, Catholics’ involvement in parliamentary life (at least initially) was predicated on a specific agenda: to instill democratic bodies with respect for divine authority. As Father Jan Rostworowski put it in 1906, “As a matter of principle, all Catholics ought to strive to establish the state and the entire society on exclusively Catholic foundations.” A political system that granted “equal rights for truth and error, a condition of free competition in a nondenominational state between Catholics and other religions or antireligious tendencies” could be endured only on a provisional basis, as “at most a fact that must be tolerated.”50 In 1915 Bishop Józef Pelczar of Przemyśl declared more simply, “We want the Catholic religion to be the ruling religion, and the Church to get the rights and freedoms that belong to it by divine appointment.”51 An almost identical appeal came in 1919 from Bishop Józef Bilczewski, one of the Polish Church’s most outspoken proponents of a reconciliation between Catholicism and the modern world. Even Bilczewski, though, recoiled at the suggestion that such modernization implied any sort of separation between Church and state. He proposed that the first line of the new Constitution of Poland should affirm that “the ruling religion [religia panująca] of the nation is and will be the Holy Roman Catholic faith, with all its laws.”52 After that Constitution was actually created and Catholicism was not established as the official state religion, Bishop Pelczar responded angrily with an open letter to the Assembly delegates from his diocese. He was outraged that instead of privileging Catholicism, the Constitution had demoted it to the rank of “a denomination equal to Judaism and the non-Catholic sects,” which amounted, in his view, to a “dechristianization of society.”53 This might seem like hyperbole if one considers the actual content of the 1921 Constitution. Article 114 stated (somewhat awkwardly), “The Roman Catholic denomination, being the religion of the overwhelming majority of the nation, occupies in the state a leading position among the denominations, which enjoy equal rights [Wyznanie rzymskokatolickie, będące religia przeważającej

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większości narodu, zajmuje w państwie naczelne stanowisko wśród równouprawnionych wyznań].” Articles 111 and 112 affirmed religious liberties (including the right to follow no religion at all), but this was somewhat undermined by article 120, which made religious education mandatory for every child. (Parents could select which faith they wanted their child to learn, but “none of the above” was not an option.)54 These provisions, though, were enough to provoke that fear of “dechristianization” expressed by Bishop Pelczar, who argued that the legal equality of all religions implied that the state had nothing to say about faith or truth. Such neutrality left fallible humans and the vicissitudes of their votes as the only source of authority and legitimacy. Rule by someone of an alien faith was far from ideal, but the concept of toleration had made it possible for Catholics to accept an Orthodox tsar and a Protestant kaiser. Likewise, though non-Christians might be undesirable neighbors, their presence in a Catholic state could be “tolerated” if necessary. When Bishop Pelczar promised in 1921, “Valuing the Catholic religion above all as the only truth and salvation, we will observe Christian tolerance toward non-Catholics,” he was repeating a mantra that could be found in almost any Catholic political text of his day.55 Tolerance, after all, did not imply that one faith was equal to another, but only that people should have the right to make their way to the truth without direct coercion. From the perspective of early twentieth-century Catholic political theorists, an affirmation of religious equality was something else altogether, tantamount to a denial that any religion had a meaningful claim to absolute truth (or worse, that truth had no relevance to politics). As Primate Hlond put it, “The state cannot help but recognize in its life the Creator . . . that is, the state cannot be atheistic, it cannot govern as if God did not exist. Rather, it ought to worship God and respect religion. . . . A Church lowered to the status of an association, existing within civil laws . . . would be an oppressed Church.”56 The Christian Democratic Party set as its primary goal the realization of Hlond’s demand. In their 1925 platform they stated that they did “not consider religion to be the private affair of the individual. Religion is an extremely social matter, and without it one cannot build a lasting political structure.” They therefore repudiated “the so-called secular state” as “contrary to human nature and foreign to the culture of the Polish nation.”57 Given this rejection of the secular state, it may seem that Archbishop Józef Teodorowicz was either self-contradictory or disingenuous when he insisted, “The Church does not interfere with the state . . . neither is the Church (as some mistakenly think) a state within a state, for these two authorities—earthly and spiritual—do not contradict each other. The State, after all, has governance over the body, and the Church governance over the soul.”58 This oft-used parallel did not imply any sort of separation of Church and state—quite the contrary: it posited

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two pillars of society that were necessarily intertwined (insofar as a body without a soul would be an empty shell). An anonymous contributor to the mass-market illustrated weekly Przewodnik Katolicki wrote in 1922 that the relationship between Church and state should be marked by “mutual aid.” The Church would assist the state insofar as it could ensure that every truly pious citizen “will be conscientious and hard working, will be harmonious and disciplined, will faithfully observe state laws and regulations, [and] will willingly pay taxes.” For its part the state should help the Church by “supporting religious education in the schools, supporting chaplains in the army, guarding the observance of Sundays and holidays, eradicating crimes and misdemeanors with state punishments, fighting public immorality by banning depraved and shameless periodicals, shows, and entertainment.”59 The main issue here was the assertion that God established religious authority in the Church and civil authority in the state, and to deny one or the other was to impugn God’s dominion over the earth. Catholic politics could and did evolve in the early twentieth century, shifting from an ultramontane commitment to hereditary legitimacy to an acceptance of the institutions and practices of representative government. What could not change, however, was the conviction that God was the origin and the objective of all things, including the political order. The old monarchs of Europe had accepted this principle, even if they were outside the Church and therefore (according to Catholic commentators) misunderstood the precise content of God’s political will. Liberals, socialists, and other supporters of the secular state posed a much more profound challenge, because such people elevated mere organizational forms (elections, parliaments, constitutions) to the level of legitimizing principles. After Leo XIII Catholics gradually came to accept those forms, but only insofar as they could be utilized to preserve God’s rightful place in political life. The Polish Constitution was technically correct when it noted the “overwhelming majority” (przeważająca większość) enjoyed by Catholicism in interwar Poland.60 Given this, one might have expected Catholicism’s path into electoral politics to be relatively smooth, but in fact neither the census nor the ballot box was a reliable source of comfort for Church leaders. A majority, after all, does not necessarily imply hegemony, and even the loosest definition of Catholic left about one-third of the Polish population outside the Church. As we will see in chapter 9, there were already those in the 1920s who wanted to exclude (by definition) non-Catholics from the Polish nation, relegating them to the status of an alien “minority,” but even the advocates of this position had to recognize that the electorate of the Polish Republic was one of the most religiously heterogeneous in Europe (see chart, opposite). In this context Catholic politicians rarely portrayed demography as a reliable ally. To be sure, there were those

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who would have agreed with Father Szczepan Sobalkowski of Kielce when he told his parishioners in 1939, “More than twenty million Catholics have, and must have not only a voice in the state, but also the right to decide about the system, about the government, about respecting the laws of God and of conscience in public life.”61 More typical, however, were the warnings of Father Jan Rostworowski, who cautioned that Catholics should avoid basing their demands on their numerical strength. He saw that the “overwhelming majority” clause of the Constitution was actually a defeat for the Church: This means that Poland as such, that the Polish State fundamentally considers all religions to be equally good, but that it grants Catholicism the first place in the parade—primus inter pares—because in fact, and thus accidentally, [Catholicism] has the largest number of believers in our country. But if it follows that all religions in the State are, fundamentally, equally good, then obviously this is proof that [the State] does not really take any of them seriously, that it does not profess any religion exclusively and that it does not feel obliged to bring the Catholic religion into public life before the others, not only in form and gesture but in reality. This is precisely what a Pole-Catholic cannot in any way accept.62

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Not only were demographic statistics an inadequate basis for Catholic preeminence as a matter of principle, but in practice it soon became clear that the Church could not effectively control the votes of the laity. Being Catholic, it turned out, was only a weak indicator of electoral preferences. In the 1922 elections, for example, approximately 29 percent of Roman Catholics voted for the socialists or one of their allied parties, compared to 23 percent of the overall population. Conversely, 39 percent of Catholics supported one of the right-wing parties, compared to 29 percent of the entire electorate.63 Although Catholics did not, therefore, exactly match the voting preferences of their non-Catholic compatriots, neither did they cast their ballots as a bloc. Moreover, many Catholics voted for parties that were almost unanimously condemned by the clergy and the Church-affiliated press. In terms of any specific electoral outcome, Catholic numerical hegemony in interwar Poland did not mean much. The role of the clergy in partisan politics was hotly contested in Poland in the early twentieth century, with no clear consensus even among the priests regarding the need for any sort of firewall between the pulpit and the voting booth. In the Russian partition the issue arose for the first time in 1906, when the deacons of the Warsaw Archdiocese met to discuss the upcoming elections to the Imperial Duma. After much debate they determined, “It is not proper or useful for the Church or for the country that priests join any political party; nonetheless, it is necessary to favor and support those national parties that clearly have the interests and welfare of the Church as their goal.” The rules they drew up walked a tightrope of ambiguity: the sermon and the confessional must never be used for direct political purposes, but priests were instructed to “teach from the pulpit about social life, and inform [parishioners] about the importance of the elections and the qualifications of delegates, particularly from the religious perspective, not however mentioning names.”64 A 1908 statement by the Bishop Karol Niedziałkowski of Łuck-Żytomierz seemed on the surface to offer a more decisive renunciation of partisanship: “The church pulpit is a place for impartial and infallible teachings (that is, Catholic faith and morals); therefore one must never hear from [the pulpit] partisan manifestos or proclamations, even if they are the most orthodox, because mistakes, subjective judgments, and passion are always possible in such cases.” This did indeed seem to be a clear instruction to stay above the political fray—until one notices that the book, released by the publishing arm of a conservative party, was titled What Are Those Threatened with Damnation Thinking?65 A similar tension can be seen in the proclamation issued by Warsaw’s Archbishop Aleksander Cardinal Kakowski on November 12, 1918 (one day after the declaration of Polish independence), in which he instructed the priests in his archdiocese, “The pulpit is a place for proclaiming the teachings of God, and not a medium for egoistic or partisan conflicts and debates.” Kakowski went on to say, however, that “honest

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people, good Catholics” had a moral obligation to give their support only to “educated, rational, and righteous men, as well as good and sincere Catholics.”66 Kakowski’s strategy, though not universally embraced, seems to have been typical: no specific individuals or parties would be mentioned by name from the pulpit, but the faithful were instructed to vote only for those who were reliably Catholic. There was enough flexibility in this strategy to allow the clergy to give strong hints in favor of certain electoral options, while still remaining a bit above the fray. It was rare for clerics to go further and directly participate in political life. Two prominent exceptions were Archbishops Józef Teodorowicz of the Armenian-Rite Catholics and Adam Sapieha of Kraków. The former served in the Galician provincial assembly and the Austrian House of Lords from 1902 to 1918, the Polish Constitutional Assembly from 1919 to 1922 (together with forty other priests), and the Polish Senate from 1922 to 1923 (together with Sapieha and three other priests). He was even one of the cofounders of the short-lived National-Christian Populist Party, which promised to preserve “the authority and purity of Christian principles” and “ensure that the nation’s filial sense of honor for the Church and the Catholic spirit itself will not be damaged or lessened in any way.”67 Although that party never amounted to anything, it become one of the constituent parts of a grand right-wing coalition called the Chrześcijański Związek Jedności Narodowej (Christian Union of National Unity), the largest parliamentary bloc after the 1922 elections. Both Sapieha and Teodorowicz represented the ChZJN in the Senate, but although nothing in the coalition’s program strayed from Catholic teachings, the two archbishops were ordered by Pius XI to cease such direct political involvement and resign their seats. Speaking out politically was acceptable, but by the early 1920s Rome seems to have decided that actually plunging the reputation of an archbishop directly into an electoral contest was going too far. The rank-and-file clergy could still hold office, but even this was discouraged by most members of the hierarchy.68 Though usually vague in their positive endorsements, priests had no qualms about telling the laity whom not to vote for. The Kraków Jesuits even published a voter’s guide in 1919, in which they warned, “Voluntary negligence in casting a vote is not just a so-called civic sin, but a sin in the strict sense of the word, for which you must go to confession.” And once at the polling place, the faithful were told, “Never vote for the socialist list! If you did vote for them you would sin gravely against God and the fatherland.” The left was to be shunned not merely because socialism itself was misguided, but because “among the socialists almost half of them are Jews; the most extreme socialist parties are under Jewish influence and direction, and from Judaism they derive their insane hatred toward Christianity.”69 In November 1920 a gathering of the Episcopate passed a resolution affirming, “In accordance with canon law, the pulpit may not be used for political

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or partisan activities. From the pulpit ought to flow pure Catholic teaching.” Such teaching, however, should “warn against mistakes, point out eternal truths, and discuss current affairs, casting light on these matters from the position of the Holy Faith.”70 By 1928 this general advice was translated into some specific voting rules: (1) Catholics must vote only for other Catholics; (2) they must never vote for socialists, Jews, or other “determined enemies of the Church”; and (3) they must never vote for parties that accepted Jews or anti-Catholics as members.71 When these instructions were ignored by much of the laity, an editorial in Przewodnik Katolicki instructed the sinful electorate to “apologize to Jesus with deep regret for the faithlessness shown toward Him” and called upon priests to deny Holy Communion and a Christian burial to anyone who had voted for the left.72 Most of the clergy was inclined to place Józef Piłsudski among those whom Catholics should oppose. After several decades as a prominent national activist, Piłsudski served as commander in chief and first marshal during Poland’s tumultuous early years of existence, only to opt for a Cincinnatian retirement rather than accept election as the country’s first president. He did not stay out of politics for long, though; in 1926 he led a military coup to block what he perceived to be a danger from the radical right. Until his death in 1935 he remained the power behind the throne in a regime that grew steadily more authoritarian. Not only had Piłsudski been one of the founders of the Polish Socialist Party, but he converted to Protestantism in order to marry his first wife. (She had divorced her first husband, so she could not get remarried as a Catholic.) Although he broke with the socialists prior to 1918 and eventually reconverted after the death of his wife (so that he could marry again, this time to a Catholic), the overwhelming majority of the clergy remained hostile to him.73 Justifying their ongoing animosity was the fact that Piłsudski never abandoned his dream of a multireligious, multilingual, multicultural Polish Republic, an aspiration that went against the expressed position of the Church hierarchy. As if that were not bad enough from a Catholic perspective, six of the eight prime ministers who served after the 1926 coup were Freemasons.74 Perhaps the only impediment to explicit Catholic mobilization against Piłsudski immediately after World War I was Monsignor Achille Ratti, who as papal nuncio to Warsaw from 1918 to 1921 had a rapport with Piłsudski and who persuaded the Vatican that the marshal could be trusted to protect the Church’s interests against the much more serious political dangers of those revolutionary years. When Ratti became Pope Pius XI in 1922 he continued to view Piłsudski favorably, which eventually allowed the Polish ambassador to the Vatican to report, “The Pope has tried, and will continue to try to get the clergy to cease agitating for the opposition,” even though the Holy See was well aware of the Polish clergy’s hostility toward the marshal.75

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When August Hlond was named primate on June 24, 1926 (only a month after the coup) his appointment was widely interpreted as a sign that Pius XI wanted to cooperate with Piłsudski. The other leading contender for the primacy had been Stanisław Łukomski, the suffragan bishop of Gniezno-Poznań and an open supporter of the nationalist opposition to Piłsudski. Not only did Łukomski fail to get nominated to the primacy, but he was transferred to the provincial diocese of Łomża.76 From that post he flaunted his continued political engagement by issuing a pastoral letter in 1930 in which he specified which political parties were off-limits for Catholics.77 In 1934 his diocesan weekly magazine went even further, listing the names of all approved candidates in local elections, alongside the addresses for the polling places. In almost every case these candidates represented the far right.78 But such endorsements meant little when set against Pius XI’s and Hlond’s continued pursuit of proper, if not always warm relations with the government. When Piłsudski died in 1935 he was even buried alongside the Polish kings under the Wawel Cathedral in Kraków, though the archbishop of Kraków, Adam Sapieha, was so upset by the flood of demonstrative Piłsudskiite pilgrims (many of whom were not Catholic) disrupting the peace of his church that he took it upon himself to remove the tomb to an outof-the-way side crypt in 1937.79 Neither Pius XI nor Hlond could ever have supported Piłsudski’s vision of a multicultural, religiously neutral Polish state, but both men were trying to navigate some treacherous political waters and Piłsudski provided a useful life raft. From the left, the Polish Socialist Party (consistently one of the largest delegations in the Sejm) would have gone beyond mere secular neutrality and openly tried to minimize the influence of the Church. Many of Piłsudski’s supporters would have done the same, but for the restraining hand of the marshal. Meanwhile, the pope seemed to recognize that the Polish right, dominated by a group known as the National Democratic movement, was more problematic than people like Łukomski acknowledged. Although there was undeniably some convergence between the far right and the Catholic Church at the time, clarifying the nature of that convergence has been made difficult by the heated polemics surrounding this topic.80 Setting aside the question of nationalism (which will be explored in chapter 6), the Vatican, the Fascists, the Nazis, and others on the interwar right did indeed share some common political enemies and more than a few common ideals. Nonetheless, the differences between them were enough for Pius XI to prefer Piłsudski over the National Democrats. Exploring the reasons for this decision helps us understand the contours of Catholic political thought at the time. During the movement’s formative years in the 1890s, the National Democrats (or Endecja, from the initials N.D.) had been quite hostile toward the Church. Even the movement’s hagiographer acknowledged that the founders of the

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Endecja looked upon Catholicism as nothing more than a “social phenomenon.”81 An early internal memo from the Endecja’s central committee spoke of “exploiting” (zużytkowanie) the Church by luring the “patriotic portion of the clergy” away from the hierarchy, “which carries out harmful policies.”82 The National Democrats’ main periodical, Przegląd Wszechpolski, repeated familiar anticlerical tales about the ignorance and corruption of the priests, even while admitting, “The overwhelming majority of the people will go with the clergy, even if [the priests] lead them astray to national betrayal. . . . In our current situation in the Russian partition we cannot conduct any audacious experiments of liberating the people from under the influence of the clergy; it is therefore necessary to exert some appropriate influence on the clergy.”83 Another article urged readers to recognize that “to break with Catholicism, to break with Rome would be the equivalent of national suicide in today’s circumstances.”84 As I will explore in more depth later, the Endecja was above all a nationalist movement, and the universality of Catholicism (not to mention the loyalism of the bishops) was for them a hindrance to national unity. Not surprisingly, few members of the clergy showed much enthusiasm for this new movement. An Endecja affiliate for patriotic priests, the Collegium Secretum, faded almost as soon as it was created, and no members of the clergy actually joined the movement until 1901 (when eleven priests attended the grandiosely titled Conference of the Clergy). The Endecja tried to publish a periodical for the clergy in 1903, but after three issues it collapsed. Parish priests in rural areas sometimes distributed National Democratic publications, but on the whole the clergy initially viewed this new movement as yet another revolutionary force that had to be contained. Father Ignacy Geppert’s 1913 polemic, The Democratic-National Party in the Light of Catholic Teaching, argued that the Endecja should be “stifled and destroyed” because its political ambitions were purely secular, formulated so that “any Jew, Protestant, schismatic, or declared atheist” could accept them. Geppert was particularly upset by the attempt to instrumentalize Catholicism for political purposes. “Could true sons of the Church know its character so poorly,” he asked, “that in good faith they could dare to describe the universal Catholic Church with the label of ‘national institution’?!”85 A pamphlet by a certain Father Hozakowski entitled On the Catholic Foundation of National Democracy also expressed concern about the “denominational tolerance of the Endecja, which stands in sharp contrast to its national intolerance.” In the ideal world of the National Democrats, he wrote, “the Jewish Pole would come out better than the German Catholic,” and the state would be marked by “a thorough recognition of freedom of conscience and religion.”86 These comments might seem odd considering the Endecja’s (well-deserved) reputation for anti-Semitism and their commitment to cultural homogeneity, but the early National Democrats did indeed advance a secular political vision.

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The conflict between the National Democrats and the Catholic Church would start to fade around the time of the First World War, but the rapprochement came slowly. The political party formed by the Endecja after the war, the Związek Ludowo-Narodowy (Populist-National Union, or ZLN), reached out to the Church by banning non-Catholics from the party and by labeling Poland a “Catholic nation,” but the ZLN only proposed that Catholicism be granted “an independent and appropriate position” in the state—a far cry from the leading role that Church leaders were seeking at the time. The Endecja went a step further in the 1925 party program, affirming “that the Roman Catholic religion occupies a leading position in the state, and that the Roman Catholic religion is governed by its own laws.” The party promised that marriage laws and the educational system would be reformed “in accordance with the principles of the Roman Catholic religion,” and they insisted that “these principles ought to penetrate public life in Poland.”87 Reconciliation between the Church and the Endecja was hastened when Pius XI openly denounced the French radical right in a way that made the parallels to the National Democrats all too clear. On the day after Christmas in 1926 the pope placed the writings of Charles Maurras on the Index of Forbidden Books and publicly repudiated L’Action Française for elevating the nation above the universal Church and for treating the clergy as mere tools of the national cause. Commenting on the Vatican’s action, Father Jan Rostworowski wrote in Przegląd Powszechny: There is no doubt about what has been condemned: the principle that political or national concerns can ever be placed higher than religious concerns, or that religion can be treated as a means or as an aid in the attainment of partisan goals.  .  .  . Since [L’Action Française], while defending Catholicism, promoting Catholicism, and performing many services for [the Church], always looked upon it exclusively as a means to its political goals, the Church did not hesitate to sever this alliance and surrender all the benefits that flowed from it.88 Kazimierz Krotoski made the link between Roman Dmowski (the leader of the National Democrats) and Maurras explicit in a 1930 book called Nationalism and the Catholic Church, in which he described the Endecja’s platform as just the sort of “nationalist heresy” that Pius XI had condemned. He held out cautious hope that the National Democrats were evolving toward a more sincerely Catholic stance, but he remained skeptical.89 The reason for Krotoski’s heavily qualified hope was a book that Dmowski had issued in response to the condemnation of L’Action Française entitled The Church, the Nation, and the State. Here the National Democratic leader promised

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that his movement would no longer treat the Church as a mere social institution. Reversing his earlier criticisms, he wrote that Catholicism had been “the foundation of [Poland’s] defense” in the nineteenth century precisely because it had its headquarters in Rome, far from the reach of the partitioning powers. He went even further, reinterpreting Polish history so as to make the Church constitutive of the nation. In a passage that was eventually carved on a monument to Dmowski that stands today inside St. Jan’s Cathedral in Warsaw, the National Democrat leader wrote, “Catholicism is not an supplement to Polishness, something that gives it a certain coloration; it is part of the essence [of Polishness], and to a large degree constitutes that essence. To attempt to separate Catholicism from Polishness, to tear the nation from religion and from the Church, is to destroy the very essence of the nation.” He went on to affirm: The Polish state is a Catholic state. This is so not just because the overwhelming majority of its population is Catholic, while such and such a percent is not Catholic. From our position it is Catholic in the fullest sense of that expression, for our state is a national state, and our nation is a Catholic nation. . . . The policies of a Catholic nation must be sincerely Catholic, which means that the development and the strength of religion must be regarded as a goal that cannot be utilized as a means to other ends that have nothing to do with religion. . . . Politics is an earthly thing, and a political point of view is earthly, corporeal. But also from this point of view religion in the life of the nation is the highest good, which cannot be sacrificed for any other goal.90 After the publication of The Church, the Nation, and the State, leading National Democratic politicians frequently tried to distinguish themselves from the “pagan” nationalism seen elsewhere in Europe. When ZLN met for its annual convention in July 1927 they passed a resolution embracing Dmowski’s new position and promising never to treat Catholicism as a mere tool of the nation. They explicitly requested the endorsement of the clergy for the upcoming 1928 elections and promised that they would henceforth be worthy of the Church’s full support.91 After poor showings in that election, the ZLN was dissolved and replaced by the Stronnictwo Narodowe (National Party), which was much more explicitly Catholic than its predecessor. “Faith and religion are the mainstay of social life,” the new party’s program declared. “The Polish nation is Catholic. Just as in the past the life of the nation was tied to the Roman Catholic faith by an unbreakable knot, so today [the Church] must lead the collective life of the state.”92 This was a key concession to the Church, and it blunted the tendency among the National Democrats to embrace the statist authoritarianism found in other interwar radical-right movements.

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Regardless of whether this ideological shift was calculated or sincere (and for Dmowski, who admitted to friends that he remained an atheist up to his conversion in 1937, the former seems more likely), it was undeniably necessary if the Endecja was to avoid conflict with the Church. Aside from some passing interest in Mussolini during the early years of the Fascist regime, the clergy and the Catholic press in Poland became increasingly critical of the political objectives of the European radical right.93 To a degree this was a byproduct of fears regarding Nazi Germany. As the popular Catholic weekly Posiew put it right after Hitler took power in 1933, the Nazis were “saturated with nationalist fanaticism, breathing astonishing anti-Polish propaganda.”94 Even though Posiew was itself strongly anti-Semitic, the editors expressed some discomfort in April 1933 when they noted that Hitler was using “terror” against the Jews as part of a broader campaign to deprive all “people of non-German descent” of civil rights.95 In 1935 another illustrated mass-market periodical, Przewodnik Katolicki, described the Nazis as “neo-pagans,” condemned their euthanasia program, and even denounced the growing wave of anti-Semitic violence.96 Later that year Przewodnik Katolicki told its readers that Germans faced a choice between “vague pagan theories” or imprisonment in a concentration camp.97 In the ominous last issue, in August 1939, the magazine depicted the situation for Catholics under Nazi rule in the darkest colors: “Today Christianity, if it does not lay in ruins, is in grave danger. The new paganism and godlessness not only receives protection, but the exclusive support of the governing circles. The elite of the [German] nation who hold power have declared a relentless war against all Christian churches.”98 Under the circumstances it was obvious why many Catholics were wary of any movement that had even the slightest ideological proximity to Nazism. Perhaps some on the French right could cry “Better Hitler than Blum” (referring to Léon Blum, the socialist leader of the Popular Front government of 1936–37), but given the anti-Polish vitriol of the Nazis, few in Poland shared similar delusions. Even setting aside the international context, Catholic political commentators in interwar Poland grew increasingly leery of what they called “totalism.” This was by no means a uniquely Polish development, but it does seem that Primate Hlond’s Church was even more inclined in this direction than Catholics elsewhere in Europe. Given the electoral marginality of Church-backed parties in Piłsudski’s Poland, and given the increasing heavy-handedness of the regime (particularly after Marshal Piłsudski’s death in 1935), Catholic commentators seem to have been unusually sensitive to the danger of centralized state power. One of the earliest articulations of a distinctly Catholic critique of authoritarianism in Poland came from Father Antoni Szymański, a prominent Catholic intellectual and eventually the rector of the Catholic University in Lublin. In 1920 Szymański wrote that liberal modernity had created a world polarized between a

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mighty state and powerless, atomized individuals. This had created some unpalatable alternatives. “Since there are only atomized individuals, organized into a state,” Szymański wrote, “in order to avoid anarchy and satisfy the needs of social life, the state much assume the management of all matters which transcend the power of individuals.” The political challenge for the twentieth century, he argued, was to create intermediary institutions that could preserve community without centralizing power.99 This support for “intermediary institutions” and political decentralization would become a common fixture of Catholic political commentary in interwar Poland. Primate Hlond himself said in 1932, “The State is for the citizens; the citizens are not for the State. . . . One cannot reconcile with natural law certain contemporary aspirations to the total subordination of citizens to political objectives.”100 In 1938 the publishing arm of Catholic Action in Poland released a book titled Catholicism and Totalism, which warned against those who might respond to the authoritarianism of the left by constructing a “Catholic totalism.” The author considered it a “fundamental truth that it is not possible to use the police to lead anyone to heaven.”101 In early 1939 Posiew echoed this sentiment in a major article, “Our Path Does Not Go That Way.” The editors emphasized the essay’s importance by printing it entirely in italics on the first page, replacing the usual front-page illustration. The author, using the cryptonym “W. S. P.,” perceived only three political forms in the modern world: democracies, “total states,” and those still vacillating between the two. “Totalism” was not an option for a Catholic, wrote W. S. P., because whether based on communism or fascism, such states “subordinate everything, even the conscience of man.” Bolshevism was marked by a “special barbarity,” but ultimately it did not differ from other forms of totalism, so turning to Hitler as a defense against Stalin was deeply misguided. Given this dilemma, W. S. P. concluded, there was only one option: “Certainly democracy is not an ideal. Here and there the democratic system became a basis for Masonic governments and led the country to the edge of a precipice (for example, in France). But one must admit that with a democratic system, if society is healthy and it knows what it wants, it can easily fix its mistakes. Democracy is freedom. One must simply avoid abusing it, since it can degenerate into anarchy.” W. S. P. was no liberal: he disliked “disorderly democracy” and longed for “a Christian state, combining rational freedom for the citizen with his duties vis-à-vis the state.” Nonetheless, in printing this article Posiew was moving toward an accommodation with liberal democrats in the common struggle against “totalist” regimes of the left and the right.102 The most outspoken advocate of this reconciliation with democracy was the leader of the Christian Democratic Party, Wojciech Korfanty. He believed that “socialism, communism, racism, and state totalism are perversions of the human spirit,” because all of them glorify the use of violence and show “disrespect for

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freedom and human dignity.”103 In Korfanty’s view there was no meaningful distinction between fascism and communism: both were “the object of hatred for all democrats on earth, because they are the negation of democracy.” Regimes of the far left and the far right had both turned “citizens” into “subjects,” undermining “the harmony between freedom and respect for authority” on which good governance depended.104 In a provocative essay published in 1936 Korfanty posed the question, “Is the Lord God on the right or on the left?” His answer must have displeased many National Democratic politicians: “For a long time the right has attempted to claim the Church for itself. Everywhere it tends to consider itself to be the representative of Catholicism and the Church. Every effort to identify the Church with the right has ended disastrously for the Church itself.” It did not follow from this that Korfanty wanted to establish an alliance with the left, however. “In general,” he wrote, “[the Church] does not identify with any regime. It must always be free and independent, for otherwise it will not fulfill its mission.”105 In late 1937 Korfanty was one of the cofounders of the Labor Party, which he hoped would cultivate an alternative to the flawed political options of the day. He promised that the new party would avoid a “Hispanicization” (zhiszpanizowania) of Poland, a term he coined to refer to an embrace of the radical right in order to protect the Church against the left.106 Korfanty responded with enthusiasm the following year, when Pius XI issued the parallel encyclicals Mit Brennender Sorge: On the Church and the German Reich and Divini Redemptoris: On Atheistic Communism. The fact that these were issued together, Korfanty thought, would help counter the tendency among some Catholics to interpret the Church’s anticommunism as tacit support for fascism.107 Korfanty remained a principled opponent of liberalism (not to mention socialism), and he refused to see states as merely “the sum of free, equal, and basically good people.”108 He rejected “19th century democracy” and argued that “true freedom can only be enjoyed by those who accept responsibility and recognize authority,” but he nonetheless maintained that “the slogans of freedom, equality and brotherhood underline the postulate of respect for the dignity of the human person, the inviolability of the inherent rights of man and the equality of the citizen before the law, about which all other regimes too easily forget. And those are quintessentially Christian postulates.”109 He even grounded this in the classic Catholic theological principle that “man is by nature free, capable of choosing between good and evil and aware of responsibility for his own fate and that of the community to which he belongs.” From this premise he concluded, “Man has a right to a decisive voice in matters concerning the community; in other words, he has a right to participate in creating and organizing the collective will. The realization of this view is democracy.”110 Korfanty died on August 17, 1939, only days before the German invasion would prove that his warnings about the secular radical right had been tragically

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prescient. During his life he had enjoyed the support of many members of the hierarchy, but his political initiatives never came close to rivaling those of the National Democrats. Despite this electoral marginality, however, Korfanty’s story does help us perceive the contours of Catholic politics in the early twentieth century more clearly. His arguments about the dangers of a totalist state seem to have met with no resistance; I have not been able to find any specifically Catholic rebuttals or critiques of his position. On the other hand, I did find references to the dangers of totalism scattered throughout the Catholic press of the 1930s. The Endecja gained Catholic support precisely because they eschewed some key ideas that characterized the radical right elsewhere in Europe: (1) they refrained from reifying the state as an absolute value; (2) they embraced the idea of intermediary social institutions to guard against totalism; and (3) they downplayed their tendency to instrumentalize the clergy, recognizing that the Church was even more important than the nation. On all three points some might question the sincerity of the National Democratic leaders (Korfanty certainly did), and whatever their views on political authority, they remained purveyors of hate speech and opponents of all forms of cultural diversity. Nonetheless, the fact remains that they adjusted their rhetoric to sooth Catholic fears, and whatever that says about the National Democrats it tells us a great deal about the boundaries of Catholic political thinking at the time. Within those boundaries there was space for someone like Korfanty, but there was little room for the unadulterated authoritarianism that marked the radical right throughout most of Europe. No Catholic political commentator prior to World War II, not even Korfanty, would have ever been accused of supporting American-style liberal democracy or French-style republicanism. The principle first articulated by Leo XIII remained firmly in place: representative governance was okay as long as it was accepted that legitimacy came from God rather than the people, and that liberty could never be placed above truth. This underlying stability, however, must not distract us from the significant changes that took place during the first decades of the twentieth century. From an unwavering commitment to hereditary legitimacy, through a reluctant acceptance of elections and constitutions, Catholic politics expanded by the 1930s to allow space for a substantive (albeit qualified and carefully defined) defense of liberty. The concept of authority had been an unquestioned virtue well into the nineteenth century, but by the mid-twentieth it was widely depicted by Polish Catholics as a potential danger if left unchecked. The Nazi occupation and the subsequent establishment of communist rule posed existential issues of survival for every Catholic institution, and even after the worst repression ended in 1956 there still seemed little chance that Catholicism would have much influence on public policy in Poland. One might expect the goals of the 1920s and 1930s to have been buried during this period, but those old

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ambitions would prove surprisingly resilient. In part this was because the new demographics of the Polish People’s Republic lent plausibility to the idea that Catholicism could be served by the establishment of a democratic state. The concern about basing the realization of God’s will on something as fickle as electoral politics remained, but after 1945 the nearly total denominational homogeneity of Poland transformed that issue into a theoretical abstraction that did not need to be discussed. Moreover, the elision between demographic hegemony and electoral hegemony became a lot easier thanks to the fact that the communists would not allow anything resembling a free and fair vote. It was much easier to link Catholicism with the will of the people when the people were unable to express their will. In this environment the vocabulary of modern politics became even further integrated into Catholic writing and speech, albeit in a conservative form that offered popular sovereignty as a means of establishing, at last, a Christian state. As a result, when communism was overthrown in 1989 Catholic political activists had at their disposal an antiliberal vision that was nonetheless securely buttressed by the terminological scaffolding of democracy. Describing communism as an ideological freezer, holding beliefs from the 1930s in place until they could be thawed out again in the 1990s, is a common but highly misleading metaphor. Polish Catholic political thought had a continuous twentieth-century history, and we cannot simply leap from 1939 to 1989. Although it is true that some of the political agendas of the interwar years resurfaced in postcommunist Poland, they were able to do so precisely because of what had happened in the interim. Father Jacek Woroniecki, a theologian and the former rector of the Catholic University of Lublin, wrote a short treatise on Church-state relations in 1946 in which he insisted, “The belief that religion is fundamentally a private thing and that [the Church] should not be concerned with public life must necessarily meet with the Church’s condemnation.” Despite the presence of the Red Army on Polish soil, Woroniecki argued that the state had a duty to “honor God and in all things take account of His laws,” and to accomplish this, the new Polish Constitution should include the following clause: Recognizing that religion is the most important component and the foundation of morality, both for the individual person and for society, the Polish state bases all of its public life on the Catholic religion and considers its moral principles to be the foundation of its legislation and its governments. Since, on the other hand, religion only exerts its beneficial influence when it is an expression of the inner command of conscience, the Polish state guarantees its citizens complete freedom of denomination [wolność wyznań], within the boundaries of general morals and public safety. However, it will not permit propaganda for non-denominationalism and godlessness, which will be regarded as a crime.

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The phrase wolność wyznań was used often in Catholic writing as an alternative to wolność sumienia (freedom of conscience), relocating liberty from the individual to a recognized (and regulated) set of religious communities and closing off atheism or agnosticism as options. From this foundation Woroniecki proposed that the Polish head of state must always be a Roman Catholic and that all important state ceremonies should be held in churches, accompanied by Catholic rituals. In his model constitution, religion classes would be mandatory for all children (including those from “nondenominational” families), and Church law would govern the marriages of all Roman Catholics (in other words, no divorces). Woroniecki’s constitutional proposals were not the musings of a fringe cleric; they were published first in Wiadomość Duszpasterska (Pastoral News) and reissued as a separate volume by the distinguished St. Wojciech’s publishing house, complete with a stamp of approval from the archdiocese.111 Even in the unfavorable (to say the least) political circumstances of the time, the hope for a Christian nation-state survived. Both Woroniecki’s proposals and his argumentation on their behalf were familiar from prewar texts, but in a pastoral letter from the entire Episcopate written that same year (1946) we see the first signs of a new reasoning designed specifically to counter the claims of the communist authorities. Reviving the prewar critique of totalism, the Episcopate condemned the state for trying to become “omnipotent,” for refusing to accept any law higher than itself and for suppressing the “voice of society.” Evidence of this, the bishops continued, could be seen in the desire of the new state authorities to “withdraw religion from an influence on public life, aspiring to a separation of religion and life, Church and state. They want to close the Church within the four walls of its houses of worship. Such aspirations are contrary to the teachings of the Church.”112 The communists insisted that they represented the will of the people, but apparently the bishops intended to challenge the party’s control over that particular piece of ground. Well into the twentieth century, Catholics tended to treat the idea of popular sovereignty as problematic even when accepting the institutional forms of electoral politics. Now the bishops were complaining that the Polish state failed to listen to the “voice of society.” What made this switch possible was the unquestioned conviction that the “teachings of the Church” and the popular will were one and the same. They simply precluded ex definitio that the true intentions of Polish society might ever lead away from God or His Church. This reasoning was even more clearly articulated in a set of “Catholic Constitutional Postulates” that the Episcopate submitted to the government in early 1947. The outline was similar to Woroniecki’s proposals, but the introductory argumentation was striking. “The spirit of [the Constitution],” the bishops insisted, “ought to correspond to the tribal [plemienny] character and the Christian ideology of the nation. . . . The Republic, as a social and political collectivity

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of the Catholic Polish nation, ought to be described in the Constitution as a Christian state that accepts God as the authority over all creation, participates in acts honoring God, and respects the Catholic conscience of the citizens.” This was certainly not the reasoning of a liberal democrat, but neither did it have much in common with older forms of conservatism. The bishops were perilously close to reducing Catholicism to a “tribal” phenomenon, to be enshrined in the law of the state not because it was transcendentally true but because it corresponded to the national will. They demanded that the law respect “inherent human freedom, limiting it only as much as is required by the common welfare and safety,” but they also insisted, “The Republic of Poland ought to take into account the fact that the Church is the religious community of virtually the entire nation.”113 It is impossible to know whether the bishops used this rhetoric just because they considered it more effective under the circumstances, or whether documents like this signaled a more deeply internalized shift in their political theology. Either way, a linkage between deity and democracy had been established and would survive even as Church tactics changed. As the Stalinist regime tightened its grip, the bishops (those who remained out of prison) eventually retreated from their ambitious goals and sought compromises with the state. Nonetheless, their reasoning remained grounded in what they believed to be the will of the people. In a communiqué to the clergy in 1953 the bishops wrote, “A Catholic society has a good sense of what is appropriate for priests: they do not like politicians in cassocks or political arguments from the pulpit; they do not like priests who get riled up about political disputes. Leave those matters to the professional politicians.”114 Framing the issue in this way made it seem as though the Church’s withdrawal from politics was dependent upon the desires and attitudes of the laity in a “Catholic society”—a surprising position for a group of Polish bishops to take, until we recognize that they had already taken it as a given that true freedom in a Polish context would lead to God’s will. In other words, the bishops had accepted the equation between vox populi and vox dei, but only because they were taking it for granted that the vox Poloniae could express nothing but the divine will. The so-called open Catholics who gathered around periodicals like Znak (The Sign) and Tygodnik Powszechny were more inclined to base their arguments on a theological rather than a nationalist foundation and perceive the Church as a sacramental body rather than a civic institution. This might seem ironic at first glance, but it merely reflects a divide between those who had come to assume that popular will and divine will were the same in Poland and those who understood democracy to imply indeterminate outcomes. For the latter the Church needed a more solid grounding than any society or polity could ever provide. In these debates we see yet again how the familiar terminological pairings of left/

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right, worldly/transcendent, progressive/reactionary, and democratic/hierarchical break down in a Catholic context. It was precisely among these seemingly progressive Catholics that some of the old arguments against the logic of popular sovereignty held out the longest in Poland. Stanisław Stomma, a distinguished Catholic legal scholar and writer, provoked a storm of controversy with a 1946 article in Znak in which he called for his coreligionists to retreat from political engagement and focus instead on living individually as faithful Christians. He wrote, “The path on which Polish Catholics are traveling (and wish to travel) has its dangers, and it might lead to the overshadowing of religious-moral issues by current socio-political issues.” Catholics should be able to support a wide range of social models and political programs, Stomma argued, as long as they strove for justice and social cooperation and guaranteed the right to freely worship. Specifically he believed that Catholicism and Marxism could coexist, and that the Church should resist the temptation to oppose the political and social reforms then being introduced in Poland.115 Stomma was, in effect, pulling religion entirely out of the political realm because he recognized that different Catholics might support different political or economic agendas. Stomma’s essay was vehemently rejected by Józef Marian Święcicki on the pages of Tygodnik Powszechny, with arguments that harkened back to very old Catholic teachings. The political and social views of the Church, Święcicki asserted, were a fully consistent extrapolation from the fact that the Church has the Truth, so it cannot accept equal rights for error. Thus the tolerance which the Church proclaims differs from the tolerance that secularism proclaims. The Church recognizes tolerance for people and it does not permit the violation of human conscience, but it does not at all accept unlimited freedom of word and thought nor the propagation of divisive doctrines which poison the soul with their venom. Rather, it strives to defend the faithful from infiltration by evil and considers it the obligation of the state to cooperate in protecting the soul from corruption.116 Stomma then replied that Święcicki was unduly pessimistic: if one truly believed that the Church was established and protected by God, then no mere human ideology could destroy it. Instead of worrying about the vagaries of politics, the faithful should “preserve a distinction between the unchanging content of Christianity and the changing course of history.  .  .  . Identifying the Catholic cause with this or that political or social issue, or even with some particular culture, might overshadow that most essential content, which is a matter of pure humanity.”117 Obviously Stomma made no reference to the recent writings of the Episcopate—during the communist era no Catholic wanted to allow internal

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fissures to appear in public—but it was not hard to see this last line as a repudiation of the attempt to base Catholicism on Poland’s “tribal” character. At this point the editor of Tygodnik Powszechny, Father Jan Piwowarczyk, stepped into the debate to warn Stomma that any acceptance of Marxism could lead to self-destruction for the Church: Catholicism is not only a religious-moral dogma, explaining the relationship of man toward God; it is also a social ideology explaining and establishing norms for collective life. Both the first and second aspects belong to the essence of Catholicism. And Catholics who would surrender, for example, the defense of religious education for youth in the schools, the indissolubility of marriage, the rights of the human person, the status of private property as the foundation of the system—if they would surrender these values in order not to upset a stronger opponent, such Catholics would commit suicide.118 What is most striking about this debate is the terrain on which it was argued: none of these authors drew upon the logic of democracy, turning instead to pastoral or doctrinal reasoning. For them, whether Poland was or was not majority Catholic was beside the point, because the issues at stake were transcendent and universal. That is, both the opponents and the supporters of political engagement at Tygodnik Powszechny understood their challenge to be the preservation of the core of their faith under difficult circumstances. They disagreed about how to delineate that core and about which tactics would best protect it, but neither Stomma, Święcicki, nor Piwowarczyk considered political ambitions to be related to the demography of the Polish state or the will of the Polish nation. This strategy would prove to be hard to maintain in the decades to come, as it became more and more difficult to avoid the logic and terminology of popular sovereignty. Virtually by definition, Catholics of all varieties in Poland would always have recourse to a universalist perspective, and the idea that truth stood above democracy would be a point on which all could (indeed must) agree. Nonetheless, everyone from Primate Wyszyński to the most progressive contributor to Tygodnik Powszechny found themselves pulled into the discourse of democracy. For the former this entailed a growing commitment to nationalism; for the latter it precluded any lasting retreat from the goal of infusing Catholic content into Polish politics. Developments in the 1950s and 1960s brought the issue of the Polish Church’s public, political position into sharp relief. After communist reformers defeated their Stalinist rivals in 1956, overt oppression of the Church lessened considerably. The regime ceased trying to destroy Catholicism (for the short term, at least), hoping instead merely to contain its influence. They even established

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procedures for public school districts to teach catechism classes if parents requested them (though in practice administrative harasment made it very hard to sustain such courses).119 In a particularly surprising move they allowed Stomma (ironically the same individual who had once called for Catholics to pull back from political life) to organize what came to be known as the “Znak circle,” a group of Catholics who accepted parliamentary seats and occasionally spoke critically (albeit with great restraint) about specific government proposals. It would be an overstatement to label the Znak circle an opposition party—in fact, they were often criticized for accepting and thus legitimizing the institutions of the communist state—but they did constitute the only example of a more or less independent voice within any Soviet-bloc parliament. Granted, they never actually voted against any legislation, but in 1976 Stomma ostentatiously abstained during a vote on a constitutional revision that enshrined the leading role of the Polish United Workers Party (the communists). Though that act led to the dissolution of the Znak circle in the Sejm, Stomma remained a vocal critic of the party.120 Meanwhile, John XXIII’s aggiornamento provided space for a whole new approach to Catholic politics. The Second Vatican Council’s pastoral constitution, Gaudium et Spes, did not go so far as to call for a separation of Church and state, but it did decree that “the Church, by reason of her role and competence, is not identified in any way with the political community nor bound to any political system.” The bishops even granted, “Respect and love ought to be extended also to those who think or act differently than we do in social, political, and even religious matters. In fact, the more deeply we come to understand their ways of thinking through such courtesy and love, the more easily will we be able to enter into dialogue with them.”121 Jerzy Turowicz, the editor of Tygodnik Powszechny, interpreted such declarations to mean that “the Church has deliberately abandoned the ambition—one that has appeared so often in its history to this point—of even indirect mastery and rule over the world.”122 This was an exaggeration, at least as far as the Polish Church was concerned. Karol Wojtyła, in a later sermon, complained, “Nowadays there are attempts to push religion to the socalled private sphere. . . . Obviously, religion is an internal matter for every person. Yes—but that does not mean that it is only a private matter. It is a social matter also.”123 To be sure, few spoke any longer about “mastery” or “rule over the world,” but there were virtually no calls from Polish Catholics to remove the state altogether from the Church’s sphere of influence. Even as they participated in the Second Vatican Council in 1966 (perhaps because they absorbed the messages of the Council), the Polish Episcopate declared that they would remain vigilant against any attempts to “lock the Church in the sacristy.”124 The Second Vatican Council had used the words freedom and liberty in many of its proclamations, but this did not necessarily imply an acceptance of the

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indeterminate outcomes of liberal democratic politics. Priests in Poland often predicted that when religion was removed from public life, “genuine freedom” gave way to swawola, a term that imperfectly translates as “licentiousness” or “decadence” but connotes more specifically the unrestrained exercise of free will (wola). For example, Bishop Zygmunt Kamiński of Lublin, in a sermon recorded by the Security Service in 1980, said that public speech was dangerously mismanaged by both sides in the cold war. In the communist world, he complained, the media was allowed to broadcast “atheist” messages while the Word of God was silenced, whereas “in the West people have too much freedom. If someone has a lot of money, he can go to a printer and say ‘I have five thousand pornographic photographs and I want to publish them.’ Go right ahead—there are no prohibitions. Money is valued, not the person, not wisdom, only money.”125 On another occasion Kamiński even argued, “We are in a slightly better situation than those in the West. In the West the problem of freedom is taken to absurd lengths. In many places, for example, in London, in Hyde Park, anyone can come, stand on a sort of stool, and swear at the Queen of England and the Prime Minister, and say that all the policies of England are idiotic.”126 Along the same lines, the Bishop of Wrocław, Bolesław Cardinal Kominek, expressed satisfaction in 1972 that “militant atheism” was no longer being spread in Poland as vigorously as it had once been, but he worried that things had only gotten worse in the West. There, he said, “the so-called liberal life” had brought with it “some sort of personal freedom, a freedom which very often manifests itself as swawola, which is not true freedom, because true freedom must be disciplined and must never harm others. [In the West] freedom is, one might say, excessive; it is complete, absolute freedom.”127 Those at Tygodnik Powszechny longed for the legal right to stand in a park and call the prime minister an idiot, but despite their differences, all segments of the Polish Catholic Church agreed that liberty had to be more than just the absence of constraint. Bringing religion into the public realm, they would all agree, was vital precisely because doing so made it possible to imbue freedom with substantive content, to give liberty a goal. Jerzy Turowicz praised democracy, but he also maintained that its value was lost whenever it failed to promote “human dignity.” In 1978 he wrote, “Hungry people, the unemployed, and the illiterate need democratic institutions and civil freedoms also so that others can speak in their name, inform them of their rights, fight for their rights.” This paternalistic approach justified democracy as a means of advancing the cause of social morality, without being particularly concerned with the idea of popular sovereignty as such.128 From a much more conservative perspective, Bishop Kamiński defined freedom as the right to preach “the complete truth” in public. In his view freedom and truth were inextricably bound together: the former was legitimate only in the pursuit of the latter.129 Similarly, Bishop Ignacy Tokarczuk of Przemyśl said in

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1971 that “contemporary humanity” was beset by three main plagues: a “brutality” in social life, a lack of freedom, and a lack of truth. Those last two issues were linked, he preached, because people became genuinely free only when they sought the truth.130 A parish priest from Podkowa Leśna went even further, preaching that “freedom is limited to truth. Freedom is identical to truth. Everything that is true, is freedom. There is no freedom aside from truth. To seek truth is, in and of itself, freedom.”131 The common point that linked even such polar opposites as Kamiński and Turowicz was thus the desire to fill liberty with substantive content, to direct it toward a particular (Christian) purpose. Father Józef Tischner, another frequent contributor to Tygodnik Powszechny, was one of the few to sense that there was a logical tension here, which he characterized as the opposition between “freedom” and “rationality.” He defined the former as the desire for a political system in which one could do whatever one wished, and the latter as the awareness that certain outcomes within that system were more desirable than others. Unlike most of his coreligionists, Tischner recognized the authoritarian implications of the mandate to order our lives according to reason. As he put it, “The more there is freedom, the less things can be predicted. The more there is rationality, the more things are regulated a priori.” He wanted to escape from this duality: “To join the ideas of rationality and freedom one must come up with something else—a third idea to unify these opposites.” Writing with the optimism generated by the Solidarity movement in 1981, he believed that democracy could serve as this harmonizing idea, but only if it evolved into something loftier than a mere system of majority rule and individual rights. To truly serve freedom, a democratic state had to use its power to limit personal freedom whenever “human dignity” was threatened or whenever liberty began to undermine “the values indispensable for the life and survival of people and their communion.”132 More conservative priests than Tischner could remain within a democratic discourse only insofar as they could sustain the belief that the voice of Polish society was by definition the voice of God. Back in 1966 the Episcopate had issued a pastoral letter in which they hinted that the Catholic Church in Poland might not in fact be coterminous with the Polish nation. This acknowledgment virtually compelled them to choose between their earlier aspiration to build a Christian state and the democratic rhetoric of the Second Vatican Council. Although the Polish Nation is Catholic in an absolute majority and expresses its membership in the Church, nonetheless we, the bishops, do not consider ourselves to be for this reason the political leaders of the Nation. Our calling is different. We are the representatives of the Christian Church in the Polish Nation and our right to representation extends as far as the Polish national soul is internally cohesive with a

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sense of belonging to the Catholic Church. We speak as representatives of the Catholic society in the Polish nation, and we derive our right to a voice from our mission from Christ, from the service that we carry out in the Church.133 This passage, as difficult to analyze in Polish as in translation, followed the lead of the Second Vatican Council in formally eschewing any leadership role within the realm of politics. That itself was not problematic; as we have seen, Catholics had long spoken of a separate sphere for politics and religion on the assumption that the principles of the latter would govern the practices of the former. The novelty in this 1966 pastoral letter was the Episcopate’s suggestion that the boundaries of the Polish nation might, in theory, extend beyond the boundaries of the Polish Church. Insofar as the Polish “soul” lost its cohesion, this text implied, the Church would nonetheless remain a voice of universal truth. Following this logic would have led to the point of divergence between liberty and truth that Tischner described, to a point where Catholics would have to decide between sustaining democracy and building the Christian state. The easiest way to deal with this dilemma was to simply avoid the problem by assuming that the genuine Polish nation never would reach that point, thus rendering the issue moot. As long as that assumption was maintained, it was easy enough to critique authoritarianism and defend democracy. In 1963 the Episcopate had written that “truly democratic governments are the best expression of the needs of today’s societies,” but they clarified that within such societies “moral force” had to sustain authority. This was a not-so-subtle attack on the communists for using other forms of control, including “threats or fear of punishment” and “temptations of rewards.” But the flip side of the argument was that if Poland was ruled by a more righteous government, then the use of persuasion alone would be adequate to uphold properly structured values.134 During the crisis that ensued when striking workers and the army clashed in cities along the Baltic coast in 1970, the bishops issued a stunningly frank denunciation of the communist regime, one devoid of their usual cautious euphemisms. They argued that the “right of the nation to existence and autonomy” implied a series of subsidiary rights: —

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the right to freedom of conscience and the freedom of religious life, alongside the full normalization of relations between the Church and the state; the right to the free shaping of the culture of one’s own nation, in accordance with the spirit of the Christian principles of human coexistence;

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the right to social justice, demonstrated by the satisfaction of just demands; the right to truth in social life, to information in accordance with the truth, and to the free expression of one’s ideas and needs; the right to material conditions that guarantee a dignified existence for the family and for every citizen; the right of citizens to be treated so that they will in no way be insulted, harmed, or persecuted.135

In critiquing the communist government they were quick to denounce authority, but only because they took it for granted that “freedom” and “democracy” would lead to a victory for “the spirit of Christian principles.” The commitment to “the right of the nation to existence and autonomy” and to “the free shaping of the culture of one’s own nation” both rely on the assumption that a free Poland would also be a Catholic Poland. As a parish priest from Lublin told his congregation in 1981, Poland’s “thousand-year Christian tradition” had always protected “well conceived religious freedom,” but any promotion of atheism was “contrary to the opinion of a decisive majority of society,” and thus unacceptable.136 This priest did not—could not—ask what would happen if free elections were ever held and that “decisive majority” turned out to be unreliable. Karol Wojtyła also made freedom contingent upon the propagation of Christianity, albeit in a more subtle way. On Christmas day 1975 he gave what seems at first glance to be a ringing endorsement of civil rights: We want to give witness to the faith; we do give witness to the faith. However, that witness to the faith, that teaching of the Church must obtain the right of citizenship in social life, which is after all a Catholic society in its overwhelming majority. Freedom of speech, freedom of spoken and written speech, cannot be restricted, abolished, or pushed aside, for any other goals or according to any other concepts. It is a basic human right, it is a measure of respect for the person, simply for the person, in every state and in every system.137 Here we see an apparent endorsement of freedom of speech, but one framed in the context of “giving witness to the faith.” Because of Wojtyła’s conviction that Poland was overwhelmingly Catholic, he could trust that freedom would lead away from the errors of communism to the truth of Christianity. There is a huge qualification in the claim that freedom cannot be restricted for “any other goals” than Catholicism. Within this framework Catholics like Wojtyła were entirely comfortable with the slogans of freedom, liberty, rights, and democracy. As long as the nation stood as the guarantor of Catholic hegemony there was little need to

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discuss how, exactly, democracy might be structured so as to ensure the victory of truth. Wyszyński did offer some musings on this point in 1976, suggesting a franchise law that would grant “the father of the family” sole voting power, each man possessing as many votes as he had children (the primate made no mention of women’s suffrage).138 Such remarks were rare, however, as long as the communists ensured that elections remained meaningless and “the will of the people” was something to affirm rhetorically rather than something to measure at the ballot box. Then suddenly, in 1989, the communists were removed from power, free elections were reintroduced, and Catholics were presented with a whole new array of theoretical and practical problems. Decades of assuming their own predominance had allowed them to fully embrace the vocabulary of modern democracy, which equipped them well to participate in post-1989 political life but also left them vulnerable to deep disappointments when democracy did not bring the anticipated results. In the summer of 1989, after the communists had agreed to elections but before the vote had actually been held, Father Mieczysław Brzozowski of Lublin prepared a sermon distinguishing between Poland’s great moment of systemic change (which he believed to be characterized by a “religious-moral motivation”) and the liberation movements of the secular left. Brzozowski was confident that a distinctively Polish understanding of freedom would eschew the undirected and content-free liberty of the left, and instead establish the freedom to affirm or deny the truth. That sort of freedom was compatible with a state that actively promoted the Word of God. Whoever brings to realization the will of God blesses and perfects the earth. Whoever rejects that plan plunges the earth into a deep night, increases the sum of hatred, disorder, and chaos. Again—it is necessary to choose. It is necessary to decide. And only a free man can decide. By the will of God a basic duty of man is to seek the truth, to live in accordance with the truth and to proclaim the revealed truth. And that is possible only for a free man.139 Over the coming months Brzozowski’s confidence began to waver as he observed, “[Many Poles] think that to be free means to select between good and evil without simultaneously accepting responsibility for the choice they make.” Freedom, he preached, must not be simplistically equated with unchecked liberty to do whatever one wished, and “the abuse of freedom for bad ends” must be recognized as a form of “sacrilege.”140 Already in 1990 Brzozowski was less optimistic that Poland would follow a distinctively Catholic path to freedom. Too many people, in his view, saw freedom as “liberation from the commandments of moral laws.” This could lead only to an “unrestrained struggle for

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survival, a rush for possessions and pleasure, sexual freedom, divorce, alcoholism, drug abuse.”141 By 1991 we find Brzozowski vacillating between his desire for a Christian state and his rhetorical commitment to freedom, demanding on the one hand that the state remain ideologically and philosophically neutral and on the other hand calling for the legal establishment of the Church’s social teachings: The state must be shaped according to the norms of Christian social ethics. The state and its structures ought to be formed by the nation, because the state is the property of the nation and must serve the nation. The state may not be the property of any party, but it ought to give every party the possibility to function. The state cannot impose on anyone any ideology or philosophy, but it ought to guarantee to all the freedom to live in accordance with the principles they acknowledge. The state may not degrade the family, the nation, or the Church, but ought to guarantee the development of these social forms.142 John Paul II himself addressed this tension in his 1991 encyclical, Centesimus Annus, but in doing so he implicitly turned away from the old claim that Poland (or any other state) should be Catholic because of its demographic profile. He reaffirmed that political liberty was good, but he insisted that this did not imply that morality could be dependent upon the will of the majority: Nowadays there is a tendency to claim that agnosticism and skeptical relativism are the philosophy and the basic attitude which correspond to democratic forms of political life. Those who are convinced that they know the truth and firmly adhere to it are considered unreliable from a democratic point of view, since they do not accept that truth is determined by the majority, or that it is subject to variation according to different political trends. It must be observed in this regard that if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.  .  .  . Freedom attains its full development only by accepting the truth. In a world without truth, freedom loses its foundation and man is exposed to the violence of passion and to manipulation, both open and hidden.143 This view was also spelled out in the Catechism of 1992, which condemned authoritarianism and despotism while affirming, “There is no true freedom except in the service of what is good and just. The choice to disobey and do evil

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is an abuse of freedom and leads to the ‘slavery of sin.’ . . . By deviating from the moral law man violates his own freedom, becomes imprisoned within himself, disrupts neighborly fellowship, and rebels against divine truth.”144 An edited and slightly revised Polish translation of the catechism from 1999 added, “Many people are not able to profit from the gift of freedom. . . . Contemporary man, shaped with a sense that there are no limits to his freedom, is unwilling to submit to the Law that is contained in the Ten Commandments revealed on the pages of the Holy Book.” Instead, too many people succumb to the “delusion of freedom and the slavery that we bring upon ourselves by choosing evil.”145 The Vatican text called on legislators to help people remain within the freedom of truth by ensuring “that public morality and social progress are not gravely endangered through the misuse of the media” and by avoiding “laws or social structures leading to the decline of morals and the corruption of religious practice.”146 The Polish edition followed this passage with the warning, “It is necessary to shape the law so as to ensure the freedom of information, but on the other hand to defend good behavior [dobre obyczaje] and respect human dignity. It is also necessary to create conditions so that information will not constitute a source of social unrest.”147 On religious matters, the Vatican catechism taught, states should avoid external constraints while understanding that “religious liberty is neither a moral license to adhere to error, nor a supposed right to error.”148 Here the Polish edition reminded readers, “The social duty of a Christian is to respect and awaken in every person a love for truth and goodness. It is demanded of them that they work to propagate the only true religion, which exists in the Catholic and apostolic Church.”149 We can see in both versions of these texts a reaffirmation that God’s truth must take precedence over the popular will and a retreat from the once confident denial that in Poland there could ever be a discordance between the two. As the contours of the postcommunist political order took shape, disillusionment grew among the most active and devoted Catholics when it became evident that the new system would not reflect their beliefs. In 1990 the Episcopate issued a statement repudiating the idea of separating Church and state, demanding instead “the healthy cooperation [of Church and state] for the common good,” along with assurances of “mutual respect for the autonomy of both Church and state in their own spheres.” Self-described Catholic politicians were calling at the time for the following phrase, drawn from the constitution of the Second Republic, to be included in the new Constitution: “The Roman Catholic denomination, being the religion of the overwhelming majority of the nation, occupies in the Republic a leading position among denominations with equal rights [zajmuje w Rzeczypospolitej naczelne stanowisko wsrod rownouprawnionych wyznan].” One commentator even insisted that a constitution that kept religious out of public life would be a mark of “faithfulness to the communist tradition.”150 Those

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advocating such a formal legal confirmation of Catholicism’s leading role were strong enough to ensure that the debate over the new Constitution would last until 1997. To this day the Constitution is decried by the right as a betrayal of Poland’s Catholic tradition because it establishes what Church legal scholars call “axiological neutrality”; that is, it purports to grant equal status to competing worldviews. The main source of this dissatisfaction comes from the preamble, which includes a truly monumental first sentence: With concern for the existence and future of our Fatherland, which attained in 1989 the ability to autonomously and democratically determine its fate, we, the Polish Nation—all the citizens of the Republic, both those believing in God as the source of law, justice, goodness and beauty, as well as those not sharing this faith, but instead recognizing other sources for those universal values; equal in law and in duty vis-àvis the common good, Poland; thankful to our ancestors for their labors, for the struggle for independence paid for with enormous sacrifices, for a culture rooted in the Christian heritage of the Nation and in universal human values; joining with the best traditions of the First and Second Republics; obligated to pass on to future generations everything that is valuable from more than a thousand years of accomplishments; joined by ties of community with our countrymen scattered around the world; conscious of the need for cooperation with all countries for the good of the Human Family; remembering the bitter experiences of the times when fundamental freedoms and the rights of man were violated in our Fatherland; desiring once and for all to guarantee civil rights, while assuring that public institutions function honestly and efficiently; with a feeling of responsibility before God and before our own consciences; we hereby establish the Constitution of the Polish Republic as the fundamental law of the state, based on respect for freedom and justice, on a cooperative government, on social dialogue, as well as on the principle of empowering citizens and their collective institutions.151 This seemingly endless sentence was formulated by parliamentary negotiators, led by the longtime Catholic activist and Poland’s first noncommunist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, as a compromise between liberals and Catholic nationalists. But that was precisely the problem: such a compromise was by definition a surrender for the Church, because it accepted the legitimacy of multiple “axiological” perspectives, implicitly denying that any one of them could be enshrined as true. Some Polish Catholics have taken their disillusionment with liberal democracy to its logical conclusion (and beyond). Bishop Kazimierz Ryczan of Kielce

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went so far as to argue that draconian legislation should be passed to punish those who promoted dangerous ideas. “The agents of harmful philosophies of life ought to be pursued by the law with the same determination as it directs against the mafia,” he wrote. “After all, the negative consequences of their activities are much more harmful than the losses caused by the mafia.”152 Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, founder and director of the Radio Maryja network, has offered the slogan, “In the Gospels the word ‘tolerance’ does not appear.” He describes liberal parliamentary democracy as “a monstrous totalitarianism, probably worse than the last one, worse than communism,” because it forces on the nation a set of alien, cosmopolitan values. If the post-1989 regime was just as bad (or worse) than the one it replaced, Catholics needed to fight it with the same spirit of uncompromising rejection.153 Rydzyk is hardly marginal; he enjoys the support of several bishops and a sizable minority of Poland’s Catholic laity. Radio Maryja, which includes a mixture of devotional material and extremist rightwing political commentary, is heard by 5.9 million people a week (including 1.4 million who listen on a daily basis), and his newspaper, Nasz Dziennik, has a daily print run of 250,000.154 Alongside Rydzyk is a right-wing party called Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, or PiS for short), created by the twin brothers Jarosław and Lech Kaczyński. In 2005 PiS won both parliamentary and presidential elections on a platform that appealed to “Christian values.” As Jarosław Kaczyński, who became Prime Minister, put it in one of his party’s programmatic declarations, “Ensuring that Christian principles have a proper place in social life is a necessary component of the moral reform of the State.”155 PiS had hoped to replace the Polish Constitution with a new one that would begin with the following line: “In the name of Almighty God, We, the Polish Nation, giving thanks to Divine Providence for the gift of our restored independence. . . . ”156 They were unable to institute any constitutional changes because their parliamentary coalition collapsed after only two years, and although Lech Kaczyński remained president, his popularity fell steadily. As his term neared its conclusion in 2010, surveys showed that fewer than 20 percent of the electorate planned to vote for his reelection.157 He never had the chance to be voted out of office, however, because a tragic plane crash in April 2010 took the lives of Lech Kaczynski, his wife, and ninety-four other leading political, cultural, and military figures. This horrible accident further highlighted the links between PiS and the Catholic Church. Archbishop Stanisław Cardinal Dziwisz provoked a great deal of controversy by announcing that the president and his wife would be interred in the crypts underneath the Wawel Cathedral in Kraków, alongside the kings of Poland (and ironically right next to Józef Piłsudski). The cardinal called the president’s death “heroic” and said that he should “rest next to those who have distinguished themselves on behalf of the welfare of [the Polish] fatherland.”158 Jarosław

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Kaczyński was defeated in his attempt to replace his brother during the special election held in the wake of the crash, but thanks in part to the support he received from the clergy the results were surprisingly close (he got 36 percent of the vote in the first round and 47 percent in the run-off ). Many priests openly campaigned from the pulpit on his behalf, and Archbishop Marian Gołębiewski even said in a sermon, “I hope that someone describing this historical period years from now . . . will be able to write, ‘Poland stands through law and justice.’” Confronted later, the archbishop said that the phrase “law and justice” only coincidentally referred to PiS; after all, he explained, both words appear quite often in the Bible.159 The enmeshment of PiS and the Church grew more complicated in the months that followed the election, as supporters of the Kaczynski brothers tried to appropriate the symbolism of the cross for their cause. During the outpouring of grief after the plane crash, a group of scouts had erected a wooden cross along the sidewalk in front of the presidential palace, and this quickly became an informal pilgrimage site. When the new head of state, a center-right politician named Bronisław Komorowski, said that he was looking for a “more appropriate” place for this improvised monument, a group of self-proclaimed “defenders of the cross” announced their determination to block any relocation. They described the cross as both a symbol of Christian love and a mark of resistance against unspecified “elites” who were responsible for the plane crash and who were now trying to take over Poland on behalf of foreign powers and foreign values.160 Jarosław Kaczyński expressed his support to the “defenders” and accused Komorowski (himself a devout Catholic) of wanting to eliminate the Church from public life using methods even worse than the Stalinists.161 As pressure mounted to do something about the standoff, Church officials agreed to remove the cross to a nearby church. On August 3 a pair of young priests in vestments arrived to lead a procession that would take the cross to its new site, only to be confronted by a few dozen people blocking their way (along with a few thousand curious onlookers and untold more watching the episode on television). The “defenders” shouted ugly epithets at the priests and refused to move, and the relocation was called off. Only on September 16 was the cross finally moved (at night, with no advanced warning and no ceremony) to a chapel inside the presidential palace, where it will remain until emotions have settled and a more public space for its display can be established. I will explore the overblown conspiratorial rhetoric surrounding this episode in chapter 7; for now I just want to note how Kaczyński and his supporters pushed against the outer boundary of Catholic politics. A few days before the final relocation, the Episcopate finally called on people “to stop treating the cross as a tool in political disputes.”162 After a summer of explicit political engagement by so many priests and bishops, the highest Church leadership tried to put the genie of

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partisan engagement back into the bottle. In part they were motivated by fear of a backlash, in part by a recognition that a line had been crossed. As this volume goes to print at the beginning of 2011, several controversies are heating up about the role of the Church in Polish public life, and for the first time in decades explicit anticlericalism is being used as a successful tool for political mobilization. During the turmoil of the past summer the Church’s approval rating fell a record ten points (from 64 percent to 54 percent).163 This is a familiar pattern, even if the intensity of today’s debate is greater. During the first fully free elections in 1991 the bishops and many members of the clergy unabashedly endorsed specific candidates and parties. This proved to be disastrous; not only did their favorites do poorly in the election, but this display of partisanship provoked a strong negative response from the Catholic laity (many of whom had supported other parties).164 A survey taken in 1993 asked, “Do the activities of the Catholic Church serve society well?” Forty-eight percent said they did not, compared to a 90 percent positive response in 1989—a stunning turnaround in a mere four years.165 During the next round of elections, later in 1993, the Episcopate took greater care to ensure that priests did not openly endorse any party by name, restricting themselves to general statements about the importance of upholding Christian principles when making electoral choices. This restraint, however, did not last: in advance of local elections in October 2002 the Episcopate issued a statement reminding voters how “important it is [to] elect people who are guided by the social teachings of the Church,” and many individual priests were happy to say who those people were.166 During the two years that PiS held power (2005–7) the Church seemed thoroughly politicized, whether the hierarchy liked it or not. Even the Vatican took notice, and during the ad limina visits of the Polish bishops in January and February 2006 Pope Benedict XVI instructed them to crack down on clerical partisanship. In early April of that year the nuncio in Poland issued an open letter to the Episcopate reiterating (and making public) the pope’s concerns.167 Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek, a longtime opponent of Radio Maryja, said at the time, “The Church does not support only one political party, so media speaking for the Church cannot support only one political party.”168 Despite such affirmations of disengagement, however, nearly two-thirds of Poles surveyed in May 2006 (at a time when PiS was in power) thought that the Church’s political involvement was excessive.169 In other words, both the Vatican and a large number of the Polish laity perceive an outer limit to Catholic politics: it was one thing to demand that Catholic values and teachings inform the policies of the state, but another to openly align the Church with a specific political party. Quite a number of priests and bishops have crossed that line over the past twenty years, but the ensuing controversies demonstrated how close they were to the edge. But if explicit partisanship provokes debate and sometimes even disciplinary warnings, so too does the other extreme: the abandonment of the goal

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of Christianizing the state. For the past two decades some Catholics in Poland have been predicting that alligning the Church with the political right would lead to disaster, and a few of them have responded by repudiating the very idea of Christian politics. The late editor of Tygodnik Powszechny, Jerzy Turowicz, wrote as far back as 1990 that the Church had to accept a new role in a democratic Poland, remaining neutral in all political debates.170Father Józef Tischner similarly argued in 1995 that the Church should “finally break with the temptation to ‘politicize the Sacrum,’” and he condemned those who used the adjectives Christian and Catholic for political parties.171 Such views, however, received very little support. A much more common response among moderate Catholics is exemplified by Jarosław Gowin, a parliamentary delegate in the Civic Platform Party (the group that succeeded PiS in power in 2007) and the former editor of the Catholic monthly Znak. Writing back in 1999 he lamented that so many of his coreligionists had been “led astray” after the fall of communism. Many in the Church, he recalled, had been confident in 1989 that once free elections came, a Catholic majority would smoothly take over and create a country that was “democratic in form and Catholic in content” (an ironic play off the old Stalinist phrase). When the new Poland did not match their imaginings, these people explained the failure by resorting to conspiracy theories that positioned the Polak-Katolik as the besieged target of an international anti-Christian campaign, lumping liberals and communists together as different manifestations of an enemy that had not yet been properly vanquished. But unlike Tischner, Gowin did not call for the Church to respond to these developments by pulling away from political life; instead, he suggested that Catholics should embrace the rules of democracy but work on “society” in order to ensure Christian outcomes: Insofar as the separation of the state from the Church is a condition of a stable democracy, the separation of the Church from society—in other words, the lessening of the moral influence of Church teachings on the bearing and behavior of the citizens—is a danger not only for religion (which by its nature includes the public behavior of the faithful), but also for democratic order. Contemporary democracy finds itself, therefore, in a phase of moral crisis. The role of the Church, Gowin believed, was to instill society with an “ethos” that would guide citizens and their representatives, preserving “the presence of religious inspiration in public life alongside the simultaneous preservation by the institutions of the Church of an authority that transcends partisanship.”172 Once again we see the concept of popular sovereignty fitting comfortably alongside a Catholic understanding of social morality, and an ecclesiology that defines

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the Church as the bearer of both. The arrangement of these three items, however, had changed a great deal since the Episcopate’s 1947 assertion that Poland’s “tribal character” demanded a Catholic state. Gowin was starting from the opposite assumption, deducing from election results that Catholicism no longer defined Polish society. What Wyszyński had once taken as an unchanging historical reality was posited by Gowin as a condition that might be created in the future if his recommendations were followed. Several prominent members of the clergy have advocated this approach to re-Christianizing Polish society. Archbishop Józef Życiński of Lublin, widely seen as the most progressive member of the Polish Episcopate, wrote in 1995 that he did “not believe in the possibility of a democratic society existing in which no values not dependent upon the opinion of the majority were recognized.”173 Elsewhere he described his fear of a future dominated by “liberal totalitarianism”—a world in which there would be “no values other than freedom, understood in an extremely egoistic manner.”174 But he came to favor pastoral outreach over law, arguing in 2000 that the Church needed to navigate between “the Scylla of totalitarianism and the Charybdis of relativism.” This path, he believed, led through a process of dialogue with nonbelievers and the consistent preaching of a Christian message to anyone who would listen.175 Życiński’s predecessor in Lublin, Archbishop Emeritus Bolesław Pylak, claimed in 1993 that the Church would never pose a threat to democracy because it worked only for the “evangelization of social life,” so that citizens would bring Christian values into the public domain. He did note, however, that the state should do all in its power to help the Church accomplish this task, and that the ideal situation would be one of “cooperation between spiritual and secular authorities.”176 This last observation demonstrates that the retreat from state to society is just a tactical consideration. The ultimate goal of Christianizing the public sphere remains. There is, to be sure, some space within Polish Catholicism today for private religiosity and the endorsement of a high wall between politics and faith. Some—but not much. In 1996 a group of Catholic scholars published a book called From a Church of the People to a Church of Choice, in which they confronted what they perceived to be a transformation in Polish religious culture. In the past, these authors claimed, the Church in Poland had been tightly bound to the nation, penetrating Polish society on almost every level. The result was a highly bureaucratized and institutionalized Church on the one hand, and a popular culture saturated with religious rituals on the other. Almost no one consciously decided to be a Christian, they argued, because it was taken for granted that to be Polish was to be Catholic. As a result, very few thought about their faith in anything but the most superficial manner, and Catholicism became nothing but a set of cultural practices deprived of meaning. The Church in turn concentrated

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more on sustaining its social and political position than on the spiritual well-being of individual believers. Because of tectonic shifts in social and cultural life in the late twentieth century, these authors continued, the “religion of the people” was doomed and would inevitably be replaced by a more personalized faith, a “religion of choice” that coexisted with many other options in a marketplace of ideas. Few of the contributors to this volume were actually willing to embrace the new religious landscape. One of the authors, Father Władysław Piwowarski, wrote, “Society continues to find itself in a state of anomie; it is disillusioned and is experiencing hopelessness. Against this backdrop, it needs a Church of the people more than a Church of choice.” He sadly acknowledged, however, “Although even recently the Church overlapped the entire society, currently it is becoming one segment of that society. . . . This is an irreversible process, and thus the sooner it is understood, the better for democracy.”177 Writing elsewhere in 1997 Father Janusz Mariański urged his coreligionists to defend their “Church of the people,” because to do otherwise would be to turn Catholicism into a “distinct counter-culture, hostile to the entirety of society.” Mariański recognized that some Catholics would be devout and deeply committed, and others would be less so, but he believed this was the only way the Church could retain its identification with Polish society and not become merely one sect among many.178 The “Church of choice” model remains unpopular among the clergy, in part because it defies the ongoing mandate to prioritize truth over the vicissitudes of democracy, and in part because it would require abandoning the link between Church and nation that gave Catholics access to the rhetoric of modern participatory politics in the first place. If hypocrisy is the price that vice pays to virtue, then spin and evasion are the prices that doctrinal consistency pays to opposing popular sentiments. It is difficult in Poland today for Catholics to defend the idea that religion is strictly a private concern, but it is equally controversial to argue that the Church should be openly and directly involved in political life. Although Rydzyk and his colleagues at Radio Maryja are undeniably operating within the boundaries of Polish Catholicism as it currently stands, a huge number of Catholics consider such explicit partisanship to be scandalous. Meanwhile, though, French laïcité or even the American First Amendment would be hard to support from a Catholic position in Poland. Few priests or engaged laypeople embrace the “Church of choice” model, and few would accept that Catholicism is just one religion among many in a marketplace of faith that is walled off from a neutral, secular public sphere. Thus we face once again a gap between the sentiments of the Catholic community and the implications of Catholicism. For now there are few signs that this divergence has reached a point of crisis, so for the time being Polish Catholics are walking an increasingly fine line between open partisanship

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and genuine disengagement from the political realm. The clergy usually obscures electoral endorsements and policy demands with euphemisms and generalities, and the majority of the laity continues to carry out (most of) the duties of their faith even if they resent and ignore the political allusions of their parish priests. Whatever happens in the years to come, the ongoing political engagement of the Catholic Church in Poland should not be viewed as some sort of historical remnant, a set of antiquated attitudes out of place in a country that hopes to integrate with “modern” and “progressive” Europe. To be sure, Catholic politics in Poland is often antiliberal and anti-European (in the sense of being opposed to the EU). It is, however, no less a product of its era than is liberalism itself. The commitment to Christianize public life is supported by a discursive formation that embeds words like democracy, freedom, and liberty into a religious vocabulary (or perhaps the other way around). The quintessentially modern understanding of political power and authority represented by Radio Maryja would be just as alien and disturbing to a conservative nineteenth-century Catholic as would the views of Tygodnik Powszechny.

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The Nation Penitent

It goes without saying that Polish nationalism is inextricably linked with the Roman Catholic Church, but as with most things thus unspoken, a great deal actually needs to be said.1 As we saw in chapter 5, the nineteenth-century Church preached political docility and deference and was generally hostile toward a Polish national movement that repeatedly staged violent insurrections. Even setting aside concerns about obedience to authority, it should not be surprising that an institution claiming to be catholic (that is, universal) would have some reservations about an ideology that politicized particularism. As the newspaper Przegląd Katolicki argued in 1905, good Catholics should unite with “all the tribes [plemiona] professing the same faith, and guard against the kind of aggressive nationalism that could antagonize the tribes [szczepy] related to us. Let us extend to them a hand for the sake of the common struggle, for the welfare that is equally dear to us all. We should not even think about Polonizing them—quite the contrary, we should help each other win as many freedoms as possible for developing our respective tribal qualities.”2 Already in the early years of the twentieth century, however, a rapprochement between the Church and the Polish national movement was well under way. Within a few short decades many came to believe that a Pole was by definition a Roman Catholic, and that the Church constituted the moral and cultural underpinning of the nation. When the hyphenated term Polak-Katolik (Pole-Catholic) came into common usage during the interwar years, it was used to label an ideal that may not always have existed in reality, but that constituted (for some) the true essence of Polishness. Even the most ardent proponents of this goal, however, had to cope with the legacy of a century’s worth of Vatican hostility. Ultimately it was necessary to reconceptualize both “Pole” and “Catholic” in order to create the Polak-Katolik. In the following four chapters I will explore this contentious and protracted process of reconciling Catholicism with nationalism in Poland. I begin in this chapter with a consideration of how devout Catholics managed to remain loyal 208

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to both their faith and their nation at a time when the institutional voices of the Church roundly condemned the national movement. In short, they could do so by evoking a distinctly Catholic historiosophy, one that allowed them to hope for independence without engaging in any acts of insurrection or political disobedience. In chapter 7 I will discuss the problems that emerged as Catholics and nationalists grew closer together in the early decades of the twentieth century, bringing the “love thy enemy” ethics of the former into confrontation with the “struggle for survival” ideology of the latter. As the Ecclesia Militans (Church Militant) became literally militant during the interwar years, Catholic texts depicted a massive plot to destroy Christian civilization, and in chapter 8 I focus on the group that most interwar Polish Catholics imagined to be at the core of that conspiracy: the Jews. Finally, chapter 9 will show how the Polak-Katolik ideal took shape against the backdrop of these anti-Semitic visions. The title of this book, Faith and Fatherland, could serve as a battle cry, because at the point where Church and Nation met stood a vision of existential struggle. As I noted in the introduction, the medieval and early modern Polish-Lithuanian Republic was one of the most religiously diverse states in Europe, and before the early seventeenth century the nobles of that polity perceived their community in a way that transcended what we would call “ethnicity.” But only a half century after the Warsaw Confederation enshrined an expansive definition of us by declaring, “We who are divided by faith will keep peace among ourselves,” some were trying to establish a religiously homogeneous identity. In 1632 a delegate to the electoral Sejm would say to his Protestant peers, “Your faith is like a visitor that wandered in from foreign lands, while the Catholic faith was and is like a mistress in her own home. So you can do only as much as you are permitted.”3 At the time such views were hotly contested, but they were later reinforced by a series of foreign invasions and domestic rebellions popularly known as “the Deluge.” During several horrific decades of war the Republic was nearly destroyed by simultaneous attacks from the Protestant Swedes, the Orthodox Muscovites and Cossacks, and the Muslim Ottomans. Needless to say, it was not hard to interpret this particular cluster of conflicts in religious terms. When in the course of the fighting the Swedes besieged the monastery of Jasna Góra in Częstochowa, the equation of Poland with Catholicism was buttressed by a myth of enduring power. After the siege failed, King Jan Kazimierz (already a fervent Catholic) staged an elaborate ceremony at which he formally crowned the icon of the Virgin of Częstochowa as “Queen of Poland” (with consequences that I will explore in chapter 10). This highly charged symbolic move was followed by unprecedented legal measures to enforce religious homogeneity, and soon publicists were describing Poland-Lithuania as the antemurales christianitatis (the bastion of Christianity—one of many countries to use this label). All this

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contributed to a demographic shift of enormous proportions: by the mideighteenth century roughly 80 percent of the Republic’s population adhered to either Latin-Rite or Eastern-Rite Catholicism—far more than had ever been the case before.4 By the time of the partitions the Church owned about 17 percent of the land, and the archbishop of Kraków was the third wealthiest member of the European Episcopate (only the archbishops of Strasbourg and Toledo surpassed him).5 But the story does not end there, because the attempted transformation of the diverse and heterodox Polish-Lithuanian Republic into a distinctly Catholic polity began to unravel at the end of the eighteenth century. The Polish Enlightenment was somewhat less hostile to organized religion than were its counterparts elsewhere in Europe, but many of the political and cultural reformers of the day were outspoken anticlericals.6 When a new Constitution was introduced on May 3, 1791, many in the Church hierarchy opposed it. Although the text affirmed the leading role of Catholicism, the shadow of the French Revolution ensured that most priests would view any such reforms with great suspicion. After Tsar Catherine the Great sponsored a puppet junta to help justify military intervention (the co-called Confederation of Targowica) her efforts were praised publicly by Pope Pius VI. Four bishops were among the confederates, and the papal nuncio tried to persuade King Stanisław August to join them.7 Angry mobs later lynched two of those bishops, and the others had to flee to safety. When Poland’s neighbors proceeded to partition the country out of existence in 1795, the position of the Catholic Church was unclear. On the one hand, the state that had just been destroyed had become dangerously infected with revolution (something most Catholics already saw as a fatal and highly contagious ailment); on the other hand, the partitioning powers included Orthodox Russia, Protestant Prussia, and Josephinian Austria. Pius VI protested the destruction of Poland, but he also condemned the ensuing rebellion of 1795, a desperate attempt led by a revolutionary named Tadeusz Kościuszko, who promised to emancipate the serfs and implement the promises of the May 3 Constitution.8 The early nineteenth century was, in the words of the historian Jerzy Kłoczowski, “the period of greatest decline in the history of Polish Christianity.”9 In all three partitions the Church lost wealth and power: in Prussia the Church was stripped of its landholdings almost immediately; in Russia a more gradual dispossession stretched over many decades; and in Habsburg Galicia the Church was subjected to Joseph II’s centralizing reforms.10 In Russia and Prussia the clergy had to grow accustomed to an unfamiliar status as a minority faith, one that state authorities looked upon with some suspicion.11 Of course, throughout the nineteenth century the majority of those who spoke Polish were also baptized into the Catholic faith, but the national movement at the time would not limit their concept of Polishness to a mere linguistic community. Until at least

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the 1860s the “Polish Question” referred to the multiethnic and multidenominational Polish-Lithuanian Republic, and most patriotic activists coupled their dreams of independence with far-reaching social, economic, and political reform agendas.12 In this environment, a profound gulf opened up between the institutions of the Church and the national movement. Eleonora Ziemięcka, an ultramontane Catholic loyal to the pope and skeptical about the national movement, remembered, “In the Kingdom, I was totally alone; alone, because among all the educated people, among all the writers and the publishers of periodicals emerging at that time, not one shared my views.”13 If the situation for Catholicism was difficult in Warsaw, Poznań, and Kraków, it was even worse among the approximately seven thousand émigrés who fled Poland after the defeat of the 1830 insurrection.14 Rome ostentatiously shunned the exiles; Gregory XVI not only demanded that the Polish Question never be mentioned in his presence, but for several years he refused to grant audiences to any Polish émigrés. Polish refugees were not even permitted to enter the Papal States in the 1830s, on the presumption that they would spread revolution.15 In 1842 Father Piotr Semeneńko and a handful of colleagues organized a new religious order, the Society for the Resurrection of the Lord (commonly known as the Zmartwychwstańcy, or Resurrectionists), with the purpose of (re)converting the émigrés. As he acknowledged in a letter to a friend in 1836, the task was a daunting one: “I remember the time I used to say to myself: there are six of us! Six in the entire emigration who made a public profession of faith of belonging to Jesus Christ! Then there were seven of us, now eight; but that went at a turtle’s pace. Finally there were ten of us and shortly after twelve. Twelve, a very prestigious number for a start.”16 When Walery Wielogłowski dedicated his book Poland and God to Pope Pius IX in 1846, he prefaced it with an open letter to the pontiff apologizing for his country’s sins and giving assurances that Poland would eschew its revolutionary ways. This was not a promise that he would be able to keep.17 Even as clerical loyalism and papal hostility was leading to an estrangement between patriotic activists and the Church, the partitioning powers were squeezing Catholicism from the opposite direction. Conversion from Orthodoxy to Catholicism was a crime in the Russian Empire; monasteries unable to demonstrate their “utility” were closed down (this measure eventually eliminated 202 houses, leaving only eighty-nine surviving); and strict regulations were enforced to ensure that children in mixed marriages were raised in the Orthodox faith. Bishoprics were routinely left empty because Petersburg demanded that candidates recognize the state’s authority over clerical training and appointments. The Polish bishops had demonstrated their loyalty to the Russian state, but they drew the line when it came to the Church’s internal administration—a non possumus issue that would arise in many countries in the

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nineteenth century. Because of these conflicts, the Diocese of Wilno had no bishop for sixty-two of the 123 years of Polish statelessness, and the Archdiocese of Warsaw was without leadership for fifty-eight of those years (including one protracted gap from 1837 to 1857).18 The Church’s administrative problems become obvious if we survey the number of bishops in the seven dioceses of the Polish Kingdom (a nominally autonomous section of the Russian Empire) during the years between the two major nineteenth-century rebellions (see chart opposite).19 All those empty bishoprics suggest how difficult the situation was for the Catholic Church in the Russian Empire, but in acknowledging this we must not simply equate the Polish-Russian conflict with the Catholic-Russian conflict. The Church was fighting for its ecclesiastical rights and religious privileges against a centralizing and (slowly) modernizing state bureaucracy, and the ensuing conflicts were comparable to those seen in nineteenth-century France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and many other states. Moreover, although Poles dominated the Catholic hierarchy in the Russian Empire, by no means were all the tsar’s Catholic subjects Polish (whether one defines this term according to language or self-identification). Indeed those Catholics we would today label Ukrainians and Belarusians suffered far more religious oppression than those we would label Poles, because the Eastern-Rite Catholic Church was entirely outlawed, first in 1838 in the lands that had been absorbed directly into the Russian Empire, and then in 1875 in the Polish Kingdom. After the first ban, a million and a half people were forcibly converted to Russian Orthodoxy; after the second, 270 parishes were converted and all but sixty-nine priests were stripped of their clerical status.20 Only a tiny minority of these Greek Catholics spoke the Polish language or self-identified as Poles. In short, the Catholic Church in the Russian Empire endured everything from administrative harassment to outright oppression, but much of this suffering was directed at Catholicism rather than Polishness. The two often overlapped, but they were not the same. In the early 1860s some activists from the nationalist movement hit upon a strategy that they hoped would bring them greater public exposure while simultaneously providing some protection from the police. On the assumption that the Russian gendarmes would hesitate to enter a sacred building, the leaders of the underground began staging protest rallies inside those churches with pastors sympathetic to the patriotic cause. (There were several such dissident priests in Warsaw, though fewer in the provinces.) Archbishop Antoni Fijałkowski condemned this practice in no uncertain terms. He ordered priests to sustain an atmosphere of “prudence and moderation” and to restrict their sermons to religious themes: “Our task is to guide the people along the path of religion and morality to God, to Christian virtue, to the understanding and the faithful fulfillment of the duties of our estate.”21 But Fijałkowski’s loyalism had little impact; in

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fact, when he died later that same year (October 1861) his funeral was transformed by national activists into a patriotic demonstration. Having discovered that religious occasions could be easily exploited, the leaders of the independence movement increasingly took advantage of the apparent security of the churches to propagate their message of national salvation. A turning point came on October 14, 1861 (shortly after Fijałkowski’s funeral), when the Russians declared martial law in Warsaw. On the next day illegal meetings were held in several churches, perhaps in a deliberate attempt to goad the gendarmes into action. If that was the goal, it worked: the police stormed two churches, provoking an enormous scandal. Because Fijałkowski had not yet been replaced, the cathedral vicar took responsibility for closing all of Warsaw’s churches, claiming that their sanctity had been violated. This story seemed to augur a convergence of the Catholic and national causes, but at the time the scandal was not used to reinforce such a linkage. In fact, the most dramatic aspect of the episode spun the symbolism in the opposite direction, because Warsaw’s Protestant Churches and Jewish synagogues were also closed in a vivid display of national unity that transcended all denominational distinctions. When Pius IX and Alexander II finally agreed on a new archbishop, their choice of Zygmunt Feliński ensured that relations between the Church and the national movement would remain tense. Not only was Feliński tainted by the tsar’s approval, but he had previously served as rector of the Catholic Theological Academy in Petersburg, the only seminary in the empire and a well-known source of loyalism. An anonymous open letter delivered to Feliński on the day prior to his ordination as archbishop warned, “Even if you, Archpastor and Father, do not join us in support of our cause . . . we will not back down from our task, for which we have already bled, because our guide is the Cross of Christ, which leads to resurrection along the path of martyrdom.” This Christian allusion was misleading, for the authors went on to chastise Feliński precisely because he placed his religion above his patriotic obligations. “Before you became a Pastor-Diplomat of the Church Militant under the protection of the Tsar,” they wrote, “you were already a citizen of Poland, the duties of which no consideration can annul.” The new archbishop confirmed the fears of the nationalists: he reopened the churches, banned the singing of patriotic hymns, and forbade the use of church buildings for anything but strictly religious functions.22 The national movement responded by trying to drive a wedge between Feliński and the rest of the clergy with a new underground magazine called Głos Kapłana Polskiego (The Voice of the Polish Priest). In the first issue an anonymous author charged, “Under the scarlet robes and the miter of Father Feliński hides one of those false prophets against whom Christ told us to be on guard. . . . Every day brings us all sorts of new evidence that Father Feliński does not care for the country at all, that his heart is divided between Petersburg and Rome, and that

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he wants to make the clergy apathetic about the fate of the Fatherland, to turn it into an ultramontane caste that would have nothing in common with the nation.”23 Anticlericalism was common in underground periodicals, but it was almost always accompanied by an attempt to recruit a patriotic segment of the clergy. The editors of a magazine called Prawdziwy Patriota (The True Patriot) wrote in 1862 that many priests demonstrated “beautiful civic feelings, confirmed by actions many times,” and that they should not be slandered by association with those who were “weak or perverse” enough to betray their nation: “Just as Judas did not weaken the faith of the Apostles with his treason . . . so too the treason and transgressions [of some priests] do not weaken the faith in our hearts and do not take away our trust in God’s justice.”24 To reinforce this argument the insurgents frequently (and sometimes outrageously) misrepresented Rome’s response to the revolt. When Archbishop Feliński ordered priests to stop singing patriotic hymns, Strażnica (The Watchtower) reported that Pope Pius IX himself had approved the songs and that the archbishop was defying the Holy Father. Rumors that the Vatican was opposed to the Polish national movement, the magazine assured its readers, were just part of a Russian disinformation campaign.25 Meanwhile, the insurgents deployed their own religious iconography and terminology. A leading figure in the revolt, Antoni Giller, later wrote that “patriotism extended its hand to the Church” in 1863, trying to integrate “philosophy and faith, democracy and love, progress and tradition” so that “all patriotic aspirations were simultaneously pious sighs.”26 Strażnica frequently tossed out phrases like “Let us go forward as we have henceforth, in the name of God, and we will reach our goal.”27 The official organ of the underground leadership, Ruch (The Movement), assured readers, “God, who always blesses the cause of freedom, will quickly grant us victory over the enemy!”28 A magazine targeted specifically for the peasantry even began its first issue, “May Jesus Christ be praised! In the name of the almighty Savior, who suffered death on the martyr’s cross for all mankind, we greet and salute you, beloved brothers. Whoever is with God, God is also with him.”29 Nowiny Polityczne Polskie (The Polish Political News) proffered the slogan “Forward, Nation of Poland, in the name of God, with the slogan of Jesus and Mary!”30 Elsewhere this magazine spoke of the uprising in terms of a centuries-old struggle between “Christian freedom” and “pagan despotism” and assured readers, “Our armor is faith, hope, and love; our weapons are the sling of the shepherd David; our slogans are the sweet names of Jesus and Mary.”31 So what are we to make of this flood of Christian rhetoric in 1863? Some of the nationalists were attempting to appear pious in an effort to win over the (presumably) devout peasantry; others were doubtless sincere in their expressions of faith. In either case, many Europeans at the time were startled to see

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revolutionaries who appeared to be so openly religious, and the 1863 insurrection is often cited as evidence of the unusually close connection between Catholicism and Polish nationalism. This is only part of the story, though, because there was a consensus among the rebels that membership in the Polish nation extended beyond the boundaries of Roman Catholicism. Strażnica pledged to fight for “equal rights for every son of our land, regardless of estate, heritage, or faith” and insisted that “the Catholic, the Orthodox, the Uniate, the Protestant, the Armenian, the Jew, the Muslim—all are Poles despite religious differences.”32 Similarly, Prawdziwy Patriota believed, “Whoever lives on this great expanse of land that has been called Poland for centuries, regardless of faith, estate, sex, or age, is a Pole.”33 These examples could be multiplied many times over. In almost every case, when the rebels evoked God’s protection using explicitly Christian imagery they quickly proceeded to emphasize their denominational inclusivity. In fact, shortly after the 1863 rebellion one Catholic writer argued that no one faithful to Rome could support the nationalist cause because a Polish patriot might well be “a Muscovite, a Jew, or a Turk.” This anonymous Poznanian reminded his readers that “a Christian can only establish fraternal bonds with other Christians,” and insisted that only by subordinating oneself to “the goals of God” (rather than the goals of religiously indifferent nationalists) could one truly be free.34 The ambivalent relationship between the Church and the national movement is evident in one of the most popular patriotic songs of the mid-nineteenth century, Kornel Ujejski’s “From the Smoke of the Fires.” Priests tended to view this song with a great deal of unease, even though it was cast as a prayer. If one listened to all six verses, one heard a moving tale of a Polish patriot’s fall into religious doubt, followed by repentance and salvation. However, if only the first few verses were sung—as was probably the case, because the entire song takes more than ten minutes to complete—then the meaning was ambiguous. The immediate inspiration for the song was the infamous “Galician Massacre” of 1846, when a failed national uprising in Kraków contributed to the outbreak of a bloody peasant uprising (with Polish-speaking peasants killing hundreds of Polish-speaking nobles). The lyrics began, “From the smoke of the fires, from the ashes of fraternal blood; / To You, Lord, this voice rises up; / A horrible accusation, a final cry.” This plea did not so much beseech God for aid as berate Him for holding back His assistance. “We no longer know any songs that do not include accusations,” Ujejski wrote, as he complained that the Poles continually rose up against their enemies with the conviction that God would protect them, but each time, “in accordance with [God’s] will, the enemy crushed us.” By the penultimate verse Ujejski asked God only, “Let the flower of martyrdom lull us to sleep with its fragrance; / let the radiance of martyrdom shine upon us.” In other words, recognizing that divine intervention would not be forthcoming,

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Ujejski expressed hope that God would accept Polish blood as a sacrifice. It was only when (or if) singers reached the final verse that they encountered a suggestion of hope: And with Your archangel in the lead, We will go into the great battle, And in the twitching body of Satan, We will plant your banner of victory. We will open our hearts for our misguided brothers, The baptism of freedom will wash away their guilt; Then the vile blasphemer will hear Our answer: “God was and is.” The complexity of this message is exemplary of the sort of Christianity articulated by national activists in the mid-nineteenth century. For all their evocations of crosses and martyrdom, they were filled with doubts about God’s attitude toward the Polish cause, and even more suspicious of the institutions of the Church. Theirs was ultimately a gospel of national salvation, despite the occasional deployment of (often formulaic and clichéd) religious catch-phrases. Thanks to songs like “From the Smoke of the Fires,” nationalists could preserve some Catholic imagery even as they resisted the influence of the loyalist clergy. To be sure, quite a few members of the late nineteenth- or early twentiethcentury intelligentsia (particularly those subjected to tsarist rule) came to the conclusion that they had to make a choice between Catholicism and the nation. A survey conducted in 1914 among the student body of Jagiellonian University in Kraków found that 77 percent of the students who had been raised in the Russian partition described themselves as “nonbelievers.”35 Despite figures like this, however, the overwhelming majority of Polish speakers, and even the majority of Polish national activists, continued to think of themselves as Roman Catholics. Moreover, virtually any Polish-speaking member of the clergy would have called himself a Pole, even while repudiating the national movement. In other words, the tensions between Church and nation in nineteenth-century Poland did not lead to secularization; instead, they generated some extraordinary rhetorical efforts on both sides, as people struggled to remain both Catholic and Polish. A statement from the Gniezno-Poznań Archdiocese in 1862 (as the January Uprising was raging across the border in the Russian partition) captured this ambiguity: It is undeniable that on the one hand we must adhere to the words of the Savior, “Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” and to the teaching of St. Paul about respecting legitimate authority, but on the other hand

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it is equally undeniable that it is appropriate to preserve a lasting memory and a heartfelt connection to the old relics of our nationality. Standing by the grace of God in the capital of St. Wojciech, around which our nation has always gathered at decisive moments, it is only appropriate that we remember that it is our obligation to defend our traditions, languages, and historical legends.36 Few priests were willing to perceive themselves as deracinated, cosmopolitan members of a transnational clergy. Even at a time when national ideologies had barely penetrated beyond the intelligentsia, nearly all members of the clergy were educated enough to have been exposed to the powerful allure of this newly elaborated form of identity. When circumstances changed in the twentieth century and a convergence between Catholicism and nationalism became possible, the clergy would suddenly emerge as the vanguard of a new Polish Catholic movement, but this was possible only because their nineteenth-century predecessors had worked out ways to reconcile faith and nation, to cultivate their own distinct ways of being “good Poles.” No one better exemplifies the dilemmas of this position than Archbishop Feliński himself, a cleric who was thoroughly vilified by contemporary national activists yet who still considered his patriotic credentials to be impeccable. He even wrote in his memoirs, “Life without the hope of recovering the fatherland seemed to me to be a hundred times more horrifying than death.”37 Feliński’s family background gave him strong Polish bona fides; his mother had been exiled for her part in a nationalist conspiracy while Feliński was still a boy, and he saw her again only when he was a university student. As a young man he lived with Polish exiles in Paris, and in 1848 (before he entered the priesthood) he participated in a Polish uprising against Prussian rule in Poznania. Poland’s right to regain its freedom, he thought, was unassailable: The right of nations to independent existence is so holy and undoubted, and the inborn love of the fatherland is so deeply embedded in the heart of every true citizen, that no sophistic argumentation can erase these things from the mass of the nation. . . . All true Poles not only want to be free and independent in their own country, but all are convinced that they have an undeniable right to this, and they do not doubt that sooner or later they will stand before their desires and once again be an independent nation. Whoever does not demand independence or doubts the possibility of its attainment is not a Polish patriot.38 When the fighting began in 1863 Feliński found himself isolated, but he insisted that this was not because he rejected the goals of the rebellion. As he

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wrote later, “I did not differ at all from other patriots, demanding the same that they demanded but merely wanting to follow a different path to that goal.”39 With the insurrection under way and martial law declared, Feliński composed a petition to the tsar in which he not only called for the establishment of Polish independence (retaining, however, a dynastic union with Russia), but even requested the incorporation into Poland of all the territories once possessed by the prepartition Republic. For this act Feliński earned the condemnation of all sides: the Polish rebels considered his loyal petition to be servile and obsequious, but the tsar was so outraged that he arrested him and sent him into internal exile.40 Despite all these affirmations of patriotism, Feliński was indeed opposed to the national movement, and the issues involved went far beyond mere tactical squabbles between people seeking the same goal. He acknowledged in his memoirs that nations did have the right to resist conquest, even if doing so required a military response. Well-established theories of “just war” allowed for this. Those same theories, however, established strict conditions on the “means of conducting the struggle” and “in this regard our historians and writers have not only the right, but the obligation to enlighten the national consciousness, so as to warn patriots against adventures that would be ruinous for the national soul.”41 This last phrase was the key to Feliński’s approach to national politics: he wanted to protect his countrymen from anything that “would be ruinous for the national soul,” and for nearly any Catholic priest in the nineteenth century, an attempt to seize control of history by staging an insurrection or revolution was a profound sin. As I have already discussed, most national activists perceived a tie between independence and social revolution. Feliński, in contrast, preached that revolution “attacked religion and the established social order, [and] must from its very nature aspire to upturn the main foundation of our national life.”42 Another popular preacher, Władysław Chotkowski, complained, “The younger and more ardent [patriots], almost without exception, grasped with both hands the secret societies of the West, accepted the principles of European revolution, and, ignoring the fact that our nation is thoroughly Christian and could never accept the principles of modern paganism, wanted to use these principles not only to regain for the nation its lost political existence, but to rebuild it and bring to it a new order.”43 The central point in sermons like these (which were quite common) was that nationalists were hoping for more than a restoration of a lost Poland; they coupled this objective with dreams of a new order that would resolve all the injustices of the world. Such goals, many contemporary Catholics thought, were by definition “pagan” because they contradicted the Church’s basic understanding of history, progress, and salvation. I have argued elsewhere that nineteenth-century Polish liberals could still aspire to independence after rejecting armed insurrection because they had

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recourse to a Spencerian philosophy of history that assigned agency to anonymous forces such as “progress” or “the struggle for survival,” thus obviating the need for political engagement.44 Similarly, clerical patriots used the theology of history discussed in chapter 3 to retain their allegiance to the nation, even as they opposed the national movement. Here we find the missing link between Feliński’s stated love for his country and his opposition to the January Uprising; here we find an explanation for why so many priests throughout the nineteenth century claimed to be ardent patriots while still expressing loyalty to the tsar or the kaiser. The problem did not stem only from concern over the socially disruptive implications of insurgency or the radical slogans of the nationalists, though this was a key aspect of the problem. Underlying the clerical worldview was an even more basic conviction: that independence would surely come to the deserving because God could not fail to punish sin and reward virtue. Individuals would be judged by God in the afterlife, but because nations could not collectively enter heaven or hell it was incumbent upon the divine medium of history to correct injustices. “Whoever manages to always see the finger of Providence in the course of historical events,” wrote Feliński, “and, trusting in the justice of God, cannot doubt that every nation will ultimately receive that which it has earned by its behavior, will recoil with disgust at the thought of committing a crime, even if that would be the only means of fighting an even greater injustice.”45 In other words, anyone who tried to restore independence without divine sanction, using means condemned by the Church (such as social or political disobedience), was defying God and committing (at least) the sin of hubris. Virtue and patience (or social reaction and political passivity, as the Church’s opponents would have it) were thus bound together by a Catholic theology of history. I have already explored the way that Catholics could use the concept of progress without undermining the belief that real change would come only with the end of secular time on Judgment Day. Their understanding of the nation’s future—its path to liberation—was similarly configured. The question in this case was the relationship between free will and Divine Providence (always capitalized in Polish Catholic texts), between the desire to bring about national independence with an act of revolutionary willfulness and the confidence that God’s plan would resolve everything in the end. The publisher and philosopher Eleonora Ziemięcka wrote that history was governed by two forces: the free will of individual humans and the historical patterns established by God. Ziemięcka explained that the Catholic Church (unlike Protestantism, as she understood it) recognized the importance of both Divine Providence and human autonomy, and perceived “the constant interplay of these two forces.”46 She acknowledged that “the plan of human life has for centuries rested in the mind of God,” but this did not imply that everything was predetermined by divine micromanagement.47

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In Ziemięcka’s presentation, humanity’s goal (salvation) was established by the Creator, but we are fundamentally free to pursue that goal or not. If we choose not to do so, God will administer the consequences, punishing us for our transgressions or intervening to remind us of the correct path. This interplay between God and humanity determined the outline of historical events.48 She thus concluded: There is no fatalism in history. Not everything that happens is necessary, not everything is a result of a God’s commanding will. A great number of things are merely permitted [by God], by his permitting will. Thus we see those thousands of historical phases, thus the various features of human life over the centuries. Despite these phases, these changes, these hesitations and uncertain steps, sometimes even these regressions, the great work of progress is continually worked out in the direction outlined by the Apostle. . . . Contingency [dowolność] and necessity are the two columns that support history. One must never lose sight of either of them, and never sacrifice one for the other. Certainly it is true that God knows everything, and even though we are free to choose sin or virtue, God is never surprised by our choices. Nonetheless, the Creator “acts in time as if He did not know.”49 The conviction that our existence is purposeful yet free had long been a theme in Catholic writing; indeed, it was often held up as the point that distinguished Catholicism from Protestantism. For Henryk Stankiewicz, a contributor to Ziemięcka’s journal, Pielgrzym, it was unthinkable that human life was pointless, “for, after all, one cannot suppose that people were created without a goal. This is a necessary condition for order and for the existence of creation. . . . It is easy to demonstrate that destiny exists and must exist, for otherwise the goal of creation would vanish and with it order, and there would be chaos and universal confusion.” Human happiness was one of these goals, argued Stankiewicz, for God could not possibly wish his own creations to be unhappy. Nonetheless, misery and suffering were possible, because God used such measures to “remind” people of their true purpose or punish them for transgressions. Free will and fate could thus coexist within a pedagogical image of God, according to which He allowed us the freedom to make our own mistakes, but unvaryingly punished us for making the wrong choices.50 Discussions of free will and Providence were not limited to high-brow philosophical journals; for example, a peasant weekly called Posiew once tried to explain the dialectic between human liberty and God’s plan in a commentary on Matthew 6:25–33, which is frequently cited in reference to these issues. In that passage Jesus says:

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That is why I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat, nor about your body and what you are to wear. Surely life is more than food, and the body more than clothing! Look at the birds in the sky. They do not sow or reap or gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they are? . . . So do not worry; do not say, “What are we to eat? What are we to drink? What are we to wear?” It is the gentiles who set their hearts on all these things. Your heavenly Father knows you need them all. Set your hearts on his Kingdom first, and on God’s saving justice, and all these other things will be given you as well. In explaining this passage, Posiew cautioned readers not to take this image of complacency too literally, because “God governs everything, but not without us.” Humans are called upon to place their faith and trust in God, but also to “live and work with God,” so that He can use us to accomplish His goals. Yes, the lilies and the birds survive even though they do not seem to worry about saving for the future, but the point of the metaphor (according to this author) is that “the birds and the lilies do what they are supposed to do. . . . Just as a bird is made for flying, so a man is made for working and he should fulfill the will of God through work. Then he can and should count on the help of God, which we call Providence.”51 It remains for us to decide whether to carry out the tasks that God has ascribed to us, to fulfill that which it is in our nature to do. To go against nature and against God is always an option—one with horrible consequences, but an option nonetheless. The fate of the nation entered this issue via the premise that God’s rules applied to both the individual and the social collective (since He was, after all, the creator of both). As Walery Wielogłowski put it in 1846 (in a book dedicated to Pius IX), “The Christian nation called to life by Providence assumes (just like an individual person) a dual nature—both corporeal and spiritual. That is, the nation is like a collective person, whom God grants physical existence.”52 Elsewhere Ziemięcka praised Adam Mickiewicz for understanding (despite his many doctrinal errors) that God worked through communities as well as through individuals. Although it was true that societies were constituted by people, she wrote, the cohesive force that held each community together “emerged from a separate command, from a separate idea residing eternally in the mind of God.”53 Ziemięcka renounced the “materialist” idea that nations were delineated by trivialities like language or heredity; instead she followed Mickiewicz by locating the nation in the “sense of common goals,” a “mission” given by God.54 Catholics often spoke (and still speak) of “the baptism of Poland” or “the conversion of Lithuania” as if such transformative spiritual moments happened to transhistorical collective agents rather than individual souls. For example, a 1908 biblical

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commentary lamented the fate of the Jews, the Russians, and the “wild peoples” who did not belong to the true Church, and urged, “[Give thanks that] the Lord Jesus called our entire nation and us ourselves to His flock so soon, because this is a great blessing that not every nation has enjoyed.”55 The idea that nations made a collective contribution to history drew Catholics to romantic nationalists like Mickiewicz, but his elevation of Poland to the status of “the Christ of Nations” was (to say the least) problematic. Archbishop Feliński, for example, criticized Mickiewicz for suggesting that any earthly community could be compared to Jesus. He acknowledged that his homeland had been victimized by an unjust act of aggression, but he pointed out, “[Poland] did not proceed to martyrdom either willingly or without sin, as did our Savior and the martyrs following in His footsteps. Considering our national guilt and mistakes, it would be more appropriate to call Poland, as it pays for its sins, the Mary Magdalene of nations, not the Christ of nations.”56 In this passage we find the key to the most common Catholic diagnosis of Poland’s fall and the resulting prescription for national resurrection. The first step in formulating a Catholic historical narrative of Poland’s collapse and (potential) resurrection was to recognize that the country’s misfortunes came from God for a reason. As Feliński put it elsewhere: If we ask why Providence subjected us to slavery, then the armed struggle with invading governments and all international interventions fall from view, since those are only temporary tools of Providence, and a strict account of our national conscience comes forward. Here it is necessary to resolve an entirely different kind of question, namely: what mission did we receive from God in the great family of nations? Were we faithful to that mission?57 As the archbishop argued in an extended commentary about the relationship between the Church and romantic nationalism, Catholicism offered a third alternative to the dominant approaches to historical philosophy. On the one hand were the “naturalists,” who perceived only the blind play of chance and the force of human will; on the other hand were the “fatalists,” who saw the hand of God behind absolutely everything and rejected the power of human volition. The Catholic Church, Feliński explained, took the kernels of truth from both these perspectives. God did assign us all (both individuals and communities) a mission, but it was up to us to obey or to disobey—and to accept the consequences either way. When we defied God’s wishes He would send us punishments and “reminders” (upamiętanie), so that in the long run His will would be done without undermining our freedom. Generally speaking, Feliński continued, individuals would receive their punishments or rewards in heaven, but

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obviously that would not work with entire nations; when a community like Poland sinned collectively, it could be punished only on this earth. This, Feliński concluded, explained why the partitions had taken place.58 The idea that Poland’s destruction was an act of God can be found in a wide range of nineteenth-century Catholic texts. Father Walerian Kalinka, a famous writer and preacher of the mid-nineteenth century, once warned in a sermon that whenever Poles strayed from the Church they were sure to bring upon themselves both “personal and national disasters.” Had the Poles of the eighteenth century remained faithful, Kalinka believed, God would have given them the strength to resist the invaders: “[But] when the moment of opportunity passes, the punishment must be fulfilled to the end. . . . Thus has God decided, wisely and providentially, and we must accept it.”59 Father Stanisław Spis, the author of a devotional text about St. Stanisław, actually thought that the Poles of the 1790s had started to repent: “But unfortunately it was too late! The eternal and just Judge, unfathomable in his verdicts, had already prepared for our nation another fate.”60 When activists gathered in Kraków for the Catholic Convention of 1893, one speaker said, “Betraying our mission through a lack of faith was doubtless the main cause of the fall of our nation.”61 Father Józef Stanisław Adamski gave a sermon in 1899 in Lwów in which he observed, “From the beginning, it always went well for us as long as we did not sin before our God, and good fortune was reversed when God ceased to defend us because we had fallen from God, because we had lost the faith of our fathers.” The partitions, he believed, were God’s way of telling the Poles that they needed to reflect on their sins and learn from their mistakes: “God condemned us to a long, hard, centurylong spiritual retreat, so that we will have the time and the means for salvific reflection.”62 Adamski’s reference to “salvific reflection” implied that there was still hope, that the partitions did not represent God’s final verdict. Piotr Semeneńko, the founder of the Resurrectionists, agreed that the partitions ensued when Poland abandoned its divine mission in the eighteenth century, when “personal interest became the only law governing the nation,” but he also stressed that the Lord was infinitely patient.63 “God waits for you and summons you,” Semeneńko preached, “and cries ‘oh, my chosen nation! You have forgotten about me, and you do not think of me, but I remember you and I think about you constantly. . . . You look for other support, and in doing so you resist me.’”64 In an 1837 letter to a friend he wrote, “Providence is punishing us so severely because we did not respond to God’s designs for us. . . . Therefore, what we have lost in times of power and success, let us grasp in this time of humiliation and adversity.”65 Few principles are as central to Catholicism as the doctrine of the absolution of sins, and nineteenth-century Polish authors extended the ideas of penance and forgiveness to the nation. As early as 1824 Jan Paweł Woronicz

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(then serving as archbishop of Kraków) hinted at how Poland might save itself: “All the history of religions and nations proves the truth that the threat of disasters and the punishments of God’s justice, that all misfortune and oppression both domestic and public, can only be turned away by abject penance combined with fasting by entire States and Nations.”66 Insofar as Poles confessed their sins, carried out their penance, and returned to the path of God, the nation would be resurrected. If the Poles continued to strive for independence without repentance, however, they were doomed. In response to the January Uprising, an anonymous author in Poznań’s Tygodnik Katolicki wrote that the partitions were sent by God “as a punishment for [Poles’] sins and as a test of [their] virtue,” and that as long as Poles strove to liberate themselves with merely earthly means, they would always fail. Only emancipation from the slavery of sin would bring true freedom for the nation.67 As Feliński put it, “If it is true that God has punished us for our national sins, then it must also be true that He will also save us as soon as we correct those sins.”68 Acts of rebellion only pushed Poles away from their necessary repentance, so it followed that a true patriot would eschew revolution in the name of prayer: “[We must] set aside all temptations leading us to aspire to regain independence, so that according to the revealed will of God, [we may] turn all our strength toward complete inner renewal, leaving it to Providence to pick the time and the means for the political liberation of our fatherland.”69 Catholics spoke often about a “national mission” and made the promise of political restoration dependent upon the fulfillment of this divine mandate. But this was not the sort of activist mission spoken of by romantic nationalists like Mickiewicz or Słowacki; instead, the mission of Poland was to embody piety and faith. “Nation of Poland! Just be faithful, and you will live,” wrote Semeneńko. “Don’t believe your own eyes when it seems to you that you have died; you live, and you will live, and you must live. You are immortal, because you have a mission from God.”70 Along the same lines, Feliński believed, “Just as every member of the family has an assigned task corresponding to his or her natural abilities, so does every nation receive a mission in accordance with the features Providence deigned to grant it.”71 Nations, in this scheme, were representational instead of historical, demonstrating their distinctive qualities over the course of time rather than willfully intervening to alter the flow of time so as to realize a particular goal. Each nation embodied some eternal principle, some idea or message that it was commissioned to present to the world, much as the Church presented and propagated the teachings of Christ. And just as the Church’s mission never changed even as the secular world endured great transformations, neither did the task assigned to each nation. Agaton Giller recalled a pilgrimage to Częstochowa in 1861, during which the faithful were promised a “happy future”

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if they only focused on the “moral struggle” and avoided armed combat. Poland’s task in history was to become “a model for all countries,” but it was hubris to imagine that they could intervene in history with the goal of transforming that model into a reality for all humanity.72 In Catholic writing, static terms like model and ideal stood where heterodox romantic nationalists like Mickiewicz might place active words like savior or messiah. Poland’s mission, thus understood, did not necessarily require independence. Although many nineteenth-century Catholics considered statehood both desirable and just, there was no pressing need to work for its fulfillment. As Feliński observed: From the fact that we lost independent existence it does not at all follow that our mission has ended. . . . The character of that mission is so spiritual, that not by the force of arms but by the force of sacrifices will we accomplish that which love demands of us. If independence would become a condition necessary for fulfilling the task that has been laid upon us, then Providence itself would so manage the course of events that state existence would again be returned to us, so that we may sufficiently mature in spirit.73 Again, humans were to embody the teachings of Christ, but they could not be expected to change the order of things, which was natural and divinely ordained. The only true actor in the grand historical drama was God Himself, and the only way for humans to really intervene in the course of historical time was to pray for His intervention. The most popular hymn of the nineteenth century was undoubtedly “Boże, coś Polskę,” which remains a standard part of the Catholic repertoire even today. This song (in its various permutations) identified God as the primary agent in human history, and placed Poland’s worldly salvation in His hands. Although the hymn is unambiguously patriotic, it was commissioned by Grand Duke Constantine Romanov, the Russian viceroy of the Kingdom, and it was quickly embraced by the loyalist Catholic hierarchy. The original version of the lyrics, however, made it unlikely that the song would be met with enthusiasm among national activists. O God, who through so many centuries Surrounded Poland with the brilliance of power and glory, Who has protected it with the shield of your defense, Against the disasters that were meant to defeat it. To your altars we carry a prayer: Save our King, Lord!

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The monarch referred to in this last line was Alexander Romanov, tsar of the Russian Empire and ex officio king of Poland. Other verses praised God for “uniting two fraternal peoples” (i.e., the Russians and the Poles). Such sentiments were already problematic in 1815, and they only became more so with time. In 1830, during the first large nineteenth-century uprising against the Russians, a new version emerged that cut the references to Russo-Polish brotherhood and replaced that last line of the refrain with “Return our Homeland to us, Lord!” This version of the song became very popular, and eventually (in 1861) the Russians tried to ban it.74 Unlike so many other patriotic songs, this one was widely embraced by the clergy because it sang of a glorious past under God’s protection and prayed for divine help for the future, but it implied no active program of national restoration. A revised verse that became popular in 1863 even pleaded, “Lift the punishment, O angry God,” reinforcing the idea that the partitions were divine retribution for Poland’s sins. This was a style of patriotism that the Church could accept; indeed, the popularity of this song would play a key role in the eventual rapprochement between nation and faith that came later in the century. A similar song that met with acceptance from the Church was Antoni Górecki’s “Hymn to God for the Preservation of Freedom.” Here too agency in the restoration of Polish independence was assigned to God, not to mortals, and rebellious action (particularly armed combat) was condemned. One verse proclaimed that others can “wield power over the world / through the might of their iron swords,” while the faithful Poles will just “raise up prayers before your altar; / grant us, o Lord, the gift of freedom.” Later the hymn expresses faith that independence will eventually be restored, just as it was taken away: For a moment only it was taken from our land, And our tears, our blood flowed in rivers. How horrible must it be for those Whose freedom you take away for centuries? The conclusion of the song, with its curious admixture of pre-Christian imagery, is grim in its message that God punishes nations for their sins and resurrects them only through His will. There is only the smallest hint of defiance at the end: Only your word, Great Lord of Thunder, Was capable of raising us up from the ashes. If once again it is your will to punish us, Turn us into ashes, but into free ashes.75

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With this understanding of divine agency, Catholic patriots could both make sense of the partitions and trace a path toward national resurrection; they could imagine political change without violating their commitment to obedience and authority. They could, in other words, be patriots while giving unto Caesar that which was Caesar’s. A program of patriotic action did in fact emerge from Catholicism’s theology of national history, but it was at odds with both the revolutionary violence proposed by the “reds” and the secular economic and cultural development advocated by liberals and conservatives. Both these approaches, wrote Feliński, were flawed by the belief that “Providence has abdicated unconditionally the governing of the world, leaving it entirely up to human cunning.”76 The best way to work for the fatherland, he wrote, was to spread the message of Catholicism so as to remove the sin that had brought such disasters upon Poland in the first place. For Catholics like Feliński, this was in no sense a passive agenda; indeed, he said in 1890 that it was “time—high time—to break with that passivity, to give up the fruitless complaints, and sincerely get to work so as to lift the national spirit, so weakened by squabbling, from its helplessness and heal it.”77 That healing, of course, entailed a restoration of faith and moral rectitude. Sermons in the late nineteenth century repeatedly urged Catholics to work for the national welfare with prayer rather than armed insurrection or systemic political change. Perhaps the most famous preacher of the last third of the century—certainly the most sought-after funeral orator—was Father Władysław Chotkowski, whose influence extended throughout the Polish-speaking lands of all three partitions. At the funeral of Count Andrzej Zamoyski in 1874 (held in Poznań), Chotkowski praised the deceased for recognizing that the partitions could never stand unless God willed them. Chotkowski said, “[Zamoyski,] as a Christian, understood that nations must suffer and endure patiently that which the Lord sends us, but continue to build. . . . We do not need loud phrases, nor lofty promises, but only to quietly, persistently, and patiently work, work, work . . . and to carry out every task with God.”78 In another sermon in 1876 (this one delivered in Lwów) Father Chotkowski made it clear that he used the term work quite differently from those who advocated “organic work” as a means of building toward independence: In order to love Poland and sacrifice for it, it is necessary to be reborn and liberated from pagan principles and feelings. The desire for revenge is pagan, and it leads to the sleep of ages and not to the work of ages from which the fruits of freedom grow. Whoever wishes to love Poland must first be prepared to sacrifice for it and not take anything in return but suffering. But it would be wrong to ever succumb to doubt—rather, believe that God will eventually reveal the dawn of freedom, even if only after the most prolonged martyrdom.79

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In 1890 Chotkowski was charged with the distinguished but difficult task of delivering the sermon at the reburial of Adam Mickiewicz’s remains in the Wawel Cathedral in Kraków, where it was taken after forty-five years of temporary interment in Paris. Władysław Mickiewicz, the poet’s son, had stipulated that he would allow the reburial only if his father could be laid to rest in the Cathedral, alongside the crypts of the Polish kings, but many in the Church (including the archbishop of Kraków) resisted this because of Mickiewicz’s considerable deviations from Catholic orthodoxy.80 Chotkowski’s sermon at the reinternment was noteworthy for its careful avoidance of Mickiewicz’s actual writings; he cited the Bible profusely but offered very few quotes from the poet. Liberals, socialists, nationalists, and others had all tried to appropriate Mickiewicz for their own causes, and Father Chotkowski did likewise: Since this is a Catholic nation, [Mickiewicz] is buried here in this Catholic Cathedral as a Catholic, because he was a Catholic. And though no one can be forbidden from joining in these general funereal honors, it must nonetheless be stressed that none who renounce Christ and the Catholic Church may appropriate it and consider it their own. . . . The archbishops and the bishops bury him, in order to demonstrate that this is not supposed to be an empty ceremony or a national ritual, but a Catholic mass. Instead of mentioning Mickiewicz’s heretical historiosophy, Chotkowski offered the standard Catholic interpretation of Poland’s eighteenth-century collapse. Basing his sermon on an apocryphal Old Testament reference ( Judith 5:21–25) he said that Poland had been conquered because the country had turned momentarily away from God. But Poles need not fear, because “Christian nations that have a mission from God as yet unfulfilled will not die.” This mission had nothing in common with the grand schemes outlined in Mickiewicz’s prophecies: “[Poland’s task is] to faithfully proclaim the faith of our forefathers against the schism that pours upon us from the East and the godlessness that pours upon us from the West.” Chotkowski considered Mickiewicz’s most important virtue to be that “despite misfortunes and disasters he did not grumble or curse, but interpreted suffering as a penance, a sacrifice and a consecration to atone for his own sins and those of the entire nation.”81 Understanding patriotic engagement in terms of religious atonement allowed the Church to participate in the atmosphere of mass mobilization at the very end of the nineteenth century, albeit in ways that did not always appear obvious to contemporary observers outside Catholic circles. Priests played a key role in several nation-building events in Habsburg Galicia, where it was possible to hold commemorations and ceremonies legally (a prerequisite for the Catholic hierarchy).

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Chotkowski’s speech at the Mickiewicz reinternment, however, is a good example of how the Church dealt with such events: with some reluctance, and with an explicit desire to shift the mood away from patriotic action and toward prayer and devotion. Bishop Józef Pelczar offered perhaps the clearest articulation of a Catholic understanding of national engagement in a sermon in 1910: Who can cure Poland? God Himself, but not without our cooperation. It is therefore necessary to get together and improve everything that serves to heal the nation, and above all to elevate within [the nation] the religious spirit. . . . Do you at least carry out the required obligations—that is, pray every day, listen to the entire mass on Sundays and Holidays, go to confession at least once a year, follow the rules of fasting and avoid mortal sins? If you do not do that, you are not worthy of being called Catholics.82 While Pelczar considered prayer to be an effective means of national action, he ardently opposed using the Church to promote national identity or (worse) insurrectionary activities. That would entail “placing religion in a secondary position, as if it was a servant of the nation,” and any such subordination was for Pelczar a “great evil.”83 With this linkage between prayer and national restoration in mind, we can better understand the many lay religious brotherhoods and sisterhoods founded in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Poland as elsewhere, those decades witnessed a surge in Catholic pilgrimages, sodalities, and other forms of collective religious life outside the confines of Sunday mass. This was a sort of public mobilization no less modern than the rise of mass-membership trade unions and political parties—and in a sense no less directed at the social and political realm. Though rarely cast explicitly in such terms, collective devotional acts had far-reaching ramifications, both for the participants and for secular observers.84 The latter saw that religion could serve as a powerful motivation for collective action, and such things were increasingly important as representative governance spread throughout Eastern Europe. For the faithful, meanwhile, public devotion mattered within the logic of Catholic historiosophy. This could be seen in the founding document of the Brotherhood of the Most Holy and Gracious Mary, the Royal Queen of Poland. In this text, submitted to the Church authorities in early 1890, the Brothers declared: The main tasks of the Brotherhood are: a) to elevate and propagate the religious spirit in the nation, urging through words and example the improvement of the particular defects and errors which caused our fall; b) to undertake and support as much as possible all efforts aimed

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in a Catholic spirit at improving the moral and material fate of our people and our working classes; c) to dedicate a selected day, with these oaths in mind, to the worship of the Most Holy Mary as the Royal Queen of Poland. To accomplish these objectives the Brothers were instructed to follow “ancient national tradition” by attending mass every Sunday, leading exemplary family lives, avoiding drunkenness, working hard, saving their money, and praying daily to the Virgin.85 On the surface there was nothing political about this undertaking, but the Brotherhood appears in a different light if cast against the context described in this chapter. From a Catholic perspective, the members of this group were working for the betterment of the nation as well as for their own souls, and their activities could be perceived as part of an agenda aimed at national restoration. There were two related principles that made it possible to depict these tactics as efficacious: the belief that God directed history in a way that punished sin and rewarded virtue (in this life as well as after death), and the application of that belief to entire communities as well as to individuals. From this foundation it was possible to argue that “elevating the religious spirit in the nation” would indeed address the causes of the partitions, and by implication bring Poland closer to redemption. Faith could invest seemingly apolitical acts with political meaning, making prayer a powerful tool in the project of national salvation.

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Ecclesia Militans

For centuries Catholics were taught that there are three components to the Church: the Ecclesia Triumphans (those Christians already in Heaven), the Ecclesia Penitens (those in Purgatory), and the Ecclesia Militans (those still on earth). The 1566 Catechism explained that the last “is called militant, because it wages eternal war with those implacable enemies: the world, the flesh, and the devil.”1 A rhetorical militancy, then, has long been a component of Catholicism, but in different contexts these martial allusions have had different consequences and meanings. As we have seen, the nineteenth-century Polish Church was hardly militant in the colloquial sense, and the battles fought at the time were usually against generic sources of temptation rather than specific earthly foes. But with the rise of Catholic social activism and with the gradual rapprochement between the Church and the nationalist right, metaphors drawn from more earthly forms of warfare proliferated, even in sermons and devotional publications. The Second Vatican Council tried to pull Catholics away from this vocabulary, preferring to talk about “the People of God” rather than the Ecclesia Militans, but in Poland the old terminology persisted. At times the battles were discussed with metaphors about seizing the initiative and vanquishing the opponents of God; at other times Catholic authors preferred defensive images of encirclement or siege. Either way, for most of the twentieth century the Polish Church was at war. As noted in chapter 5, a snapshot of the Polish political scene a century ago would have revealed a seemingly irreconcilable contradiction between Roman Catholicism and the National Democratic movement. For the founders of the Endecja, every nation was locked in an unending struggle for survival that left no space for any transcendent ethical system, let alone the Christian commandment to love one’s enemy. The young Roman Dmowski called on Poles to embrace “an elemental egoism” that precluded any moral qualms. Although Christian ethics might retain some value as a standard for regulating interpersonal 232

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interactions, he believed that “the relations of the individual to the nation and of the nation to [other] nations lie properly outside the sphere of Christian ethics. . . . Aside from Christian ethics, there are national ethics.”2 Another early member of the Endecja, Zygmunt Balicki, tried to develop a new ethical system to replace the “weakness” of Christianity. He called this “national egoism,” which he summed up in a simple formula: “When one goes against the interests of one’s own nation, one becomes immoral.”3 After some Poles organized a fund-raising campaign to aid victims of a famine in Russia in 1899, one National Democratic periodical (citing Balicki’s ethical standards) denounced any assistance for the “Volga horde” on the grounds that weakening Russia was in Poland’s interest.4 Even before the Endecja came on the scene, some prominent Catholics had warned that nationalism, taken to its logical conclusion, would lead to something like the doctrine of national egoism. As early as 1864 Piotr Semeneńko had maintained that “a Fatherland without God, without Christ, is not worth loving. . . . Nationality does not sanctify the cause, but the cause sanctifies the nationality.”5 Two decades later Father Maryan Morawski hoped to prevent mankind’s descent into a “wild state” in which nations “either fight each other, or hold each other in mutual respect by shaking their clubs.”6 Archbishop Feliński similarly called on Poles to ensure that “every activity, both in private and public life, be based on the spirit of the Gospels, that is, that it flow from a love of God and one’s neighbor, not from hatred, envy, or egoistic calculations.”7 This message—rather abstract for a Polish audience before the 1890s—became more salient after the rise of the National Democratic movement. From that point, condemnation of “national egoism” became a very common theme in Catholic sermons and writings. Father Józef Adamski, in an 1899 homily delivered in Lwów, described each nation as “a separate tone in the great harmony of God” and insisted that a Christian must never “accept any sort of crime because of patriotic considerations, for even the most noble goal does not justify evil means.”8 In 1902 a lay Catholic activist from Galicia, Professor Maurycy Straszewski, mounted a direct critique of the concept of a struggle for survival: If the members of one nation, instead of loving it and bearing high the standard of their own national traditions, hold to the illusion that their nationality is loftier and more perfect than others; that it possesses some sort of special value while other nations are subordinate; that other nations are destined to serve as a field of conquest in the struggle for survival; . . . if a person looks with hatred and contempt upon his neighbor even if he did nothing to harm him, simply because he belongs to a hated nation—whenever all this comes to pass, truly horrible human relations have been formed. And we must say, unfortunately

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and with sorrow, that national vanity and the overvaluation of one’s own nationality at the expense of others has increased considerably among European nations, particularly in the past decade.9 In that same year (1902) an anonymous book called Love of the Fatherland from the Catholic Position was released by a major Catholic publishing house in Poznań. Patriotism was a good thing, this author wrote, but “love felt for one’s compatriots ought not to build anyone’s contempt toward other nations,” and one must never allow the nation to come before God. Only if patriotism was “based on religion, and not just feeling or reason” could it be a genuine virtue.10 Unfortunately, many Catholic authors noted, by the early years of the twentieth century this quality seemed in short supply among European nationalists. Father M. Cimniewski, writing in Warsaw’s Przegląd Katolicki in 1904, saw the rise of racial hatred and national chauvinism as a signum temporis that demonstrated the decline in true religious faith. The whole point of the Christian message, he argued, was to bring people together regardless of language, customs, and location “and create from them one Christian society, united by the bonds of love for God and one’s neighbor.” Cimniewski predicted that nationalism would lead to atheism, for “what is national chauvinism, but a product of a pathological lack of love for God?”11 The bishop of Łuck-Żytomierz, Karol Niedziałkowski, attacked the National Democrats by name for promoting “pagan concepts” that placed the nation above God Himself, teaching that “there are no moral laws and that everything that achieves one’s goal, particularly in politics, is allowed.”12 Even Bishop Józef Pelczar, who (as we will see) was a prominent advocate of antiSemitic conspiracy theories, frequently stressed, “Hatred is a satanic weapon, which in wounding an opponent, poisons the one who uses it. . . . May Polish society not repay hatred with hatred; rather, let it be a force for reconciliation.”13 This critique of the Endecja’s national egoism should not surprise us; the “cardinal virtues” itemized in the Catholic catechism are faith, hope, and love, and as St. Paul put it in First Corinthians 13:13, “the greatest of these is love.” This virtue is mentioned eleven times in the Bible, including the famous passage in which Jesus identifies loving one’s neighbors and enemies as the supreme commandment.14 As the popular interwar preacher Ireneusz Kmiecik once said, “Love of one’s neighbor, alongside the love of God, is the basis and foundation, the content and the core of Christ’s religion.”15 And as Father T. Portych explained to his congregation in 1927, “Love of one’s neighbor is so bound with love of God that one cannot exist without the other.”16 Across the centuries few words have received more sustained attention in both ordinary sermons and sophisticated theological treatises than the verb love, but the real challenge of this commandment comes with its direct object: neighbor. In English we might assume that the word neighbor provides Christians

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with an easy escape from the implication that everyone should be loved: perhaps it was only necessary to love members of one’s own community, while still showing wariness and mistrust toward strangers. But English is misleading in this regard, because it translates Jesus’ commandment in a uniquely narrow way. In Polish the term used in the Bible is not sąsiad (one who lives next door) but bliźni, a noun used in no other context. The word derives from the adjective bliski, which means “close to,” but the noun designates (as a canonical Polish dictionary puts it) “a person without regard to race, nationality, religion, or social standing.”17 The creation of a distinct term to translate this commandment is in keeping with the Latin Vulgate, which instructs people to diliges proximum tuum rather than diliges vicinum tuum. Nearly every language but English does the same; for example, in Italian the phrase is ama il tuo prossimo (not vicino), in German Du sollst deinen Nächsten lieben (not Nachbar), in Spanish amarás a tu prójimo (not vecino), in French tu aimeras ton prochain (not voisin), and in Hungarian szeresd felebarátodat (not szomszédodat). All the Slavic languages use a term similar to the Polish: люби ближнeгo твoeгo (Russian), své bližní budeš milovat (Czech), oбичaй ближния cи (Bulgarian), svojich blížnych budeš milovať (Slovak), and ljubi bližnjega svoga (Croatian). In all these cases, theologians have emphasized that the use of a distinct word like bliźni is intended to remind us that the biblical injunction to love refers not just to those in our own community; rather, we are to embrace a higher understanding of proximity that extends to all of humanity. As far back as the Council of Trent, the Church stressed, “Our neighbor is he who needs our assistance, whether bound to us by ties of kindred or not, whether a fellow citizen or a stranger, a friend or an enemy.”18 That reference to enemies brings us to the even greater challenge posed by Luke 6:27–35: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. To the person who strikes you on one cheek, offer the other one as well, and from the person who takes your cloak, do not withhold even your tunic. Give to everyone who asks of you, and from the one who takes what is yours do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.”19 There was no getting around it: the Bible was inconveniently clear in commanding the faithful to avoid any ideology that posited a bellum omnium contra omnes—or to use the phrase preferred by the early Endecja, national egoism. Priests have consistently taken this commandment very seriously, working hard (with mixed results, of course) to ensure that it would be observed. In fact, no theme was mentioned more frequently in Polish homiletic, devotional, or  catechetical texts of the past two centuries. In 1845 an author named Zenonim Ancyporowicz offered a “Survey of Christian Duties” in the magazine Pielgrzym. Primary among these obligations was a recognition that “every human, of whatever estate, age, or religion, is always our neighbor.” Though it

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was understandable to feel a special kind of love for friends and family, Ancyporowicz wrote, Christianity nonetheless demanded “that in our hearts we avoid nurturing hatred toward anyone, that when confronted with evil we not repay it with evil and villainy—finally, that we always and in every moment are prepared to reconcile with [those who have done us wrong], that we sincerely forgive insults from them, that we pray for them and that with all our abilities we strive to do good for them.”20 A generation later Father Józef Krukowski used almost identical language in a popular catechism that defined bliźni as “every person regardless of religion, estate, age, etc., because everyone is a child of God, destined for eternal life.” He was even more explicit when he instructed Catholics: Love strangers and foreigners, those who are hindered in terms of their wealth, their position, their talents, their health; those who never did anything good for us in life, and even poisoned our hearts with their betrayal, dishonesty, slyness, cruelty, and injustice—in other words, our hidden and open enemies, people opposed to us in matters of principle, nationality, religion, or custom, people of demonstrated cruelty, dishonorable criminals.21 Father Stagraczyński’s influential sermons from a few decades later taught, “[We] must remove all discord and hostility amongst ourselves and we should even forgive, with Christian love, those who have offended us. . . . The love of one’s enemy is an act of the greatest heroism. Love of one’s enemy demands a great victory over ourselves, it demands a total command over our own heart.”22 Bishop Floryan Stablewski summed up this message eloquently when, in 1895, he called upon the Catholics of the Diocese of Poznań and Gniezno to rise above all forms of hatred: Whosoever would restrict their love to their family alone, and persecute others; whosoever would love only one estate while hating others and spreading hatred against them, whosoever would love only their own nation while trying to impoverish, to cripple, to harm, to displace or to eradicate another just because they do not share a common descent, language, or faith—such a person would turn on its head the first principle of Christianity; such a person would negate the teachings of Jesus Christ, who knows no differences between the poor and the rich, “the great and the small, the Roman and the barbarian, the pagan and the Jew.” . . . [The true Christian] does not perceive and does not ask if someone is an enemy, but sees only someone who is suffering. That suffices as a reason to help as a beloved brother, as a dear friend.23

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For most of the nineteenth century Catholic commentators deduced from this teaching that national antagonism was an un-Christian sentiment. As the Eastern-Rite bishop Andrzej Szeptycki (a.k.a. Шeптицький; though from a line of Polonized nobles, he embraced a Ukrainian identity as a young man) wrote in a pastoral letter addressed to the Polish speakers in his flock, “The Christian is obliged to love the fatherland and care about the well-being of his nation. But one thing is not allowed: it is not allowed, even under the cover of patriotism, to hate. . . . Social and national hatred is worse than personal hatred, since the infection of evil can more easily spread, and blind people with the garments of virtue.”24 As a Ukrainian opponent of Polish nationalism, Szeptycki/Шeптицький certainly had a reason to raise these issues, but they were a common concern among Catholics across all the various forms and intensities of ethnic affiliation. One of the more forceful affirmations of this message came in 1902, when the Kraków monthly Przegląd Powszechny devoted six pages of double-size print to a denunciation of some recent student unrest in the Prussian partition. During a lengthy student strike protesting forced Germanization, some students had engaged in vandalism and had shouted harsh slogans against Germans in general (and not just against the government’s denationalization policies). Przegląd Powszechny reprimanded the protesters for shifting the rhetoric of Polish patriotism away from its Christian foundations, which the editors believed should focus on penance for Polish transgressions: Above all, let us arm ourselves with Christian love. Persuaded by the example of others showing us where blind hatred and obstinacy can lead, let us cure ourselves of all chauvinism, which is not at all a way to love the fatherland, but will only teach us to blindly overvalue beyond all measure everything that is ours, and moreover, to hate foreigners. Love of the fatherland is a Christian virtue; chauvinist pride and hatred toward others is thoroughly pagan. . . . We have always been, we are, and God willing we will remain to the end a Christian nation—that is a source of pride, that is our hope. And one of the foremost Christian principles is to love one’s enemy. We are a nation doing penance for the sins of our fathers and for our own sins. We are guilty of many things against many people, and above all against ourselves, so our prayer ought to be “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”25 A Czech priest, when asked how to deal with the Germans after World War II, is reported to have said, “The time has come for settling accounts with the Germans, who are evil and to whom the commandment to love thy neighbor therefore does not apply.”26 This reasoning was extraordinarily rare; the mandate

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to love was simply too fundamental to revoke in such a cavalier way. Neither could it be easily reinterpreted, redefined, or finessed: it just stood there in Catholic texts as a persistent challenge. Archbishop Henryk Przeździecki of Podlasie explained to a diocesan synod in 1923 that this doctrine allowed for no equivocation or compromise: One cannot love God without loving mankind, and of course the more one loves mankind the more one loves God. In the love of one’s neighbor there is not and cannot be any compromises, any exceptions, as unfortunately happens nowadays among Christians—or rather, among those who call themselves Christians. Here one encounters class or national hatred, disguised as love for a social class or a nation. No exceptions! No compromises! One must embrace everyone with love, everyone without regard to nationality, denomination, political partisanship, or social class, regardless of whether the disposition of the neighbor is nice and friendly, or hostile toward us. One is only allowed to hate sin, and only sin itself, without even the slightest confusion between it and the sinner. For sin—hatred; for the sinner—love.27 That last sentence was very common in Catholic writing and remains so to this day. Father Tomasz Dąbrowski of Stanisławów (in Galicia) preached that when confronted with injustice, the Christian should remember to “look upon the transgression as repugnant, but never despise the person. . . . Even the evil person has within himself the likeness of God, and the Lord Jesus also shed his blood for the sinners.”28 There was a recognition that if one paired ascriptive labels with particular sins, then it became impossible to make this distinction between the transgression and the transgressor, and conflict tended to become ossified. If, in contrast, one struggled against ideas, then it was easier to love the propagators of those ideas. To this day Catholics often repeat the slogan “Hate the sin but love the sinner.” Vatican documents in particular almost always use vague phraseology in their critical remarks (“There are those who . . . ,” “It has been argued that . . .  ,” etc.), in part to draw attention to the act or idea being criticized and away from the people involved. Priests and Catholic writers in Poland adopted this practice in the nineteenth century and continue to employ it today. For example, Piotr Semeneńko was quite willing to use militant metaphors, calling for a “crusade” against “the spirit of the Antichrist” and claiming that “struggle is the necessary and natural state of history.”29 He always added, however, that these were battles of ideas, and no specific groups could be said to embody either sin or righteousness. No political party or nation, he taught, should be “some sort of cause in and of itself,” and no enemy should be viewed as the incarnation of evil.30

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Mitigating any tendency to move from a struggle for moral purity to an actual earthly conflict was the conviction that the Church’s victory was inevitable, so any sort of systemic or comprehensive attempt to defeat evil was superfluous. An 1831 pastoral letter from the bishop of Kraków, Karol Skórkowski, expressed the long-term optimism of Catholicism, still intact even after decades of turmoil following the French Revolution: The words of the Savior, that the rock on which [the Church] is built will always stand firm and never succumb to the reign of darkness, must come true. Even if the times of severe persecution were to return, we trust that with patience, with tenderness, and with truth, the blood of the innocent will defeat those who shed it, their hard steel will be blunted, their most severe persecution will stop, and either they will themselves adhere to the truth or succumb to their own weapons; and that the Church, certain of the promises of its Bridegroom, always united in its teachings, always unchanging in its faith, always bringing happiness to people, will experience as many victories as it will have enemies.31 It was not always easy to sustain this optimism during the nineteenth century, but it continued to be preached as an ideal. A half-century after Skórkowski’s letter, Stagraczyński’s homiletic guide repeated the same message: Be calm! Over two thousand years the Church has become accustomed to these storms and to the clamor of idol worshipers. The Church has outlived all of its enemies. The Church was given at its foundation the words of God: The gates of hell will not prevail against it. Above the Church is the providential hand of Almighty God, and the Angels of God stand on guard. Let the enemies of the Church raise the sword; let even the sons of the Church in their inexpressible anger or in incomprehensible blindness curse it. The Church will stand immobile on the rock upon which God founded it, and the swords and the curses will fall on the heads of its enemies.32 Timelessness was the key to Stagraczyński’s argument; the struggle of which he spoke did not take place within historical time, but was part of an eternal and unchanging confrontation between good and evil. “So it was from the beginning, so it is today, and so it will be until the end of time,” he wrote, “ . . . because alongside the Kingdom of God and salvation in the Church there exists always the Kingdom of Satan and sin.”33 The omnipresence of both evil and good made it almost superfluous to go forth and smite those who served the Kingdom of

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Satan, since the battle had neither origin nor resolution within terrestrial historical time. The struggles and battles referred to by Stagraczyński, Semeneńko, and Feliński could thus remain safely metaphorical, offering no obvious links to the “struggle for survival” rhetoric of the nationalist right. Their Ecclesia Militans was supposed to be at war with sin, not sinners. Well into the 1920s, many Catholics continued to believe that National Democracy spread hatred. In 1917 the Catholic literary critic Józef Ujejski wrote a book called Nationalism as an Ethical Problem, in which he praised patriotism as a Christian duty but argued, “We must decisively reject nationalism in the sense in which the term is used today, nationalism as egoism and national Machiavellianism.”34 In 1922 Przewodnik Katolicki even claimed that anyone who would place the interests of the nation above the teachings of the Church was “not only a false member of the Church, but an unwitting traitor to the Fatherland.”35 Józef Bilczewski’s pastoral letter of 1923 instructed the faithful that patriotism was Christian only if it was grounded in a “supernatural religious duty” to love one’s neighbor, and he attacked “all those super-patriots who turn the Lord God into some kind of national deity, to whom they can appeal during warfare in various ways, in poetry and prose, ‘O God, destroy our enemies.’ . . . Just as it is not appropriate to deify the nation, in the same way it is not permitted to nationalize God.”36 But despite all these concerns, the National Democratic movement eventually gained the support of a large majority of the Catholic clergy and nearly all the Church-affiliated periodicals. At first glance this is surprising, insofar as the criticisms quoted above would seem to involve rather important principles. The paradox can be explained in part by Dmowski’s own ideological (or at least rhetorical) evolution. In the mid-1920s, as he maneuvered to avoid the fate of L’Action Française, he realized that a Spencerian struggle for survival would be unacceptable to Pius XI. Already in 1923 Dmowski gave a speech to an Endecja youth group in which he rejected the principle of national egoism, and in early 1924 the movement’s newspaper, Myśl Narodowa, published a much discussed article claiming that the nationalists were losing support because of their tendency to “deify the nation” and deny the existence of any transcendent values.37 In his 1926 book, The Church, the Nation, and the State, Dmowski even wrote that the concept of national egoism was fundamentally a Protestant creation, so it could never have caught on in Poland.38 Even the Endecja’s radical youth movement, the Młodzież Wszechpolska (All-Poland Youth), eventually assumed the mantle of Catholicism. One of their leading activists, Witold Nowosad, once said, “[We want] nothing to do with either Hitlerite racism or racial hatred, or with any kind of hatred in general. The madness of German neo-paganism disgusts us.”39 A few Polish Catholics were unconvinced by these professions of faith. In 1927 Father Jan Urban wrote that the Endecja’s revised stance might seem

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“entirely correct from a Catholic position,” but he remained worried: “[I] get the impression that there is a need for such a political position here primarily because the Catholic religion is ours, and not because it is the true religion of Christ.”40 The archbishop of Warsaw, Aleksander Cardinal Kakowski, had never been fond of the far right, and as late as 1936 he warned the priests of his archdiocese to keep their distance from the National Democrats. If they wanted to be “true patriots,” he wrote, they should “condemn unhealthy patriotism, which manifests itself as an exaggerated nationalism that aspires to oppress other nations.  .  .  . [The Endecja displays] too much mutual prejudice and hatred, too much family, class, and national discord for mostly trifling reasons. Too little faith and hope.”41 These concerns would continue to appear from time to time in Catholic texts, but already in the early 1920s such worries were being pushed aside, as most members of the clergy discovered their own ways to speak with surprising vitriol about their imagined (and even real) enemies. Just as the Endecja changed in an attempt to win Catholic support, so did the boundaries of Polish Catholicism shift so as to make room for the Endecja. At the core of this transformation was a new approach to conflict and war, one that continued to reject a Spencerian understanding of struggle, but that had plenty of space for imagining existential conflict. As we have seen, the nineteenth-century Polish Church taught that God was the only meaningful historical agent; individuals and nations could earn His wrath or His mercy, but they could not independently control the course of events. From this perspective international conflict and war would be interpreted as means for God to express His will, but those who actively and willfully pursued war as a means of attaining territory, wealth, or national glory would be guilty of (among other things) the sin of hubris for imagining that they could shape history on their own. On a still deeper level, this historiosophy precluded viewing war as the engine of progress or suggesting that conflict constituted the essence and meaning of history. In nineteenth-century Poland one rarely encounters hints of the Manichaean heresy—the idea that the world is a battlefield between forces of light and darkness, good and evil. Since at least the time of St. Augustine (who was himself a Manichaean before converting to Christianity) Church authorities have been vigilant in stamping out any hints of this heresy, which was thought to undermine the monotheistic omnipotence of God. Catholicism taught that the Devil and Hell were literal realities, but it was going way too far to imply that Satan had the power to seriously challenge God, or to suggest that the course of history was shaped by such a conflict. When World War I began, most priests explained the conflict in accordance with mainstream theology as a manifestation of God’s mysterious will, and their texts located the Church and God above and outside the conflicts of the earth.

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From this position, the role of the Church was to explain why Divine Providence allowed wars to happen but would not join in as one of the combatants. For example, Father Nikodem Cieszyński said in 1915, “Almighty God watches in His Providence over the world and over humanity, guiding the fate not only of individuals but also of nations.” This meant that the war was an act of God, “a means of strengthening [the sinner’s] will, of purifying his character.”42 That same year the respected St. Wojciech Publishers of Poznań released a collection of sermons about warfare, and the titles alone reflected this familiar theology of history: “War as the Scourge of God,” “War as a Divine Punishment,” “War as a Time for Penance and Correction,” “A Voice of Warning and Consolation.”43 Bishop Pelczar reiterated his faith in Divine Providence by interpreting World War I as the “mighty voice of God’s justice and mercy—justice, because people deserved a lashing [chłosta] for their many and grave sins; mercy, because God uses those lashings to convert the bad and educate and perfect the good.”44 Bishop Władysław Bandurski even constructed a special “Way of the Cross” in the town of Piotrków, in which he juxtaposed Jesus’ march to crucifixion against Poland’s suffering. The nation continued to endure misery and humiliation, he wrote, because of its earlier sins of “arrogance, pride, conceit, and haughtiness.”45 Many priests also perceived God’s hand in 1918, when peace came and Polish independence was restored. Cieszyński compared Poland to Lazarus, avoiding the doctrinally troublesome metaphor of the “Christ of nations” in favor of a story that ascribed initiative and agency to God. Just as “Lazarus came out from the shadows of the grave into the light, the sun, freedom, liberty, and the great days of the future,” he wrote, so had Poland been resurrected—not because of its own actions, but because God willed it so.46 Archbishop Kakowski also interpreted Poland’s restoration as a heavenly gift. He told the faithful, in a pastoral letter issued on the day independence was restored, “God gazed upon the oppression of his people in slavery, heard their laments, showed mercy and stood at our side in order to crumble our unbearable bonds and give us the free, independent, and united lands of our fathers. So it is. By the grace of God we are free in our free Poland.”47 Similar sentiments were echoed by Bishop Stanisław Gall, the first field bishop of the Polish Armed Forces. In a pastoral letter of August 1920, right after a battle near Warsaw that pushed back a Russian offensive during the Polish-Bolshevik War (which Catholics dubbed the “Miracle on the Vistula”), he wrote to the soldiers that their victory was “a triumph for Christian principles and the rule of Christ on the lands of the resurrected Fatherland. . . . The love of Christ gave you strength in the heroic struggle with the enemies of Christian civilization.”48 But the pendulum was about to swing yet again, because a constitutional assembly established a secular, liberal political order, and to the east the Bolsheviks were constructing a programmatically atheistic socialist regime. There then

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followed a decade in which Józef Piłsudski took power and the Polish economy slid into a deep depression. The consensus reaction to these events, expressed in nearly every Catholic text from those years, echoed the words of a 1933 sermon by Father Ildefons Bobicz: “In the world things are bad, very bad! Worse than they have been for a long time. Crisis! Poverty! Misery!”49 By 1922 Archbishop Kakowski was again assuming the voice of an Old Testament prophet, warning Poles that if they did not repent, they would “descend into a new slavery.”50 Father Ireneusz Kmiecik, the famous itinerant preacher, asked one audience provocatively, “Was not that terrible world war, which we survived but in which millions of people lost their lives and thousands of cities and towns fell into ruins, a clear divine punishment for the crimes and sins of the world? Who cannot see that? And to this day the effects of that war persist, because people still persist in their sins instead of recognizing their sins and, with penitence, praying to God for mercy and forgiveness.”51 Jeremiads like these, whether lamenting tribulations or celebrating victories, fit within the historical vision of nineteenth-century Catholicism, a perspective that had ascribed nearly all agency to God. According to this view, humans possessed enough free will to evoke God’s anger or earn his rewards, but they could not directly control the flow of events. There was, however, another way of interpreting the disappointments and accomplishments of the early twentieth century. Already in 1919 Archbishop Józef Bilczewski was hesitantly suggesting that God might not have been working alone to bring Poland back to the map of Europe. In a pastoral letter that he titled “Post-War Duties” he wrote, “Only someone spiritually and morally blind would fail to see that the Lord’s hand was in this,” but he carefully added, “We do not, after all, violate the principle of Christian humility if we remember that our resurrection is also, in large part, the result of our own merits.”52 This claim of responsibility could also apply when things went badly, though in these cases the agency was usually ascribed to some hostile alien group. In 1929 a contributor to Życie i Praca repudiated the teaching that the Poles had brought about their own suffering: “When it was said to us that we deserved our fate, we answered ‘it isn’t true!’ Poland had an unbroken feeling that a crime was committed against it.”53 The power of Divine Providence remained intact in this text, but the grounds for God’s intervention in history was realigned. As Życie i Praca later explained, God’s anger was provoked by the forces of evil within Poland, and faithful Catholics suffered insofar as they failed to do enough to contain those forces. Responding to some disastrous floods in 1934, the paper characterized them as a supernatural punishment: Do not imagine, you madmen, that God would allow Himself to be ridiculed and derided. Every blasphemous word, all of your shameful

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verses that you spread all around Poland, so too all around Poland they cry out for divine punishment. And this divine punishment will reach not only the blasphemers themselves, but also those who do not struggle against blasphemy and the blasphemers, but instead peacefully and apathetically look on as blasphemous books and newspapers spread around the country.54 In a move that had become common by then, the notional addressee of this text (the “you” of the first line) was not the actual reader, but some vaguely identified enemy. Życie i Praca was not disturbed as much by the consumption of those “shameful verses” as by their production and distribution. The sins of the actual readers of the magazine were reduced to one crucial transgression: the failure to do enough to silence all the “blasphemers.” Catholics would thus claim credit for the good that had happened (such as the restoration of Poland), while believing that enemies bore the main responsibility for the bad. This partial dislocation of sin to groups or individuals outside the Church was of fundamental importance, because it inspired a quest to identify those evildoers and discern their goals and their tactics. The eventual result was a proliferation of conspiracy theories that explained and linked together secularism, capitalism, socialism, decadent popular culture, and more. Such conspiratorial visions can be found across all historical eras and cultural contexts, but at certain times and among certain communities we find unusually widespread agreement that specific (though usually invisible) agents are responsible for injustice, suffering, and evil. Scholars often interpret outbursts of conspiracy theories as a reaction to insecurity and disorientation, particularly in a modern world ruled by global economic and political forces that cannot be easily understood or even perceived. To make sense of what seems like senseless suffering, this reasoning goes, people embrace stories about maleficent individuals, organizations, or foreign communities.55 This explanation is persuasive in the case of Catholicism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A list of all the misfortunes that befell the Church during that time would be long indeed, and vague, impersonal words like modernization and secularization (terms drawn from a liberal vocabulary, no less) would hardly have been adequate explanations for a devout Christian. It is easy to imagine that the clergy and the most committed members of the laity might have been receptive to alternative ways of giving meaning to their troubled world. Explaining conspiratorial thinking as a response to widespread disorientation is helpful, but it does not tell us the full story. After all, the concept of Divine Providence offered a well-established means of giving meaning to suffering. But  two forces were intersecting to make it easier to believe in a hostile plot against  Christendom. On the one hand, the Vatican itself was promoting the

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idea, particularly during the papacy of Pius X. In his 1907 encyclical, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, Pius described the modernists not merely as the purveyors of misguided ideas, but as infiltrators who were intent on undermining Christianity in general. He believed that the modernists “put their designs for [the Church’s] ruin into operation not from without but from within; hence, the danger is present almost in the very veins and heart of the Church, whose injury is the more certain, the more intimate is their knowledge of her.” In Pius’s mind the evil ambitions of the modernists knew no bounds; he was convinced that they aspired to nothing less than “the destruction not of the Catholic religion alone, but of all religion.”56 The antimodernist campaign may have brought immediate harm to only a small cluster of dissident intellectuals, but the mind-set it revealed was more far-reaching. Here too was a worldview that blamed some ill-defined force hostile to the Church for the problems of the modern world. Once sanctioned in such a dramatic way by the Vatican, conspiracy theories spread rapidly throughout the Catholic world. The second and more fundamental factor contributing to the spread of conspiratorial thinking among Catholics was the turn away from the nineteenth century’s docility and quiescence toward new forms of political and social engagement. The concept of action—directly tackling the problems of the world instead of leaving all the initiative in God’s hands—had been percolating through the Church since at least the time of Leo XIII, and by the interwar years it could have been used as a one-word summary of the hierarchy’s program. As one parish priest put it in a sermon in 1927, the Church had two weapons in the battle against God’s enemies: “The first is faith, and the second is action.”57 On one level, action entailed the commitment to political and social change explored in chapter 4 and 5, but it went far beyond that. Eventually the turn to an active engagement with the problems of the world created openings for talking about a life-or-death battle against the enemies of God and the Church. Some of the earliest expressions of the new militancy date back as far as the 1890s, when some contributors to the Catholic press began hesitantly incorporating bits and pieces of the “struggle for survival” ideology that was so common in those days. The Poznań weekly Przewodnik Katolicki was one of the first Catholic periodicals to make this turn, publishing an unsigned editorial in 1895 claiming, “Two camps and two worlds stand today against each other, and among them a battle for life and death must play out.” From this militant foundation the magazine was even able to praise the Polish national uprisings, which had long been denounced in the Catholic press. “We must stand under the cross,” this author wrote, “on our land, in a struggle modeled on that of our fathers, who shed their blood for that cross on the fields of so many battles.”58 In another article that year the editors of Przewodnik Katolicki justified the creation  of a Catholic lay association with martial imagery that would have been

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unthinkable a generation earlier: “Today the times are sorrowful, faith is endangered, virtue is trampled upon, and thus today more than ever there is a need to collect our thoughts, unite our souls, a need to line up armies in brotherhoods against the legions of hell that have marked their work on earth so clearly through the corruption of morals, the collapse of faith.”59 Yet another contributor openly challenged the standard interpretation of Matthew 16:18 (the prophesy about the Church’s invincibility against the forces of Satan), which had long been used to justify political passivity on the grounds that Christianity’s victory was predestined regardless of what mere mortals did: The Church must achieve victory sooner or later, because the gates of hell will not prevail against it. . . . Should you, considering this, toss up your hands and look peacefully upon what is happening? Oh, no! . . . Against the spirit of the time, which wants to introduce disbelief to the world, which takes joy only in the consumption of earthly things and the gathering of the treasures of the world, which wants to set the children of one mother against each other—[against all this] you must go into battle, lit by the fire of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth, justice, and love.60 These references to “armies” and “battlefields” exemplify the profound shift in tone that was reshaping Catholic rhetoric all over Europe in the 1890s, as the transition from quiescence to action began to take hold. This alternative to nineteenth-century fatalism shifted the blame for tragedy onto others, turning Catholic Poland into a collective hero responsible for vanquishing its enemies. We have seen how Archbishop Bilczewski led the move to Catholic social reform; one side effect of this new perspective was that passively accepting evil became one of the most important sins. Speaking in 1911, he lamented that the Church’s enemies were “developing their activities with increasing vigor,” and rallied his audience to resist these dangers. “My Dear Ones,” he said, “your most sacred duty is to clean out [odmiatać] from your homes, from your villages, the emissaries of the Masons, the socialists, [the Mariavites], the Lutherans, the Orthodox.” Those who failed to do so “would commit a crime that would not be worthy of absolution.”61 Homilies in the coming decades would continue to chastise the faithful for the catalog of personal sins described in chapter 2, but alongside familiar diatribes we find an increasing tendency to locate the ultimate source of evil outside the Church, thus making it vital for Christians to identify and suppress the purveyors of that evil. Catholic social activism is usually located within historical narratives that lead to the Second Vatican Council, liberation theology, the Maryknoll order, Dorothy Day, and other progressive heroes. But in the context of this chapter we see the dark flip

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side of the same logic of terrestrial engagement. The move to the concrete, the embodied, the earthly, and the mundane profoundly altered the way Catholics talked about “the enemy,” because the same reasoning that justified social action could be turned in a different direction once exploitation and persecution were incarnated in a flesh-and-blood ascriptive community rather than a disembodied set of ideas. In 1908 Bishop Józef Pelczar was merely expressing a widely held belief when he told a diocesan synod that the enemies of the Church had successfully established control of “power, money, governments, parliaments, associations, newspapers, books, schools, theaters, and works of art.”62 With each passing year these fears fed on themselves in a cycle of escalating anxiety. In 1913 Archbishop Aleksander Kakowski of Warsaw wrote, “Nowadays there are more false prophets, bad teachers, and illegitimate authorities than before. . . . Because of all this, I am afraid.”63 In 1927 Father Feliks Bodzianowski believed that the enemies of God “ensnare into their traps the working people, young people, and women in the factories, they call meetings [metingi] and lead religious discussions, they also write plays and hide behind the scenes, having fun and laughing loudly. But in reality it is not they who stand behind the scenes. Someone else occupies that place, rubs his hands together and cackles: Satan.”64 Bodzianowski’s reference to Satan was characteristic of Catholic conspiracy theories, giving them a slightly different sense than their secular counterparts. Also in 1927 Father Alfons Graszyński reminded his parishioners that “Satan is struggling with us for our souls,” but he went on to explain that this was no longer just a matter of personal salvation or damnation. Since World War I, Graszyński believed, the Church had been faced with “another struggle, a hundred times more dangerous,” against enemies who were trying to destroy Christianity altogether. “There are enemies everywhere,” he said, “enemies within us, enemies around us. Satan has uncountable and extremely dangerous helpers; we, on the other hand, are recognizing with fear that the battlefield is increasingly emptying and our helpers are increasingly retreating.”65 The author of a Gospel commentary published in 1934 seemed on the verge of despair as he described the power of the Devil and the weakness of humanity: “Our weakness will be exploited by the enemy of salvation, Satan.. . . Helping Satan are many human souls deprived of faith, in whom [Satan] has already established his rule, emerging victorious over God inside the unfortunate victim. With hellish fury the godless descend upon those who worship God, deploying all their might to rip faith out of their hearts and raise the evil spirit onto the throne.”66 Few interwar Polish Catholics would have dissented from the view that God and Satan were at war. As Archbishop Teodorowicz put it in 1931, “There is for the world no other choice: either perish in the grip of the Soviet demons, or rise up and be reborn in the lifeblood of Christian culture. Christ and the Antichrist

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stand today before the world, and it must choose between these two.”67 This almost Manichaean choice appeared again and again in every genre of Catholic writing in interwar Poland, at every level of the Church. The devotional magazine Rycerz Niepokalanej proclaimed, “Today we must clearly and decisively declare where we stand: under the banner of Christ, in His ranks, in the ranks of the servants of His Immaculate Mother—or do we go under the banner of Satan, the banner of rebellion and revolution, of hatred to God and to everything related to Him. There can be no talk of reconciliation or compromise here.”68 Similarly, the editors of the popular illustrated weekly Przewodnik Katolicki wrote, “Every day convinces us that just as all over the world, so also in Poland there are two factions in society: one that stands under the sign of the cross, another that comes out against it.”69 The entire Episcopate affirmed this dichotomy even more authoritatively in a 1926 pastoral letter: Today it is more apparent than ever before that the world is divided between two camps: between the camp of Christ and the Camp of Belial, between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Satan. There, in the Kingdom of God, the Christian culture of today’s world is preserved, and with it all the elements of order and regulation, such as property, such as the family, such as social justice and love, such as authority. The other camp is now struggling not only against Christianity, but is striking at the very foundation of a healthy national and state system, destroying the family, property, all authority, and basing the social order on the class struggle, on violence, and on hated. . . . The world really has only one choice: either God, the family, healthy public education, culture, and Christian civilization—or chaos, demagoguery, communism, nihilism.70 A very popular biblical passage among interwar Polish Catholics was one that appears in both Luke 11:23 and Matthew 12:30, where Jesus states, “Anyone who is not with me is against me, and anyone who does not gather in with me  throws away.” Przewodnik Katolicki cited this passage in 1922, explaining its  relevance for the early twentieth century by complaining that “all the enemy  powers have conspired against the Divine religion of Christ. International Jewry and the underground might of Masonry and the advocates of the socialist party and all unbelievers. That entire million-man falanga has arisen arm-in-arm in order to launch a general assault against the unconquered fortresses of Christianity.”71 Significantly, I have not found a single homily, speech, or essay from the interwar years expounding upon the more inclusive suggestions from Luke 9:50 and Mark 9:40: “Anyone who is not against us is for us.” One could track the ebb and flow of Catholic intellectual history by determining

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which of these contrasting passages was more popular in a given era. By the interwar years Luke 11 and Matthew 12 were the clear winners. As interwar Catholics came increasingly to perceive the world as a battlefield between God and Satan, the lines between religious, cultural, political, and social categories began to blur. Given the nature of the conspiratorial thinking described above, it was quite easy to link a problem in one sphere with an enemy in another, and ultimately to lump them all together into a unified diabolical assault. Father Mieczysław Skonieczny tried to help his congregation unravel all the labels used to name the forces of evil. “In the city of the demons,” he wrote, “there are many camps bearing separate names such as socialism, communism, sectarianisms of various shades, and Masonry towering over everything (which for its part obeys the Jewish command center). What unites them all? They are united and held together by a great hatred of the Kingdom of God! All of them have one common goal: to destroy the Kingdom of God on Earth.”72 Or, as Archbishop Teodorowicz put it: We have overlooked the fact that everything opposed to the national soul, despite different labels and separate activities, have united nonetheless into one group and one common program, as well as one cohesive enemy camp. And whether it is communism and the tendencies related to it, or sectarianism supported from abroad, or Masonry, or non-denominationalism with its influences in public education, or the attacks on the laws of marriage—everything was joined together by the single idea of radicalizing Poland, and by a single sentiment: hatred for the Kingdom of God and Christ.73 With this reasoning as a foundation, nearly every controversy of the 1920s and 1930s could be subsumed within the presumed war between the Church and its enemies, between God and Satan. Dr. Antoni Szymański (who, as we saw in chapter 4, was a key figure in the Catholic Action movement and a leading proponent of the Church’s social justice mission) defended his own activism in terms of this epochal battle. “The contemporary struggle between the Kingdom of Satan and the Kingdom of the Lord Christ,” he wrote in 1927, “plays out less in the area of religious studies, dogma, or Christian piety, and increasingly in the area of collective and public life, in the family, in the school, the university, in associations, institutions, in the state, in offices, workplaces, in the factories, the banks.” In advocating lay involvement in this struggle he called on the faithful to become “warriors” for the cause of God.74 In 1934 Życie i Praca addressed the persistent economic crisis in a front-page essay, observing provocatively: How odd it is that the crisis in Poland became the most severe precisely when marital infidelity began to multiply, when the plague of divorce

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began to infect us, when public blasphemy grew—and together with all this, poverty increased, the crises deepened.  .  .  . If we really want to improve the human condition in Poland, then let us clean the atmosphere, the environment of the filth, of rubbish, for only in a clean house, in the clean consciences of families, does life become more prosperous and wellbeing and happiness flourish.75 A half-century earlier the connection between sin and economic catastrophe might have been drawn, but only insofar as the former provoked God’s wrath, leading to the latter. Here we see a different logic: the “filth” present in Polish society is behind both calamities. As in this text, it was common to locate the advances of Satan’s minions within the cultural realm—not in the metaphorical sense deployed in current American discussions of “the culture wars,” but quite literally.76 In Catholic texts, sermons, and speeches from the interwar years we find countless references to the imagined battle plan of Satan’s armies, according to which the plot to destroy the Church (and the Polish nation) would commence with an assault on public morality, then move on to other spheres. As Father Stanisław Durzyński explained in a 1927 homily, “This anti-God [antyboża] struggle began on the field of science, with neo-pagan philosophy; then, in further progression, it transferred to the political, governmental field, ate away at the social bases of Christian life, poisoned the education of the young generation, destroyed the sanctity of the family.”77 Similarly, the editors of Przewodnik Katolicki wrote in 1935, “If one wants to rule over a man in body and soul, one must first take from him property and religion. For only then, when a man no longer has either property, or family, or God, he is given over to the mercy of those who want to transform him into a slave.”78 Cardinal Hlond offered a more elaborate account of the enemy’s plan of attack: The struggle with religious studies in the schools, . . . the careful support given to all sorts of sectarianism, . . . the moral depravity spread by fashion, the press, pornography, theater, dance, the cult of nudity: do we not have all too much of these things, wherever the Semitic spirit manages to take control? And finally the degradation of the woman, so that instead of being a pillar of ethical culture, she becomes an agent of decadence, of marital disintegration, of the gradual expulsion of the Church from all aspects of life: have we not had fresh examples of this every day? Step by step, the attack proceeds, and it has more and more influential allies.79 In discussing the struggle against evil, metaphors of defensive shields and fortresses were most typical, but Cardinal Hlond did say in an Ash Wednesday

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sermon in 1932, “Defense is not everything. It is not enough to cover ourselves and ward off blows. . . . The leading imperative of the current moment is to launch a general Catholic offensive.”80 In his mind the primary force to be deployed in that offensive was the Catholic Action association. Though it was usually thought of as a devotional and social organization, martial metaphors were sprinkled throughout Archbishop Kakowski’s announcement of the formation of his local branch in 1936: “Catholic Action is an organized army of lay apostles, with the help of whom the bishop will carry out apostolic work alongside the first rank of his priestly co-workers. Catholic Action will ennoble the lay Catholic as a knight of Christ.”81 Father Ireneusz Kmiecik urged people to join this group (and other lay associations) by arguing, “Today no Christian should go forth alone. The enemy can easily defeat a dispersed army, even a very large one, even if he has fewer numbers, as long as he is well organized. Particularly nowadays, when so many enemies strike at the Church, Catholics must gather together strongly in Catholic organizations.”82 Father Mieczysław Skonieczny defended all associational activity as a tactic in the war against the enemies of God: We are all soldiers of Christ the King and our Catholic associations are cadres in the army of Christ the King, which fight for the Kingdom of God on earth. What fortresses are for a normal army, Catholic associations are for the army of Christ. They create for the soldiers of Christ spiritual fortresses, which are a foundation and a support for us in battle. . . . What else are Catholic associations? They are spiritual military schools. . . . This is the true army of the soldiers of Christ, well organized and trained, which will fight for Christ to achieve the Kingdom of God on earth, and which must triumph.83 This militaristic vocabulary was so pervasive that it even penetrated devotional magazines like Rycerz Niepokalanej. The very title of this publication, The Knight of the Immaculate, points once again to armies and warfare, albeit with a slightly anachronistic tone. Each issue carried two slogans on the masthead: “She will crush your head” and “You alone have destroyed all heresies throughout the world.” The first line is from Genesis 3:15, where God tells the serpent that there will be eternal enmity between him and the daughters of Eve. The actual passage has an ambiguous pronoun, and reads in English, “I shall put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; it will bruise your head and you will strike its heel.” Though employing a much stronger verb (zmiażdżyć, which means “crush” or “grind up”), the standard Polish translation retains the third-person neuter (ono, “it”). However, Catholic devotional texts often switch to “she” in order to facilitate a Marian interpretation of the line, with implications that I explore in chapter 10.84 The second line

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on the magazine’s masthead is from Pius IX’s 1864 ultramontane manifesto, Quanta Cura, and had been incorporated into a popular prayer to the Virgin.85 Subscribers to Rycerz Niepokalanej were urged to join a lay group called the Militia of the Immaculate, which framed even mundane devotional activities as if they were a form of paramilitary action.86 In the spring of 1933 Rycerz Niepokalanej published an article on the importance of participating in the special ceremonies of May, which is traditionally considered the month of Mary. The anonymous author reminded readers, “We are not merely the children [of Mary]. We are also her knights. And knights have a duty to fight. Today the struggle, more than ever before, is our holy duty. For indeed there have been attacks on Christ’s Holy Church—and these have not been at all ambiguous— by both the open and the still concealed godless ones.”87 An obvious question emerges: How did all these Catholics avoid the charge that they had succumbed to the Manichaean heresy? How could one believe in the inevitable triumph of the Church, yet still argue that direct human action was needed lest the forces of evil win? Some interwar priests did indeed get so caught up in the idea of a struggle between light and darkness that they seemed to doubt God’s eventual victory. For example, Father Władysław Śpikowski of Poznań told his parish in 1933: A struggle is nearing that will determine the basic issues of the world; decisions will be made that will decide the fate of all of mankind: with God or without God. That decision arises today everywhere: in politics, in the economic realm, in moral questions, in science and art, in the state, society, and the family, in the east and in the west. Whoever does not want anarchy and violence must with all their might work to ensure that the enemies do not carry out their all-tooevident ambitions.88 No Catholic was supposed to question the inevitability of the Church’s victory, regardless of what humans did or did not do. No Catholic was supposed to suggest that Satan was so evenly matched with God that “the fate of mankind” could be influenced by decisions made by mere mortals. Father Józef Hetnał told  his parishioners in the village of Kozy in 1933, “[The Church] has been forced from the dawn of its existence all the way to the present day to carry out a determined struggle with the dark forces that try to totally overthrow it and absolutely destroy it. But despite that we—sons of that greatest mother, the Church—must never succumb to doubt or vacillation.”89 Even in the worst of times, with war looming in 1939, Father Bernard Hołownia of Poznań asked his parishioners, “Could Jesus Christ repeat today his words ‘I have conquered the world’? Yes, without a doubt! Despite every disaster and historical misfortune

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that has disturbed God’s Church, Jesus Christ will always achieve the ultimate victory.”90 Nonetheless, it became increasingly common to argue, as did Archbishop Teodorowicz in 1931, that Catholics in the past had placed too much emphasis on God’s predestined victory, leading to “passivity and apathy” among the faithful. It was incumbent upon good Christians, he believed, to organize themselves into disciplined groups that would “publicly proclaim and defend the right of Christ the King to His Kingdom.”91 One way to reconcile this mandatory optimism with the pessimistic mood of the 1920s and 1930s was suggested by the Catholic activist Father Kazimierz Lutosławski (the founder of the Polish boy scouts and an uncle of the famous composer, Witold Lutosławski): The cause of God on earth is the object of a fierce struggle by the henchmen of Satan in his rebellion against God. The forces opposed to the moral principles of Christianity are superbly organized, and in close ranks they are moving against everything that is Catholic, everything that magnifies the glory of God and the influence of God’s grace on earth. . . . We have a duty to oppose the unified hosts of the servant of darkness with a harmonious and cohesive Catholic force, because otherwise we will lose this struggle. The Lord God always wins, but groups of people can lose and will lose.92 In this presentation, Christianity’s victory was assured, but the short-term victory of the Polish Church was not. Along similar lines, August Hlond said in 1924 (while still bishop of Silesia), “A general test of souls is emerging, the result of which will determine for a long time whether Silesia is to remain Catholic or not. That struggle has already begun.”93 Another way to deal with the tension between the immediate sense of dread and the necessary long-term optimism was to describe the battle against evil as the characteristic feature of human history, positing a victory for God only at the end of (and thus outside of) historical time. Archbishop Teodorowicz, for example, painted a picture of a conflict that would last throughout terrestrial time, but that needed to be fought nonetheless: When Jesus looked into the future history of the Kingdom of God on earth, when he expressed it in one image and in this presented the history of all generations until the end of the world, then once again he presented only a history of struggles and fights. For Jesus says about His Kingdom, about His Church, that “the gates of Hell will not prevail against it,” and thus will struggle against it just as His Church will strive for victory against [the forces of Hell].

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This Ecclesia Militans, Teodorowicz continued, must never compromise with its  implacable foe; all Catholics must repeat Pius IX’s famous cry of “Non possumus” and remember that “Jesus did not recognize any cease-fires.”94 The forces of light might win or lose a particular battle, and the consequences of such defeats would be significant in human terms, but the overarching imperative was to struggle on, with faith in the inevitable victory at the end of history. Most interwar Catholic priests were apparently aware of the danger of slipping into the Manichaean heresy, of basing their worldview entirely on struggle and conflict. Most were apparently aware that “Love thy enemy” was a principle that could not be questioned. Yet most also succumbed to the pessimism of the 1920s and 1930s, and a sort of “struggle for survival” mentality was omnipresent despite all the doctrinal barriers that stood against it. It was quite different from the more worldly concerns of someone like Roman Dmowski, particularly insofar as it focused on the role of Satan in guiding the conspiracies against God and the Fatherland. But it was not different enough to preclude an increasingly close affiliation between the National Democrats and the clergy. Both believed that they were engaged in a struggle of monumental importance, and both argued that concerted action was necessary. In chapter 8 and 9 I will explore precisely what sort of action they envisioned and against whom they thought they were struggling. Before that, however, let us track what happened to this ideology of existential war as the Polish Catholic Church was plunged into an all too literal series of conflicts. The disastrous years between 1939 and the end of the Stalinist era in 1956 presented the Church in Poland with many challenges, but thanks to the ideas about struggle and conflict developed prior to World War II, perceiving a deeper meaning in that long series of events was relatively easy. As discussed in chapter  1, the Church suffered incalculable losses during the war, with thousands of priests killed and a large portion of the churches (particularly those in urban areas) left in ruins. To make matters even worse, liberation from Nazi Germany only brought domination by communist Russia—the very power that had been demonized during the interwar years. As soon as the Stalinists established full control over Polish politics, they turned on the Church with a rapidly escalating series of arrests, culminating in the detention of Cardinal Wyszyński himself from 1953 to 1956.95 For many Polish Catholics of that time, World War II and all that followed seemed to fulfill their worst fears, and the not-quite-Manichaean views promoted by the interwar Church provided ample material for placing the successive waves of Nazi and Soviet occupation into a larger historical narrative. For at least two decades they had prophesied disaster unless the Poles resisted those trying to spread heresy and sin, and cleansed their nation and their state of all the servants of Satan. Because that purification never took place, the calamities of both the

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Nazi invasion and the Soviet seizure of power were predictable—indeed predicted—outcomes. That said, the worldview of apocalyptic struggle was not the only legacy that Catholics carried into the postwar era. The troublesome commandment to love one’s neighbor would continue to coexist with the fear of a Satanic foe, and the former was just as likely to guide the actions of Catholic priests and activists as the latter. Moreover, as bad as the communists were in Catholic eyes, they were never seen as the only (or even necessarily the most dangerous) enemy. For these reasons, even as a belief in the struggle for survival continued to frame how many Catholics perceived the world around them, the day-to-day policies of the bishops and priests never came close to matching their rhetoric. “In an anti-Church rampage,” Hlond wrote in 1947, “Hitler set the life of the Polish Church adrift in blood and fire, as if beginning an apocalyptic era of universal attack by the ‘forces of hell’ on Christianity. He fell and died like the ‘beast’ of Revelations, but the assault on the Catholic position started by him did not break, only weakened a bit.” Given this ongoing danger, Hlond believed, the Ecclesia Militans must stand up and fight: We must not evade the conflict with paganism. We must oppose it. We must not, because of weakness and apathy, facilitate the spread of paganism in the land of Mieszko and Bolesław. We must guard the Christian character of this land. We may make no concessions to paganism, and under no circumstances may we surrender in the struggle with it. There is no “harmony between Christ and Belial,” and there can be no reconciliation between Christianity and godless atheism.96 Rycerz Niepokalanej was briefly revived in the summer of 1945, and the surviving editors carried forward the agenda of rallying the nation under Mary’s banner. It was obvious, the editors wrote in the first postwar issue, that World War II had been “the work of Satan and other evil spirits,” but the defeat of the Nazis did not mean that the struggle with demonic forces had ended. “Rebels against the will of God” were still at large, and their “sadistic cruelty” had to be countered by a “struggle to eradicate the Satanic seeds (evil) and show people true Christian love of one’s neighbor.”97 In a 1946 Lenten letter, the entire Episcopate told the faithful, “Anti-Church elements have taken advantage of the postwar disorder, renewing the assault on religion under the slogans of progress and novelty. The temptations to apostasy are multiplying. Active sectarian cells are emerging. . . . We must not underestimate the alignment of forces that want to morally weaken the nation and cut it off from the Church.”98 Hlond’s successor, Stefan Wyszyński, could not be accused of downplaying the stakes involved:

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It has been a long time since the prayers of the rite of exorcism have had as much realistic eloquence as today. Once they seemed too distant to us—theoretical, full of historical solemnity. And today? We have entered into an open struggle with Satan, whose godless might appears in nearly every aspect of everyday life. Today we, segregati a peccatoribus, see ever more clearly that there exists in the world a community of sinners, related through their sins with tight bonds, emerging from the times of the original sin. These are filii satanæ—the family of Satan, which lives off of interest earned from sin and hatred for the sons of God. . . . There also exists a sanctorum communio, a family of God— filii Dei—related by grace, joined by God’s love. Priests are the leaders of the family of God, armed for struggle with the rite of exorcism. It is up to us to fight the Kingdom of Satan—oportet abicere dæmones. This is a genuine obligation; we must do it.99 To be sure, there were others in the 1940s who saw the impending new era as an opportunity to turn away from the rhetoric of militancy and struggle. According to Father Józef Tischner (who was then a young seminarian), there was a divide in Poland at the time between “a pre-war, catechetical Catholicism” that was still locked in a pointless struggle with modernity, and an “evangelical Catholicism” that hoped to build “a Church of dialogue, a Church of pluralism and seeking.”100 Tischner himself was drawn to a style of Christianity that was “born from the pages and the spirit of the Gospel and does not need an enemy or opponent to strengthen itself and to grow. It turns toward all and not against anyone.”101 Writing in Tygodnik Powszechny in 1946, Jerzy Zagórski argued that it had been wrong “to look for Satanic elements at every opportunity, to drive us to an inquisitorial complex, to permit us to see the devil where we have no evidence that he really exists, to seek sacrificial lambs among human opponents.” Dividing the world into representatives of absolute good and absolute evil, he observed, came perilously close to the Manichaean heresy.102 This perspective was generally accompanied by a repudiation of the nationalism that had characterized the interwar Church. Father Jan Piwowarczyk wrote at the same time, “The world knows, it is convinced, that the role of the Catholic Church—not only the religious [role], but more broadly the cultural one—is conditioned upon its independence from states and nations and races and cultural types. [The world] knows, it is convinced, that to tie [the Church] to the state or to the nation would transform it into a political tool.”103 But Tygodnik Powszechny remained a minority voice with only limited influence beyond the urban intelligentsia. At a time when priests were being arrested  and Church institutions closed down, it is understandable that most Catholics would find the old stories about a vast struggle between good and evil

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compelling. But the relationship between ideology and experience is very complex, and certainly not unidirectional. Drawing a sharp distinction between political conditions or social relations on the one hand and ideologies on the other is misleading, particularly if the former is said to cause the latter. Instead, we should explore the mutually recursive ways in which ideologies structure perceptions of the world, while recognizing that experiences provide material from which ideologies are in turn elaborated. When the now cliché term discourse was first introduced into academic jargon, it referred to the cluster of conceptual and linguistic filters that allow us to make sense of the world but simultaneously make it hard for us to perceive certain phenomena or processes that do not fit within our discursive framework. A discourse, in this sense, is a collection of statements and silences that both give structure to our experiences and limit what can be experienced.104 Unfortunately, what was once a helpful term is now hopelessly overused and misused, but if we reclaimed that more precise definition we could say that there is no such thing as an experience devoid of discursive filters, just as there is no such thing as a discourse entirely unmoored from the experiences of those within it. Most of the arguments prioritizing one over the other, or even differentiating between the two, lead to a polemical dead end. With this in mind, it is clear that the idea of a struggle for survival and the experiences of Catholics living under the early communist regime were in a recursive relationship, with the causal arrows going in both directions. Stalinist persecution was very real and undeniably brutal, but a preexisting narrative of apocalyptic struggle gave that oppression a particular meaning and even helped determine which actions would be understood as oppression and which as mere inconveniences. To contextualize the persistence of Catholic rhetorical militancy it is important to recall the Church’s ambivalent position in the post-Stalinist Polish People’s Republic. To be sure, there were bitter conflicts between Church and state between 1956 and 1989, particularly surrounding the construction of new church buildings. Poland experienced a demographic explosion in the decades following World War II, but when the Church tried to meet the pastoral needs of new communities, the required building permits were usually slow to arrive. In one case, the new city of Nowa Huta (near Kraków) was granted permission to build a church in November 1956, but this ruling was rescinded in 1959, shortly after work on the church had begun and a large cross had been erected on the site. In 1960 the local authorities removed the cross, which sparked a violent demonstration that led to 181 injuries and 500 arrests (resulting in eighty-seven convictions).105 But such incidents were relatively rare; on most occasions the authorities eventually acquiesced and allowed new churches to be built. The total number of churches in Poland nearly doubled between 1946 and 1985, from 7,904 to 15,114. Some of that growth consisted of the reconstruction of

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existing churches destroyed in the war, but even the number of parishes increased, from 5,889 to 8,101. The size of the clergy exploded, from 8,806 priests right after World War II to 22,040 by 1985. At the end of the communist era the Poles enjoyed a ratio of priests to parishioners (5.7 per 10,000) that was actually better than the global average (5.5 per 10,000).106 In fact, the Polish Church has probably never been as powerful and influential as it was in the 1980s. According to one survey, 48 percent of the Polish population went to mass on a regular basis in 1978, and 58 percent claimed to do so a mere five years later. Even more impressive was the level of regular mass attendance among adult males, which rose from 22 percent in 1976 to 50 percent in 1984. In the decade between John Paul II’s rise to the papacy and the fall of communism, a record number of young men entered the priesthood: 40 percent more than the decade before, and 20 percent more than the decade that followed.107 It seems clear in hindsight that part of the growth came from a combination of John Paul II’s star power and the sense that the Church was one of the few institutions in Poland not controlled by the martial law regime. But whatever the case, one hardly gets a picture of a Church locked in a struggle for its very existence. A revealing example of the Church-state conflict came in 1966, when Catholics celebrated the thousand-year anniversary of the baptism of Mieszko I, the ruler who brought Christianity to the Poles. Primate Wyszyński declared a Great Novena leading up to the commemorations, with each of the years from 1957 to 1965 dedicated to a particular homiletic theme. During this time a full-size copy of the famous icon from Częstochowa was taken on a ceremonial pilgrimage through every parish in the country, creating countless opportunities for priests and party officials to spar. The regime did not actually ban the procession, but they did deploy a range of obstructions: traffic police would routinely delay the vehicles carrying the icon, and road construction crews would unexpectedly appear along its route, ensuring that its schedule would be unpredictable and that crowds could not easily gather to greet it. On three occasions the painting was briefly confiscated (“kidnapping the Virgin,” as Catholics like to put it), until finally, on September 2, 1966, it was forcibly taken back to Częstochowa and guards were posted to ensure that it did not leave the premises again. The Virgin remained under house arrest until 1972, but meanwhile the pilgrimage continued with a symbolic empty frame.108 There was no doubt at the time of the Great Novena that the Church and the Communist Party were opponents, but the methods used by both sides were surprisingly restrained, and occasionally quite petty. It might seem paradoxical at first glance, but the hierarchy’s approach to the communist state was based on the maintenance of social order and peace, not confrontation—so much so that the anticommunist opposition was often critical of the bishops for their unwillingness to directly challenge the state

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authorities. For example, in 1970 the army was deployed to quell a workers’ strike in Gdańsk, leading to at least forty-two deaths, and the Episcopate urged people to be calm and rely on prayer to resolve their problems. They did criticize the regime’s use of force, but they also emphasized that “only within the boundaries of peace, order, and inner freedom can one speak about an independent Fatherland. Seeking the means of bringing order and inner peace is the duty of us all.”109 By 1976 party leader Edward Gierek would even announce, “Today one can probably assert that in our country, in Poland, there is no conflict between the state and the Church. . . . I think that there exists a wide-open field for fruitful cooperation between the Church and the State in the realization of important national goals.”110 That was an exaggeration (to say the least), but it did express the recognition among party officials that they shared with the Episcopate a desire to maintain social peace. Prime Minister Piotr Jaroszewicz sent flowers to the primate on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday in 1976, and later the government even petitioned Pope Paul VI to extend Wyszyński’s term of office, despite the fact that he had reached the Vatican’s official retirement age. Significantly, a group of Catholic intellectuals responded by petitioning the pope to enforce the rules and name a new primate.111 Adam Michnik, a prominent secular dissident, would recall later that he had then considered Wyszyński to be “a reactionary, backward politician” who was “basically an ally” of the party. From Michnik’s point of view at the time (he would later soften his assessment), “there were at most secondary conflicts over matters of little importance” between the primate and the party leadership.112 All this might seem surprising to anyone who remembers the Solidarity movement of 1980–81. The religious overtones of the workers’ revolt were obvious to even the casual observer: protesters displayed icons of the Virgin, priests were welcomed into factories during occupation strikes, and Lech Wałęsa himself appeared to be a model of working-class piety. This, however, was an example of popular appropriation of religious imagery in defiance of the wishes of the Church leadership. Wyszyński gave a speech shortly after the outbreak of the strikes in which he criticized the regime but called on the workers to end their protests and return to work, and on September 5 he issued a pastoral letter to the clergy demanding a turn away from political confrontation and toward an examination of personal sin. He argued that state policy was not the only reason the economy was in such bad shape; just as important was the fact that “the deepening sickness of drunkenness bears fruit like dishonesty at work, a lack of reliability, a disrespect for public property, stealing from the nation, the exploitation of working people, embezzlement at the expense of the state, a shocking insensitivity toward the misfortunes of people, and many more phenomena from everyday life.” He concluded by telling the parish priests, “We must have the courage to tell our faithful that the social and economic order depends to a large degree

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on the moral order in our everyday lives.”113 Wyszyński even suggested to a delegation of Solidarity leaders in March 1981 that they should seek reconciliation with the regime. “My dear ones,” he said, “give the government a little time.”114 Wyszyński’s chosen successor, Józef Glemp, continued this policy of nonresistance and tactical compromise. A bit of early 1980s slang eloquently captures the image of the new primate: the verb glempić was used to describe speaking at great length in soothing terms about absolutely nothing.115 When martial law was declared in December 1981, Glemp tried to prevent any resistance. He said that the primary objective of the Church was to “defend against bloodshed” no matter what happened. “I will myself call for calm,” he promised, “even at the cost of exposing myself to insults, and I will plead, even if I have to walk barefoot and beg on my knees, ‘do not take up a struggle of Pole against Pole.’”116 Justifying his stance in hindsight, Glemp said that he “feared bloodshed during martial law, considering how great the anger of the people was.”117 Throughout the 1980s Catholics were urged to recite at every mass the new Prayer for the Fatherland (introduced in December 1980), which included the plea: Give us unity, a spirit of love, truth, and mutual understanding, so that we might, while vanquishing all difficulties and differences of opinion, preserve the common good of the Fatherland. Grant us the spirit of peace and level-headedness, so that it will not come to bloodshed and war. Defend us, so that we will not lose our freedom, achieved at such a high cost by our fathers. Share with us the grace of a deep, genuine renewal of the spirit of the Nation, so that every one of us will undertake a personal effort to change our lives, joining in the great task of the social renewal of the Fatherland.118 Glemp recognized that many people were disappointed by this message; as he put it later, “I saw tears of disillusionment. People thought: the Church has abandoned us.”119 Glemp’s pacifist stance was maintained even after one of the most infamous murders of modern Polish history. When the occupation strikes of 1980 broke out, a thirty-three-year-old priest named Jerzy Popiełuszko joined the workers at a large Warsaw factory to say mass and hear confessions, and he soon became renowned as an outspoken critic of the communist state. When martial law was declared Popiełuszko began organizing a regular Mass for the Fatherland, at which he offered a potent blend of religious devotion and political protest. As more and more people flocked to Popiełuszko’s parish in the northern Warsaw neighborhood of Żoliborz, the state authorities threatened him with arrest. Meanwhile, Glemp told Popiełuszko to give more attention to his regular pastoral duties and less to political activism, and he even tried to move Popiełuszko

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off-stage by urging him to go to Rome to study (though the cardinal later claimed that he was motivated by concern for his subordinate’s safety). In 1984 Popiełuszko was indeed arrested, and subsequently beaten to death and dumped in a river. Though the security officials directly guilty of the murder were tried and imprisoned, it remains unclear how far up the command structure ultimate responsibility lies. When Popiełuszko was buried on November 3, 1984, an estimated quarter of a million people attended the funeral, and his grave remains a pilgrimage site to this day. As traumatic as this brutal murder was, it did not weaken the Catholic hierarchy’s commitment to political disengagement. Among the clergy more broadly this event radicalized some, while persuading others to pull back from political activism lest they provoke further acts of violence.120 The hierarchy’s policy of tactical compromise and pacification stands in striking contrast to the rhetoric that continued to characterize most of their own official pronouncements, not to mention the sermons delivered by parish priests. In 1975 the clergy in the Warsaw Archdiocese were instructed to give a sermon emphasizing that “all of human life, individual and collective, presents itself as a dramatic struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness.”121 This bifurcated image was just as much a part of postwar Polish Catholicism as it had been in the interwar years, making it possible to perceive continuity between the violence of World War II, the overt repression of the Stalinist years, and the less dramatic challenges of later decades. For example, Father Paweł Kosiak, a priest at the Jasna Góra monastery in Częstochowa, told an audience in 1980 that the war against the Church was no less dangerous merely because the regime had softened its tactics: There are situations when the children of the Church must endure discrimination and humiliation just because they belong to Christ. It is not at all necessary to evoke those times in which the blood of the martyrs flowed profusely. The epoch of barbarism is repeated constantly, but in a changing form. The time of so-called modern civilization avoids open persecution, imprisonment, exile, and the death sentence. They manage, however, to torment the Church and its children with just as much ruthlessness, undermining religious rights and the work of the Church.122 On October 16, 1980, at a time when Solidarity had been legalized and the communists seemed to be retreating on every issue, and when Wyszyński was urging the new movement to avoid confrontation, the primate also gave a sermon warning the faithful not to delude themselves that they were winning the war against Satan. In fact, he continued, “nowadays that struggle has become particularly intense. It is carried out in a planned, organized way, with the help of

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powerful material and intellectual means.”123 Seen through this prism, every apparent success looked like a trap, and even the smallest issue could set off a cascade of associations until it seemed as if the Church’s very existence was at stake. On one occasion the Episcopate called on the faithful to pray for relief from the “forces of darkness” that were plotting to use the press to encourage institutional changes in the Church. The plan, the bishops explained, was to introduce “such far-reaching reforms in the organization of the Church that they  would amount to the destruction of its entire institutional and socialadministrative structure.” This amounted to a “great frontal attack” by God’s enemies, involving “an intensification of evil, unbelief, social hatred, divorce, secularization, disobedience toward all authority (divine and human), a general uprising against everything.” The issue that provoked this particular jeremiad was not something the Polish communists had done; rather, the bishops were upset by calls from a few laypeople to end mandatory clerical celibacy.124 The conviction that the Church was still locked in an existential struggle generated invectives that might seem hyperbolic to outsiders. When nuns in habits were forbidden from working in secularized state hospitals in 1963, the bishops exclaimed in outrage, “Does this not recall the situation of the blacks in the U.S.? Does it not recall the fate of the colored people in South Africa? Does it not recall the star that the Jews had to wear in their time as a ‘lower category of human’?” In the same pastoral letter they complained about a new rule that children could not attend mass at state-run summer camps: “[Because of this] the camp dorms are indeed transformed into summertime concentration camps for children.”125 Virtually anything could be depicted as a step toward “the biological and moral destruction of the Nation,” as the bishops put it in a letter about the decline of traditional familial norms.126 Sermons from the communist era expressed concern over a range of social and cultural issues, including the rising rate of abortion, changes in sexual norms, alcoholism and drug abuse, and juvenile delinquency. Such issues, taken alone, were unremarkable; Christians of many denominations all over the world were concerned with similar matters. In the Polish Church, however, there was a particularly pronounced strain depicting these problems as a manifestation of “the struggle with religion, the struggle with God, the struggle with sanctity” (as Bishop Zygmunt Kamiński of Lublin put it).127 In a sermon recorded by the State Security Services (ironically, a genuine act of conspiratorial hostility), Kamiński explained that the enemies of God were deliberately spreading intoxicants as part of a broader agenda that extended far beyond Poland: Many have observed that propagating atheism directly in Poland will not succeed, so different atheist actions were taken, indirectly. Precisely which? Break the moral fiber of man, break him morally, lead him to sin.

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Then he will go after everything just in order to attain it. Some act similarly in Western countries, guiding the youth. At first they invite the youth to a party, to a discotheque, and while there they give them narcotics. But after a few weeks the youth can no longer live without the narcotics. They say: we will give them to you, but you must work with us. If you will come to meetings with us, demonstrate, shout, then we will pay you.128 The disjuncture between the Church’s official policy of compromise and the pervasive rhetoric of apocalyptic struggle does not necessarily point to competing factions within the Church, one militant and one pacifist. Often the same priests who urged calm in the face of state oppression gave sermons on other occasions describing the plans of the enemy to destroy Christian civilization. There are several possible explanations for this gap between language and practice. First, as the political scientist Wojciech Sokół noted, the Church leadership was “ambivalent” about the “democratic-liberal values posed as an alternative to communism.”129 For much of the 1970s it was common in Catholic circles to refer to the conflict between the state and the anticommunist dissidents as a battle between the pinks and the reds, an internecine struggle between two groups hostile to the Church. For those who held this view there was no compelling reason for Catholics to get involved on either side. Second, the very militancy of the Church’s pronouncements partially insulated them from any accusations of collaboration with the regime. In other words, they could make the deals needed to thrive as an institution while maintaining their anticommunist bona fides. Third, with each passing decade it became less and less obvious that the Church should be focusing its efforts on resisting the communists, when so many other enemies were arising. In the words of Father Czesław Bartnik, a professor of theology at the Catholic University of Lublin, the Church actually found it easier to cooperate on a day-to-day basis with the communists than they did with “liberal or Masonic states,” because Catholics and communists alike “work together to maintain social order, social discipline, and an ascetic collective life.”130 We must not read too much into an isolated statement, but Bartnik does show us that many of the clergy’s concerns were not unique to communism at all. In fact, after an initial flurry of social experimentation, the satellite regimes of Eastern Europe became notoriously prudish, and the party leaders were likely to share an understanding of personal morality, family values, and cultural tastes closer in practice to the clergy than to younger generations of Poles. In other words, since at least the 1970s it was not at all clear to many in the Church that the regime was still in the vanguard of the war against Christian civilization. That they were part of the struggle could hardly be in doubt, but there was room for uncertainty about the most important source of danger.

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Finally, there were doctrinal constraints that simply could not be ignored. Back in 1947 Wyszyński had written a pastoral letter instructing the faithful, “Our neighbors, even if they are enemies, political opponents, do not cease to be children of God.”131 A year later the Episcopate told Catholic youth to “respect the good will of those people in the ranks of the materialists who honestly want to work for a better future for the working masses,” because the rank-and-file Communist Party members “most often do not know what they are doing.”132 In 1949 Wyszyński told the faithful that they should not hate individual communists, even if they did horrible things. “Let us distance ourselves from spite, anger, churlishness, vengefulness, severity,” he said. “Remember that many of them hate just because they have been ordered to do so.”133 Even at the height of the anti-Catholic persecution in 1953, only a few months before his own arrest, Wyszyński urged his fellow priests, “Maintain respect for people even if they are hostile toward you; maintain peace in your words, even when struggling for the spirit.”134 Once the brutality of Stalinism had passed, this teaching was conveyed with even more enthusiasm. In 1959 the Episcopate issued a joint pastoral letter to the children of Poland in which they wrote, “It might happen, dear Boys and Girls, that among your classmates you will find some who do not pray and do not seek God. Be lenient toward them, do not rebuke them or cause them any distress as a result of this. Rather, in the silence of your heart invite them to the most beautiful Love that is God. Remember that they are the children of God, so you have a duty to love and respect them all.”135 A couple of years later the entire Episcopate issued a similar injunction to the clergy, reminding them that in their pastoral duties they were to remain open to all: The principles of behavior follow clearly from the primary commandments of the Lord Christ: “Love your neighbor as yourself ” (Matthew 5:43); “Do not judge, lest you be judged” (Matthew 7:1); “Love your enemy” (Matthew 5:44). Even the faith must not be defended at the cost of love for one’s neighbor. Condemning sin, not tolerating evil, we must simultaneously tolerate concrete sinners. We have no right to judge or condemn concrete individuals.  .  .  . Disavowing their claims and warning the faithful about their teachings, we ought to refrain from insulting epithets and sweeping judgments, and utilize the language of care and sympathy.136 Father Stanisław Szymański of Olsztyn passed that message to his flock in a sermon on “meekness” (łagodność) that same year. “Meekness is a complicated virtue,” he said, “containing within itself three elements: a) control over outbursts of anger; b) patient endurance of the shortcomings of one’s neighbor;

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c) forgiveness of affronts and friendliness toward everyone, even enemies.” When we get emotional, he cautioned, we become like lions, bears, and wolves, but our Christian duty was “to change bit by bit into a lamb, like Jesus, so that we can live meekly, and meekly spread the Gospel.”137 When the reforms of Vatican II came along, the otherwise conservative Wyszyński did find one aspect of the Council worthy of enthusiastic support. As he put it in a Lenten sermon in 1963, “The breath of active love of one’s brother ought to reach out from the Council chambers, my dear Children, to every shrine and parish, to every home and family, to every mind and heart. That spirit ought to vanquish the hostility of feeling, word, and deed to which we have become very accustomed. . . . We cannot permit into our heart a sentiment that would be hostile to anyone.”138 While attending the Council, the Polish bishops made a dramatic move that would put this teaching into practice and provoke a storm of protest. In preparation for the coming millennium of Christianity in Poland, the Episcopate issued separate letters of invitation to the episcopates of every nation, hoping to stage an impressive display of global solidarity for the Polish Church. Most of these were formulaic, but the letter to the German Episcopate stood out because of one startling paragraph: Despite everything, despite a situation burdened with an almost hopeless past—or precisely because of this situation—we appeal to you, our honored brothers: let us try to forget. No polemics, no more cold war, but the start of the dialogue to which the Council and Pope Paul VI are aspiring. . . . In a most Christian, but also a very human spirit, we reach out to you, sitting here on the benches of the final session of the Council, and we give our forgiveness and ask for yours [udzielamy wybaczenia i prosimy o nie].139 In a sermon at Wawel, Cathedral Bishop Wojtyła of Kraków explained that this wording was necessary because “in relations between people, particularly over a long period of time, it is never the case that there are no matters for mutual forgiveness.”140 The communist regime exploited this letter by wrapping themselves in the Polish flag and launching an anticlerical propaganda campaign that drew upon still fresh memories of wartime German atrocities. Even many devout Polish Catholics found it hard to understand why the Germans should be forgiven, let alone why Poles should be asking for German forgiveness. The letter to the German bishops was an unmitigated disaster from a public relations perspective within Poland, but Wyszyński, Wojtyła, and the other Polish bishops did not seem overly concerned about this. They never retreated from the message of the  1965 letter. In a 1972 joint pastoral letter the bishops denounced “selfish

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chauvinisms and degenerate nationalisms,” contrasting these with “the creative force of genuine patriotism.” The latter was marked by “noble love, free from hatred, because hatred is a destructive force that leads to sickness and the perversion of patriotism (properly understood).”141 Homiletic instructions from the Warsaw Archdiocese in 1975 lamented the spread of “hatred, discord, and the  lack of trust,” and expressed particular concern that “hatred encompasses entire nations and social groups.” The Warsaw clergy was told to remind their parishioners that such emotions were not only contrary to Christianity, but also very dangerous: “Every hatred gives birth most often to a new hatred, and every retaliation—a new retaliation. So that hatred and evil will not perpetually increase, someone must be the first to break that tragic chain of mutual offense and insult.”142 The commandment to love even extended to atheists and communists. Another memo to the priests of the Warsaw Archdiocese instructed them to reject atheism but “call for dialogue with the atheists, for cooperation in building a world for the welfare of humanity.” Such a dialogue would be possible, this anonymous author wrote, if built on “a foundation of love and justice.”143 As social tensions mounted in the summer of 1980, Father T. Badura reminded his congregation: Jesus loved everyone, and he demands of us to “love your enemies.” That principle cuts through all boundaries that might stand between one person and another. It involves not only people of the same nation, adherents of the same religion, people of the same race, of the same political views, but every person on the entire earth, and even the closest personal enemy. Complete oneness, without any exceptions or exclusions, even when it comes to a person who is hated, damned, a religious or political enemy.144 Many Catholics even managed to sustain this commitment to love through their anger and bitterness over the declaration of martial law in 1981. Father Mirosław Drzewiecki, an otherwise outspoken supporter of Solidarity from Wrocław, told his congregation in 1982, “Although it is hard for us to think about this today, every retreat from [the commandment to love one’s enemy], every retreat from prayer for one’s enemy, every retreat from love, is a betrayal of Jesus Christ. . . . We must cry out, we must speak up, but with love. No ill-considered act, no act of anti-love can contribute to the cause of peace. . . . If in the struggle with evil we use the means that evil uses, then we have lost—evil has emerged triumphant.”145 Another priest, speaking in Częstochowa in 1982, even said that when confronting people who spied for the regime or worked in the Security Services, Catholics should remember, “Our nation believes in love, not in hatred.

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Our nation does not want hatred or revenge, even against those who cause or caused the greatest harm, the greatest suffering.”146 The doctrine of love tended to act as a constraint (albeit a highly imperfect one), setting some rough limits on what could and could not be easily said within a Catholic framework. In this case the Gospels both dovetailed with and in part inspired the tactical policies of the Episcopate vis-à-vis the communist state, reinforcing a tendency toward conciliation and compromise. It would be an exaggeration to suggest that every Catholic, or even most Catholics, fully internalized this teaching, but it would be equally misleading to consider it a disposable verbal flourish of no real consequence. “Love your neighbor” was repeated so often that it became a cliché—and clichés have a way of sticking in our heads, shaping the ways we talk about, perceive, and respond to the world. We can only speculate whether the constant repetition of this message contributed to the relative lack of violent resistance when martial law was declared, or the lack of violent retribution when communism was finally overthrown, but we can say that it ensured that the moral authority of the clergy could not easily support any form of violent resistance. There was undeniably a gap between the language of struggle and the practice of love. These two principles could never be reconciled, but neither could either of them be entirely ignored. If the letter to the German bishops and the Church’s support for dialogue and nonviolence demonstrate the enduring power of the commandment to love one’s enemy, then an emerging countertrend in the 1980s demonstrates that there was always more (and less) to Catholicism than just that one eloquent teaching. In 1982, less than a year after the declaration of martial law, a priest from Podkowa Leśna told his parish, “The arm of justice will sooner or later reach the traitors of the Nation. It will reach them here on earth or in eternity. Each traitor must be punished. Each one who betrays the truth must be punished. They must be! We can speak about the mercy of God, but we must speak about the justice of God.”147 From the 1980s until the present the dichotomy between love and justice would become one of the most important points of contention within the Church. If love entailed dialogue, outreach, and forgiveness, justice implied a continuation of the struggle against the evildoers until they had all been utterly vanquished. Sometimes this debate appeared to split the Church into two irreconcilable camps, but the love/struggle duality does not always offer a simple either/or choice. All Catholics are supposed to love their enemies, but no Catholic can easily shed the legacy of nearly a century of institutional and cultural preoccupation with identifying and condemning (if not always actively battling) the enemies of the Church. This tension exists within each individual, and not just between different factions within the Church. The complex relationship between love and struggle was on vivid display in a single issue of Biblioteka Kaznodziejska in January 1989. The editors published

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two alternative sermons for the third Sunday of Lent, each appearing to serve as a rebuttal of the other. In the first, Father Stanisław Iłczyk of Częstochowa warned his congregation, “There are forces in the world whose only task is to divide, break apart, scatter, and sow foment and confusion. To snatch souls away from the Savior that were redeemed by His Blood! Such are the characteristic activities of the evil spirit. Satan can only divide. It is he who never ceases to present illusory images of happiness that are supposed to make people happy.”148 Immediately following this text, however, was a sermon by Father Rafał Pierzchała of Poznań, contending that “we all create civilization, technology, culture, and society, and all the evil that is in these things cannot be blamed on some sort of ill-defined forces. All of us bring to the community of humanity a portion of good or evil. Christ expects from all people a constant conversion and a personal effort to do good.”149 Neither author contested the idea that there were clear choices between good and evil; neither would have questioned that love and forgiveness were lofty virtues. Both condemned “division” (though each used the term in a different way). Despite these parallels, Pierzchała and Iłczyk employed strikingly different tones and came to different conclusions. It is clear that these two priests had contrasting perspectives, but equally clear that they built their views from a common foundation. Many committed Catholics believed that once they emerged from the catacombs of communism they should wield the sword of divine justice, smite their old enemies, and move forward in the construction of a truly Catholic Poland. When it became obvious that this wasn’t going to happen, that they had just shifted from one opponent (communism) to another (liberal capitalism), a great many returned to a language of struggle that sometimes bore a marked similarity to the rhetoric of a half-century earlier.150 In 1994 Bishop Adam Lepa said that the political elites of the Third Republic (as the postcommunist state is known) had demonstrated “a clear desire to continue the struggle with the Church, the goal of which is its complete destruction.”151 As we saw in chapter 5, those sharing such views are gathered around Father Tadeusz Rydzyk’s Radio Maryja and its several media offshoots, and they have carried their message onto the political stage through the Law and Justice Party of Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński as well as several smaller political organizations. Archbishop Bolesław Pylak said in 2002 that Radio Maryja was “the only mass media that has not been sold to foreign agents. It proclaims the word of God, therefore it is attacked by diabolicMasonic centers carrying out a struggle against the Catholic Church. . . . Simply put, Father Rydzyk proclaims the truth.”152 Radio Maryja’s leading theologian, Czesław Bartnik, wrote that large segments of the Polish intellectual and political elite today view the Church as “a hindrance on their path to Satanic rule over the Polish spirit, and they want to entirely destroy it.” The desire to impose atheism on the nation is, for Bartnik, “just as intolerant and ruthless in relation

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to the Catholic Church as Stalinism was.”153 The suggestion that Poland is as relentlessly anti-Catholic today as it was during the early 1950s might seem absurd, but for those at Radio Maryja it is virtually axiomatic. Rydzyk’s worldview could be summed up in a simple proclamation from 2002: “To adjust to the world is to collaborate with evil.” His Catholicism is one that eschews moderation, accommodation, and dialogue, because he occupies a world where the Church is under constant attack by enemies (both open and concealed) and where the faithful must hold to a firm, uncompromising faith in order to survive. Rydzyk perceives an ongoing battle with evil in which the forces of Satan have gained control of virtually all social and political institutions, infiltrating even the Church itself (in the form of liberal priests and theologians). Even Father Rydzyk must say that he loves his enemies—that commandment remains too important to be explicitly denied. His love, however, is embedded in an uncompromising message: “It must be said clearly: I do not oppose people, only the lies they proclaim. . . . It is not in my nature to hate. I pity such people. . . . What will they say one day to the Lord God? For they too will die. . . . I would not want to be in the skin of such a person.”154 Because many of the most vociferous critics of Radio Maryja are themselves Catholics, Father Rydzyk can only conclude that the institutions of his faith have already been infiltrated by “wolves” who are “realizing a scenario, the goal of which is to destroy the Church.”155 A contributor to Rydzyk’s newspaper Nasz Dziennik, Father Jerzy Bajda, characterized the period after 1989 as a mere continuation of a long struggle: Socio-political “engineers” took great care, precisely and scientifically, to create all the superficial features of sovereignty and independence, but we did not govern ourselves—“someone” governed for us and dictated to us how we were to understand the goals and priorities of Polish domestic and foreign policy. Those goals had not yet diverged from that which Lenin or Stalin dreamed up, only the methods were more gentle, numbing us and giving us the false impression that this is now Poland. . . . Behind this war against Poland stands the eternal enemy of Christ—Satan. It is he who does not want to accept that Poland will be Poland, that it will be a Nation subject to the Law of God and the cherished authority of Christ the King. This did not start happening today. For a long time Poland has been attacked from all sides—from the east and the west—because it has such a tight bond with Christ and His Church as well as with the Most Holy Mother, whose symbolic throne for fourteen years has been the radio station in Toruń directed by the humble monk, Father T. Rydzyk. For a long time Poland had to stand up to the enemies of God and man. For these same reasons, Poland is uncomfortable in Europe today.156

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Not surprisingly, Rydzyk’s supporters respond to criticism with familiar evocations of conspiracies. When a TV documentary in 2002 exposed some of Radio Maryja’s financial improprieties, a group of parliamentary delegates aligned with the station issued a proclamation describing the film as a “consciously planned act of propaganda directed against the Catholic Church in Poland as well as the rights of believers. . . . We treat all attacks on Radio Maryja as an assault on our national freedom.” One of Rydzyk’s supporters, Father Ryszard Żuber, even identified the film as “an act of the servants of Satan, who want to destroy the work of Christ’s Church and His Mother.”157 In an interview in Nasz Dziennik in 2002, Bishop Edward Frankowski was asked why the media attacked Radio Maryja and the Church so harshly. He responded that they were angry after hearing Pope John Paul II’s preaching: Hearing those words, all those who are involved in building on earth a misterium of iniquity or a civilization of death—those who want God to be a great absence, and people to live as if God did not exist—grew afraid and trembled with the shock of hatred. . . . They feared that the mercy of God, whose spark goes forth to the whole world from Poland, spread by Pope John Paul II, might be victorious in Poland and in the world. . . . Therefore the attacks on Radio Maryja must be seen in connection to the massive and outright Satanic attacks on the person of the Holy Father. . . . Meanwhile, the attacks on Radio Maryja by virtually all the leftist and secular media testify to the fact that they all have a central hub directed against Catholic Poland and the Catholic Church.158 A great many Polish Catholics—probably a large majority—reject this sort of vitriol. Writing in Tygodnik Powszechny in 2003, Sebastian Duda complained that Radio Maryja’s prominence made it very hard to spread the Gospels, because too many people assumed that Rydzyk represented the true face of the Church. This was absolutely not the case, Duda insisted; in fact, he considered Radio Maryja’s views to diverge from mainstream Catholicism on many key points. Not least of these was the us/them mind-set that the station propagated. Of course Catholicism had enemies, Duda acknowledged, but “the answer of the Christian should not be struggle, but circumspect and courageous dialogue from which no one should be excluded. . . . The basic task of the Church is not the ruthless condemnation of persecutors, but the proclamation of Christ to all people.”159 Along the same lines, Father Maciej Zięba wrote in 2003, “The simple scheme of us/them, friend/enemy, good/evil is theologically false, for each of us is a sinner.”160 Many readers of periodicals like Tygodnik Powszechny, Znak, or Więź would argue that Radio Maryja does not broadcast a genuine Catholicism. Meanwhile,

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Rydzyk’s supporters routinely call Tygodnik Powszechny a mouthpiece for the enemies of the Church. The truth is, however, that the amorphous configuration of Catholicism in Poland today has room for both groups; indeed, the clashes between them reflect the creative tension that is at the core of Polish Catholicism itself. Earlier I quoted Father Mirosław Drzewiecki’s conviction that “every retreat from love is a betrayal of Jesus Christ.” But this same priest told his parish in Wrocław a few years ago: It was once easy to resist the easily recognizable red enemy. It is harder today to recognize the authentic enemy of the Nation and the Church. The lack of de-communization has led to a situation in which the old rulers of the state, after momentarily lurking in the shadows, literally privatized for themselves the national treasury and repainted themselves as liberal capitalists. Worse, allied with them, under the cover of democratic slogans, are the new crypto-libertines who initially walked alongside the workers in Solidarity and after the victory began to throw insults at the Church.161 Just as Drzewiecki has eloquently articulated both the doctrine of love and the ideology of struggle, so do all Polish Catholics have to acknowledge that they are the heirs of both traditions. A line of continuity is obvious between the Ecclesia Militans of the interwar years, Wyszyński’s anticommunist rhetoric, and Radio Maryja today. To characterize people like Rydzyk and Nowak as deviants who have twisted the true nature of the faith would thus require a deep reevaluation of the entire twentieth-century history of Polish Catholicism, one that would end up consigning most of the Church’s modern heroes into the same dustbin of heresy. But neither would it be justifiable to discard the dissident voices arguing for dialogue instead of struggle, for they too can lay claim to some deep roots in the soil of Polish Catholicism. Throughout the past century, Catholics in Poland have been presented with a truly horrific image of a coalition of diabolic enemies, but with just as much consistency they have been told to love those enemies. Pursuing both these themes to their logical conclusions leads to some contradictions (to say the least), but that does not mean that either message will be silenced any time soon. As different people try to work through those contradictions in different ways, they chart the boundaries that will continue to define Polish Catholicism.

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The Jew

Many scholars have urged us to disentangle the history of Catholic-Jewish tensions from the history of modern anti-Semitism, arguing that these two phenomena have different roots and different consequences. The historian Krzysztof Lewalski, for example, distinguishes between “anti-Judaic” beliefs (the theological teachings that distinguish Christianity from Judaism), “anti-Jewish” attitudes (the day-to-day hostilities that came from social and economic conflicts between Jewish and Christian communities), and anti-Semitism sensu stricto (the distinctly modern ideology of racialized hatred).1 Others have rejected this differentiation. Most famously, David Kertzer argues that the Church propagated all the major tenets of modern anti-Semitism, thus serving as “antechamber to the Holocaust.”2 The political scientist Andrzej Korboński asserts bluntly that “one of the most important sources of antisemitism in Poland before WWII could be found in the teachings of the Catholic Church.”3 Not surprisingly, the polemics surrounding this issue are fraught with emotions, but if we set aside both the indictments and the apologetics we are left with two points that are hard to dispute: representations of the Jews in Catholic texts (particularly prior to World War I) did indeed differ from the writings of secular, racial anti-Semites; nonetheless it is impossible to completely separate Catholic anti-Semitism from racial anti-Semitism, because religious hatred and secular hatred coexisted in mutually formative ways. Catholic anti-Semitism would not have taken the shape it did had racialist ideas not been such a key component of European culture at the time, and secular anti-Semitism could not have gained so much support had it not shared a lot of common ground with Christianity. Whatever the role of Christianity in the origins of anti-Semitism, there can be no doubt that the interwar Catholic Church was thoroughly penetrated by paranoia over Jewish conspiracies and stereotypes about Jewish vice. Anyone who reads the Catholic press in Poland from the 1920s and 1930s cannot help but be shocked by the intensity and frequency of the anti-Semitic diatribes.4 This was not a tangential issue at the time, but something that the editors of nearly every 272

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Catholic periodical considered to be of primary importance. The idea that the Jews were engaged in a plot to destroy Christian civilization was so widely accepted in Catholic circles by the 1930s that it did not even need to be argued; it became one of the self-evident assumptions that constituted common sense. Of course, Poland was in no way unique in this regard. Any attempt to identify anti-Semitism in general, or Catholic anti-Semitism in particular, as a product of some imagined East European “backwardness” is as much a distortion as the efforts by some to claim that Poland was entirely untainted by this ideological blight. But if anti-Semitism was characteristic of Europe in general in the 1920s and 1930s, that does not mean that it carried the same meanings or had the same implications everywhere. The conspiracy theories of secular anti-Semites differed somewhat from those of Catholic anti-Semites, because the latter had to work around some doctrinal constraints. If the Spencerian struggle for survival was difficult to reconcile with the commandment to love one’s neighbor and enemy, it was even harder for a believing Catholic to cope with the essentializing racism at the core of early twentieth-century anti-Semitism. Seemingly contradictory ideas managed to coexist within both of these examples, but not without consequences. Surprisingly (given what was to happen later), Catholic writers and preachers in nineteenth-century Poland did not seem to care much about the Jews one way or the other. We will not find many (if any) sympathetic portraits of Jews in the Catholic texts of that era, but neither will we find many examples of the virulent hatred that would become so prevalent in the interwar years. Moreover, the hierarchy of the nineteenth-century Polish Church was unambiguous and occasionally outspoken in its opposition to racial anti-Semitism. Only at the very end of the century would this start to change—although when that change came, it penetrated very deeply. A certain polemic with Judaism is probably inherent in Christianity, but there is a difference between a polemic and a prejudice. The doctrine of supersessionism, although challenged by many theologians since the Second Vatican Council, was long a source of theological dispute between Christians and Jews. Father Adam Kopyciński summarized this teaching succinctly in a sermon in 1905, describing the history of salvation in terms of a theatrical drama: “In the first act the Jewish nation appears; in the second Jesus Christ, and in the third the Catholic Church. . . . The Jewish nation is the preface to Christianity.”5 In other words, the covenant between God and the Jews was “superseded” by the salvific coming of Jesus, and the Church now embodies the ongoing divine revelation. Supersessionism is not only an assertion that Christianity is true and Judaism false, but that the former realizes and thus replaces the latter. Christianity denies

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the validity of the Gods and holy books of most other religions, but appropriates the Jewish God and the Jewish Bible as its own. In addition to the theological disputes surrounding supersessionism, there are many passages in the New Testament that criticize the Jews, most famously in the scenes surrounding the arrest and execution of Jesus. Particularly troubling is Matthew 27:25, in which a mob of Jews shouts, “Let His blood be on us and on our children!” Although that sentence is omitted in the other canonical depictions of this episode (Luke 23, Mark 15, and John 19), all four Gospels depict a Jewish crowd calling for execution. Most mainstream Catholic theologians today would contextualize these passages against the backdrop of the bitter theological feuds of the era in which they were written, but regardless, those wishing to criticize the Jews could find ample biblical support. For example, an anonymous author in the popular Catholic magazine Posiew in 1933 drew upon biblical references to argue that the Jews of Jesus’ time “distorted the Law of Moses,” leading ultimately to a religion that was “a dead teaching, and often outright immoral.” In a telling parallel to the teaching that the partitions had been a divine punishment for Poland’s transgressions, this author recounted a very old myth that blamed the Jewish expulsion from Israel on the failure to accept that the Messiah had arrived. And just as nineteenthcentury Catholics had preached that Poland would remain stateless until the nation completed its penance, so did this writer believe that the Jews “persist and are among us as a sign of the punishment by God for their rejection of the Savior two thousand years ago.”6 Rosemary Ruether has labeled supersessionism one of the “roots of antisemitism,” and the potential of the Passion story to generate ill will seems obvious.7 Nonetheless, that potential has not always been realized. After all, it is one thing to say that certain people are doctrinally mistaken or even damned, and quite another to persecute or hate them. The one often leads to the other, but the connection is contingent rather than logically or theologically inevitable. In fact, throughout most of the nineteenth century the homiletic literature generally used biblical references about the ancient Jews in order to construct moral lessons for the Christian laity, and not as a means to stir up hatred toward contemporary Jews. Even when priests did evoke the worst elements of the alleged Jewish role in the Passion narrative, the result was usually a paradoxical message that combined hateful imagery with an injunction to rise above animosity and love one’s enemies. As one of Stagraczyński’s model sermons put it: The Jews cried out, “crucify him!” And the Lord Jesus prayed, “forgive them.” Their evil was great, yet Jesus’ mercy was greater. And for whom did he pray? Certainly not for those servants of Satan who led him to the cross? Certainly not for those beasts who tore him apart on the

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cross? O yes, precisely for them did he pray—for them did he beg for grace and forgiveness. They blasphemed, and he blessed; they murdered, and he prayed for them. . . . Those words are thus words of prayer for grace and forgiveness, but they are also an example, a lesson for us about how to behave toward those who persecute us. Revenge is a diabolic thing, but to suffer persecution patiently is a Christian thing. . . . This is a lesson for us, so that we will not repay evil with evil.8 Stagraczyński’s main point was that Christians should turn their attention to heaven, avoid vengeful thoughts, and love their neighbors and enemies. His characterization of the Jews was brutal, but as noted in chapter 2 he was equally prone to describe his fellow Poles as miserable creatures whose very reason for living was a mystery understood only by God. In another sermon he explained how the Jews had been “rejected by God” because they “persisted in their stubbornness” and refused to acknowledge the Savior. Then he quickly changed direction, warning his audience that once God’s “mercy” shifted from the Jews to the Christians, the latter were obliged to adhere to a much higher moral standard. “The greater the mercy, the greater the punishment for those who sin against that mercy,” Stagraczyński preached. Revealingly, the title of that particular sermon is “The Catholic in Hell.”9 These passages were typical; most of the references to Jews in nineteenth-century Polish sermons alluded to a mythologized image of the people of ancient Israel rather than to the Ashkenazim down the street, and those biblical Jews were discussed mainly as a way of setting up moral lessons for Christians. The result was hardly sympathetic to the Jews, but there was still quite a bit of distance between this religious imagery and the racialized, politicized fears of the secular anti-Semites. One might expect economic and social conflict to be common themes in Catholic texts, given the ferocity of twentieth-century charges of Jewish usury, tavern keeping, commercial domination, and so on. Surprisingly, this was not the case in Poland throughout most of the nineteenth century. Even when matters were discussed that might seem to create an obvious opening for an attack on the Jews, the anticipated anti-Semitic remarks were usually (though not always) missing. For example, in a homiletic guidebook of 1891 Father Tomasz Dąbrowski offered an entire sermon about the evils of dishonest economic practices, with particular reference to exorbitantly high interest rates. All his condemnations and exhortations, however, were directed at Christian perpetrators of this practice; there were not even any implied references to the Jews. This priest wanted to provide moral instruction to his flock, so he was concentrating on their transgressions; the practices of those outside the fold were of little importance to him.10 Similarly, a book of poems published in 1909 by Father Józef Janiszewski seemed to set up the ideal launching pad for an anti-Semitic

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tirade: not only was the book aimed at combating alcoholism, but it was titled To Battle, Brothers! The conflict in question, however, was not directed at the Jews: To battle, brothers, exhausting but not bloody, Let us hurry, willingly, today, all together! For the cruel enemy will not let the matter rest, It wants to destroy our country and kill us! But who is that enemy, who brings a sea of evil And misfortune of various kinds into the world, Who will recognize no law above himself? It turns out that this enemy is often our own brother. Who is that king, before whom people die, On their knees, wanting to pay him homage? Before whom the proud bow their foreheads, Even those who do not want to know God?! You know this enemy, and this executioner of souls: He is King Alcohol, that evil spirit of the world.11 Nowhere in these poems was there a reference to the Jews, which is surprising considering that Janiszewski would later become a particularly outspoken antiSemite. This book was not exceptional: the majority of nineteenth-century Polish Catholic texts dealing with alcohol focused on the sinfulness of the drunk, not the evil of the person who sold the vodka. When nineteenth-century Catholic authors did talk about the Jews they tried to avoid the implication that the Jews were a radically alien community, impermeable to conversion. Suspicion about the newly baptized had long been common among the Catholic clergy and laity alike, but the official voices of the Church repeatedly stressed that sincere conversion was both desirable and possible. From this foundation it was harder to speak about the alleged dangers that Jews as such posed for Polish society; criticism was supposed to be aimed at the (usually imagined) moral or ethical teachings of Judaism. This might seem like a minor distinction, but in fact it had significant consequences. When Archbishop Zygmunt Feliński complained about Jewish participation in the public funeral of his predecessor in 1861, he did not root his objections in any presumption that Jews and Poles were locked in conflict; rather, he was concerned about maintaining doctrinal purity. “It never occurred to anyone participating in that demonstration,” he wrote with dismay, “that such a religious mixing of all denominations would be evidence of religious indifferentism rather than tolerance.” Tellingly, Feliński was equally upset that Protestants and Eastern Orthodox were present

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at the event.12 He was motivated by a desire to protect the purity of his faith, not his nation. In fact, outside the religious sphere he was remarkably tolerant. When he learned on another occasion that some priests were claiming that it was a sin to work for a Jewish employer, he responded that there was nothing at all wrong with such relationships, and that priests should intervene only if it could be conclusively demonstrated that the job was creating a “barrier to fulfilling their religious duties or any danger for their faith.”13 Anti-Semitic tracts almost always blame the Jews for the evils of modernity, but Polish Catholics were slow to pick up on this theme. The first reference I have found to the idea of “Jewish modernity” in any Polish Catholic text comes from 1868, in an anonymous book published in Poznań called Kościół i postępowość (The Church and Progress). The linkage is misleading, however, because the author made no attempt to blame the actual community of living Jews for the sins of the modern world. His polemical targets were those who spread religious indifference; Judaism was tied to these sinners not because of any imagined conspiracy, but because of a presumed affinity in the realm of ideas. “The theory teaching that someone who is not obedient to the Church (or even someone who struggles against the Church) can be a Christian is probably a Jewish theory,” he wrote, “because it excludes Christ from the life of mankind.” In other words, just as the Jews denied Christ, so were the progressives of the nineteenth century denying His Church. The linkage was relational: A is to B as X is to Y, and this formula did not necessarily imply a link between B and Y. Moreover, the argument remained in the realm of ideas: the people of Israel were described as the “ancient Jews,” with the “modern Jews” being their ideological corollary, not their genealogical descendents. This text offered a rare example of the use of both the words żyd and Żyd (jew and Jew). Adjectives in Polish are almost always written in lowercase, as are nouns referring to religious denominations or ideological groupings (thus katolik and katolicki, liberał and liberalny). Nouns referring to states, nations, and ethnic groups, in contrast, are capitalized (thus Polska and Polak, Ameryka and Amerykanin).14 The one word that confounds this rule is the noun jew/Jew, insofar as it refers to both a faith and a people. The Anglophone reader encountering the word żyd might assume that the lowercase was intended as an insult, but in fact the opposite was generally the case throughout most of the nineteenth century. In Kościół i postępowość the author used the lowercase when speaking of the “modern jews” who advocate the separation of Church and State; here żyd was lined up orthographically with words like katolik or liberał. “The whole theory of progress,” he wrote, “which would really be called modern judaism if we stripped away all the dishonest rhetorical spots, is nothing more than a declaration of war, in one form or another, against the Church.” But later in the book, in a passage that mentioned the actual Jewish community of

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Poland, the uppercase was used (I have preserved the relevant Polish terms to illustrate the orthography): We only perceive justice in the matter of our liberation, and beyond that we do not even consider what is right. We have come to the point at which our brother is not a katolik, not a Polak who believes in the faith of our Fathers, who speaks their language, who pays them homage, who honors their great acts, but rather the person who, regardless of whether he is a Moskal [a derogatory term for a Russian], a Żyd, or a Turek [Turk], at least with words honors and proclaims the principle of our liberation. . . . We no longer think, or even feel, that chrześcijanie [Christians] can only fraternize with other chrześcijanie.15 So the “modern jew” was the metaphorical label for the liberal intellectual who denied the Church, just as the ancient Jewish religion rejected Jesus; the “Jew,” in contrast, was a member of a social collectivity, akin to “the Russian” or “the Turk.” And most of this author’s polemical vitriol was directed at the lowercase żyd. Like most other Catholic authors of the 1860s, he was mainly interested in attacking a set of pernicious ideas. He was certainly not cosmopolitan—he preferred each national community to remain among its own—but he was a long way from modern anti-Semitism. There were of course nineteenth-century Polish Catholic texts that attacked the Jewish community of Poland, but usually they did so in ways that were rooted in Judeophobic traditions that date back centuries. The emphasis remained on the lowercase; the żydzi were the followers of a particular religion, not a biologically delineated race. For example, Father Krukowski’s widely used homiletic guide (a book that went through at least three editions in the 1870s and bore the imprimatur) provided five examples of sins that were so grave that only a bishop was empowered to grant absolution: “intentional patricide, arson, incest, abortion, and serving as a wet-nurse for Jews.” In contrast to Archbishop Feliński, Krukowski was unwilling to excuse those who sought employment among Jews. The Jews, he wrote, “as a mark of contempt for the Christian faith, use a Christian for their most debased tasks, such as putting out and lighting candles and all sorts of tasks in their temples.” He depicted the consequences of this sort of service: Go to a nearby town, look into the hospitals, and you will see the poor victims of debauchery.  .  .  . What misery! What disgrace! You raised a young woman, but she did not want to listen to you and she went into the service of a żyd, she lost her modesty, her virtue, her health, her good name, and now she is dying in pain. . . . Is there a sin more

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ignominious than impurity? Which sin pulls us further away from God, which shows as much contempt for God, which more resembles idolatry, than that one? . . . The drunkard, the thief, the highwayman can be reformed, but the honest conversion of a person who has long succumbed to lascivious habits would be a greater miracle than expelling a million demons from the demented.16 Here we see a set of corporeal protagonists (and antagonists), but the use of the lowercase suggests that Krukowski’s presentation still represented a form of Judeophobia grounded mostly in religious doctrine rather than racialist fears, despite the eerily prescient description of sexual corruption. The żyd of Krukowski’s book was not part of an international Jewish conspiracy; he was a person of another faith whose influence would draw the good Catholic servant girl away from the Church and from God, who would compel her to perform nefarious “tasks in the temple” that would undermine her faith and thus open the path to moral dissolution. This argument was akin to sermons that warned (usually with equally strong language) against the dangers of mingling with “heretics” (Protestants), “schismatics” (Eastern Orthodox), or above all liberals. Even in a text that would seem to come so close to twentieth-century screeds against the implications of racial mixing, Krukowski’s ultimate emphasis was on the virtues of faith and chastity rather than the danger of biological impurity. These were certainly not benign texts. They should not be dismissed just because they were targeted mainly at Judaism rather than Jews, nor just because the animosities they implied reflected very old religious attitudes rather than modern racial ideas. Nonetheless, it was still necessary to look outside the Church for the (a)moral standards that could justify anti-Semitic conflict and violence. In fact, nineteenth-century Catholic authors in Poland were initially inclined to equate anti-Semitism, not the Jews, with secularism and modernity. For example, when the first programmatically anti-Semitic periodical in Poland, a monthly called Rola (The Soil), was launched in early 1883, the Warsaw weekly Przegląd Katolicki responded with harsh criticism: Only in our times has the cynicism of unbelief, winning for itself a rather sizeable number of adherents, stepped forward with its attempt to legalize the struggle for survival in social life, substituting this principle for the love for one’s neighbor. It is not necessary to demonstrate that from such a fundamentally materialist foundation we get the foment of unending struggle and unrest in society, and therefore we are unpleasantly disturbed by some of the voices speaking out on the pages of Rola against the Jews and declaring a struggle for survival against

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them. Rola is fulfilling its civic duty when it complains about our lack of attention to industry and trade, when it calls for competition in these areas with the Jews, when it criticizes Jewish usury, etc. But it can do all of this without descending from the position of Christian love, without soaking its pen in hatred. . . . One may, with love, defend against usury and all forms of exploitation, but one may not proclaim a struggle against an entire segment of society, and one may not have hatred against anyone in one’s heart. . . . The German, and the Jew, and every human is a brother to the Pole, if the Pole recognizes God as his Father. Only the kind of Pole who does not consider himself to be a creation of God, but who looks for his most immediate ancestors among some kind of monkey . . . could proclaim a bestial struggle for survival. . . . It is true that the tightest forms of brotherhood are conditioned by a unity of faith and nationality, but society would descend into cannibalism if the principle of the struggle for survival and hatred toward all who find themselves outside such unity would prevail.17 A few weeks later Przegląd Katolicki reiterated this message, describing two parts of Polish society, Jewish and Christian, and instructing the latter to “never forget that the Jews are our neighbors [żydzi są naszymi bliźnimi]”18 Przegląd Katolicki was certainly not a bastion of philo-Semitism; these articles repeated an array of pernicious stereotypes about the Jews, and elsewhere the editors even professed their belief that some Jews (albeit only obscure secret sects) might use the blood of Christian children in their ceremonies.19 But for all that, they too were a long way from secular anti-Semitism, and they were even willing to perceive a single Polish society that included both Christians and Jews. As another critic of Rola put it more than a decade later, “A Christian periodical ought to stress two things: truth and love. Let us defend the truth without undermining love; let us defend love while recognizing the truth. Enough taunting and harassing the Jews for the entertainment of the reader! Is that supposed to be an act of Christian love, a constructive act? Would it not be more beneficial if Rola stepped forth with positive work, developing serious principles . . .?”20 This desire to construct a program of “positive work,” unsullied by vulgar anti-Semitism, was evident at the Catholic Convention held in Kraków in 1893 (discussed in chapter 1). This event was staged to launch a Galician Christian Social Movement along the lines of Karl Lueger’s group in Vienna, but the affair was more closely tied to the clergy and the old landed elites than was its Austrian counterpart. In fact, the contrast between the Christian Social Party in Vienna and its Galician spin-off nicely illustrates the difference between a twentiethcentury Catholicism open to new forms of public action and new ideologies of conflict, and a nineteenth-century Catholicism that continued to approach such

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matters with caution. Although Lueger himself was often praised by conference delegates in Kraków, the centrality he gave to the Jewish question was conspicuously absent.21 There was only one indirect reference to Jews in the conference’s formal proclamations, and even that was a short statement within a broader document from the Agrarian-Economic Section that urged the cultivation of Christian shops and co-ops.22 When one delegate proposed that the assembly adopt the slogan “Local trade for local producers and local labor,” another participant proposed that this be amended to refer to “our” (swój) rather than “local” (krajowy) so as to focus on the Polish Catholic population to the exclusion of others who just happened to live in Galicia (i.e., the Jews and Ukrainians). This proposed revision was rejected on the grounds that any economic development, regardless of the ownership of the firm, was a positive thing.23 When the archbishop of the Eastern-Rite Catholics, Sylwester Sembratowicz, spoke to the rally in his native Ukrainian, emphasizing Catholic unity regardless of nationality, he was greeted with rousing applause.24 The Catholic Convention did provide an opportunity for talking about conflict, but the speakers were surprisingly reticent about naming the enemies involved.25 Count Andrzej Potocki acknowledged that the Church faced many challenges from “an underground effort to undermine faith and an antireligious and anti-Catholic spirit,” but he asked, “[Is it] really necessary that the harsh resolutions of the Catholic Convention be directed against a particular enemy? There are, after all, enough important internal questions which would be appropriate to consider, enough mysteries of life which must be clearly stated and clearly resolved.”26 Albin Cardinal Dunajewski addressed the conferees in similar terms, reminding his listeners, “We have not gathered here to begin a struggle with anyone, but rather we have gathered because we want to determine our duties and fulfill them with zeal.”27 The only extended recitation of anti-Semitic stereotypes at the Catholic Convention came, significantly, in a speech by the conservative aristocrat Stanisław Tarnowski. He spoke of the “multifaceted struggle with Christianity” that had been undertaken by the Jews and emphasized the Jewish presence in the liberal press. But all this was merely a prelude to his main argument, which dealt with the means to resist this alleged danger. In other countries of Europe, Tarnowski said, the fear of Jewish influence had led to hatred and to unreasonable and disruptive demands: That is fundamentally evil, and practically dangerous. Evil, because it is anti-Christian, unjust, and unmerciful. One may not hate one’s neighbor just because God created him different than me. Such so-called anti-Semitism, moreover, can be dangerous in practice because no one knows where it might lead, where it will stop, where

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such unbridled hatred of one part of the population against another will lead, once it has been taken up. . . . May God protect us against anti-Semitism.28 Sadly, Tarnowski’s prayer was not answered. Although the rapprochement between the Catholic Church and the National Democratic movement was never entirely complete, by the late 1920s no significant disagreements remained regarding “the Jewish question.” Enabling this shift was the encroachment into Catholicism of the conspiracy theories discussed in chapter 7. In 1924 Father Józef Lubelski received the imprimatur for his book attacking the Endecja, Nationalism in the Light of Catholic Ethics. Ironically, this volume would both criticize the radical right and summarize the foundation on which a convergence between nationalism and Catholicism could solidify. Even as Lubelski complained about the National Democratic tendency to promote conflict and hatred, he ended up reiterating the very struggle-for-survival rhetoric that he purported to oppose. The most important reason nationalism was bad, Lubelski believed, was because it distracted Catholics of all nations from the need to unite against the hostile coalition lined up against them. At a time when global, international Masonry, international socialism, and international sects and heresies gather all their forces against Christ and His Church, when therefore all Catholic forces, wherever they are, ought to step forth in solidarity in a great Catholic action against these enemies, a chauvinism that builds mutual suspicions, dislike, hatred, that charges others of a lack of legitimacy not only among the laity but even in the ranks of the clergy itself.29 Although Catholic conspiracy theories would ultimately take a sharply antiSemitic turn, it was actually quite some time before the Jews played the major role in the imaginary plots promoted by priests and lay authors in Poland. Initially, another enemy took center stage: the Freemasons. Significantly, almost all the traits later ascribed to the international Jewish conspiracy were first imagined as Masonic characteristics; a great deal of what would become modern antiSemitism involved a word substitution, placing Jew where Mason had been. As far back as 1797 Abbé Augustin Barruel had published a five-volume polemic against the French Revolution in which he blamed the Church’s tribulations on the Freemasons, but his book attracted limited attention at the time, and it would be many decades before the intellectual and cultural context would be ripe for such a story.30 Although the papacy condemned membership in secret societies on several occasions, only in the second half of the nineteenth century did the myth of the Masonic plot really take off, culminating in the 1884 encyclical

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Humanum Genus. In this text Leo XIII painted a horrifying image of an incarnate enemy: The partisans of evil seem to be combining together, and to be struggling with united vehemence, led on or assisted by that strongly organized and widespread association called the Freemasons. No longer making any secret of their purposes, they are now boldly rising up against God Himself. They are planning the destruction of Holy Church publicly and openly, and this with the set purpose of utterly despoiling the nations of Christendom, if it were possible, of the blessings obtained for us through Jesus Christ our Savior. With an argument that would later become common, Leo wrote that the Masons planned to seize absolute power by undermining all morality, “since generally no one is accustomed to obey crafty and clever men so submissively as those whose soul is weakened and broken down by the domination of the passions.” Leo itemized the many evils that could be attributed to this plot: the legalization of divorce, the spread of secular education, the “satiation of the multitude with a boundless license of vice,” the promotion of the idea “that all men have the same rights, and are in every respect of equal and like condition; that each one is naturally free .  .  . that, when the popular will changes, rulers may lawfully be deposed.” Catholics must mobilize to resist this grand conspiracy, the pope concluded. In fact, he implied that his support for workers’ associations (Rerum Novarum) and Catholic political parties (Immortale Dei) should be understood as tactics in the war against the Masons.31 Fears about Masonic conspiracies were spreading throughout the Polish Catholic Church even before Humanum Genus. For example, a small book published in Poznań in 1868 described the Freemasons as “the most dangerous [sect] ever known, and simultaneously the best adapted to the mood of today’s society.” The goal of the Masons was nothing less than the “eradication of Christianity from the bosom of humanity.”32 A small booklet published by a Kraków priest a few years later reiterated these fears, claiming that the evidence was based on “sources beyond doubt.”33 Faith in the existence of a vast Masonic conspiracy intensified after the publication of Leo XIII’s encyclical, and by the 1890s it had become a common theme among Polish Catholic writers. The respected journal Przegląd Katolicki printed a long series of articles in early 1897 entitled “Masonry and Socialism,” in which a pseudonymous author argued that every unpleasant aspect of modernity could be traced to a plot to undermine Christianity. Even (or perhaps particularly) the women’s emancipation movement, “having as its goal the separation of women from the household hearth and the establishment of illusory equal rights with men in the name of individualism,

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has its source in the Masonic lodges.” The logic here followed that of Leo XIII: with the spread of immorality and the erosion of family bonds, people would become so demoralized that they would easily succumb to “the absolute omnipotence of the Masonic Temple over humanity.”34 Perhaps the most important contribution to the Polish literature on the Masonic conspiracy was a fourhundred-page tome by Bishop (now Saint) Józef Pelczar entitled Masonry: Its Essence, Principles, Aspirations, Origins, Development, Organization, Ceremonies, and Activities. This volume was enormously popular, going through three editions before World War I. Pelczar believed that “history is a witness that since the French Revolution there has not been in the world of politics, particularly in Catholic countries, a single revolution or an attack on the Catholic Church or on a monarchy in which the Masons did not take a greater or lesser part.” He accused the Masons of trying to “rehabilitate Satan” while “introducing godlessness, moral corruption, revolutionary foment, and social breakdown.” Like Przegląd Katolicki, Pelczar was disturbed by the Masonic plan to spread “the unhealthy tendency of feminism” among women who “stood on guard over the family hearth.”35 Such stories are so outlandish that one might be inclined to dismiss them. Surely, one is tempted to conclude, people like Pope Leo XIII and Bishop Pelczar could not have really believed in such absurdities; there must be a set of motives grounded in the real world that will explain their actions and beliefs. Obviously we cannot access the unstated motives of historical figures, but a broad reading of Catholic texts from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth reveals the incredible consistency and frequency with which these conspiracy stories were invoked. Moreover, these beliefs played a large role in a shift within Catholicism that made it harder than ever to “hate the sin while loving the sinner.” The Masonic legend located evil not in ideas (liberalism, socialism, decadence, modernity) but in an actual group of people, albeit one that had been thoroughly mythologized. There were those in the Polish Church who saw the danger of this development. In a sermon in 1911 Bishop Leon Wałęga of Tarnów accepted that the Masons were engaged in “destructive and hellish work,” but he urged the faithful to be careful lest they focus too much on the machinations of enemies and not enough on their own souls. “Normally we look to external enemies as the cause of all evil,” he said, “to those people and periodicals that spread decadence and disbelief. Meanwhile, the guilt to a large degree lies with us. Even the most implacable enemy could not triumph if we opposed him with unbending faithfulness to the principles of Christ.”36 Just as Wałęga was reluctant to support Catholic social activism (as we saw in chapter 4), he found it hard to endorse militancy in the fight against Masonic evil. For him the most important battle was not about dominion over the earth, but about the purity of the individual soul.

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It was precisely the shift away from Wałęga’s style of Catholicism that constituted the link between the anti-Masonic mythologies of the nineteenth century and the anti-Semitism of the twentieth. Taken alone, the Masonic myth provided only a limited foundation for militancy, because both the real Masons and their imaginary doppelgangers were so hard to identify. Although this legend might have helped explain the modern world, it posited an enemy that was notoriously difficult to find, let alone fight. But the logic of conspiratorial thinking easily migrated to other groups, and in the 1890s some Polish Catholic authors began using this reasoning to talk about a community that was easily identifiable in Poland: the Jews. As Catholic rhetoric dovetailed with arguments already being developed by secular anti-Semites, a great many concepts, terms, and stories began flowing back and forth. Over time the doctrinal barriers against racialized anti-Semitism grew so thin as to no longer matter. A seminal article by Maryan Morawski entitled “A-Semitism,” published in 1896 by the Jesuit weekly in Kraków, Przegląd Powszechny, illustrated how Catholicism and secular anti-Semitism were starting to flow together. Here we see a line-up of ideas that would have been unimaginable in a Polish Catholic text even a decade before: the loaded term race, the idea of a Spencerian struggle for survival, and the embodiment of evil within a biologically delineated community. Morawski, a noted philosopher and theologian, claimed not to believe that the Jews were a race, but he went on to say: The morality that the Jews inherit from their ancestors and pass on to their descendents is of a lower level than Christian morality. It is a morality that tends to restrict the concept of duty and justice to the sphere of one’s own nation. It can be easily reconciled with contempt, and even hatred toward the so-called goys. Moreover, we can understand that the practical materialism to which the Jew is naturally drawn is not resisted, as among us, by the religious and moral principles that are inculcated into us from childhood—quite the contrary, [such materialism] finds strong support in the principles that [the Jews] absorb with their mother’s milk. Morawski was so thoroughly caught up with terminology taken from biology that he implied (despite himself, it seems) that immorality was a product of inheritance rather than an individual choice to defy “natural law.” He even questioned the efficacy of personal conversion, arguing that the heavy weight of biology made the Jews highly resistant to God’s grace. After baptism, he believed, “those features of the Jewish character that we do not like will not, in fact, be erased immediately, but only over the course of several generations.” Using Polish rules of capitalization, he might have said that a żyd could become a katolik, but a Żyd would always be a Żyd.

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Perhaps an even more obvious tension in Morawski’s article was his attempt to deal with the commandment to love one’s neighbors and enemies, even as he borrowed heavily from racist categories that usually suggested a bellum omnium contra omnes. He described a centuries-long battle between the Church and the Jews, who were supposedly “preparing for the rule of freethinking and atheism.” Unlike the authors discussed earlier, Morawski explicitly drew a direct line between the Israelites of the Bible and the modern Jews, even imagining that they possess an enduring “living organization” that “keeps the population in line and compels obedience.” But Morawski openly worried about the direction his argument was taking, because he understood that Christianity and anti-Semitism were supposed to be antithetical. Therefore he announced a way to avoid heterodoxy while still resisting the Jews: a new ideological formation that he labeled “a-semitism.” As he explained, “I call it that because such self-defense does not contain anything aggressive; it depends upon Christian society, convinced that Semitic influence is usually fatal, closing itself off, fortifying itself against that influence, and insofar as possible living and developing outside of that influence.” He was confident that a-semitism could be reconciled with love for one’s neighbor, “because such love commands that we care more for the good of the whole than for the good of the individual, and more for moral than for material welfare.” Morawski recognized that it would be a “gross injustice” to allege that every individual Jew was evil, and he even argued, “If, God forbid, something like [a pogrom] should happen among us, we could do nothing better than go out into the streets and, at the risk of our own lives, defend the Jews from harm—and defend our own people from committing a crime.”37 The allure of modern anti-Semitism was obvious in this text, though so were the remaining (but weakening) doctrinal inhibitions. Warsaw’s Przegląd Katolicki echoed Morawski’s attempt to avoid the label anti-Semite while still introducing into Catholicism a range of racialist terms and concepts. An author who signed his name only as “J. b. P.” insisted in 1900 that “anti-Semitism is a specifically Protestant ideology” and called Luther “the father of anti-Semitism.” Following this denunciation, however, J. b. P. went on to relate a now familiar mythology of innate Jewish perfidy: The Jews [żydzi, lowercase] are entirely different. They are, in their own opinion, the only society that has a right to exist, because they have, in their judgment, the absolute truth. In the name of that truth they demand power for themselves, and since they do not have their own fatherland under their feet they consider the entire earth their fatherland, and they want to rule over it and command others. Money for the Jews was never the goal, only a means to power.

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J. b. P. might have been writing about lowercase żydzi, still avoiding the idea of racial antagonisms, but the whole thrust of his work was aimed at the uppercase Żydzi. This became an early twentieth-century marker of Catholic efforts to hedge this issue; even as racialist thinking became increasingly obvious in Catholic texts, the uncapitalized ż often remained a lingering reminder of older, more strictly religious categories. By midcentury even this orthographic remnant was fading away, and the uppercase Ż became almost universally accepted. J. b. P. imagined how some might respond to his diatribe: “But respected author, says the gracious reader, in the introduction you indicated that anti-Semitism is a Protestant growth that you do not like, and yet you write just like all the antiSemites!” It was certainly true that he was no friend of the Jews, admitted J. b. P., but he was equally opposed to the anti-Semites because they resorted to the weapon of “hatred” in their effort to counteract the Jewish threat. Even as he denounced such animosity, however, he positioned the Jews within an entirely separate moral universe: The slogan of the Church is love; the slogan of the Jews is hatred toward the Church. These are indeed two opposing forces. There is a struggle, the struggle will be for life or death, and the methods of struggle will be in accordance with the nature of each opponent. And what is our role in that struggle? Whereas the character of the Church is universality, the character of the Jewish religion is national exclusivity; whereas the main duty of a Christian is universal love, the first duty of the Jews is absolute love for the Jews alone. Like Morawski, J. b. P. wanted to steer his readers away from violence and hatred. “Let us remember,” he wrote, “that hatred and jealousy are barren feelings, which are not capable of building anything. The point is not to hate the Jews; the point is to understand and love ourselves and our kin in a Christian manner.”38 The upshot of this entire presentation, however, was to establish a tight equation between xenophobia, hatred, and the Jews. Opposing the anti-Semites and opposing the Jews became, ironically, two sides of a coin stamped with the slogan “Christian love.” Even as people like Morawski and J. b. P. echoed the most outrageous conspiracy theories, and even as they described immutable racial categories, they were restrained by their desire to remain within a religious framework that preached universal love and the possible salvation of every soul. The more “the Jewish question” became a matter for secular rather than religious concern, however, the less reliable such restraint became. In 1898 an anonymous author in Kraków who signed his name “Father M. J.” exemplified the transition to entirely worldly categories of analysis. His primary concern was the imagined attempt to

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transform Galicia “into an entirely Jewish country, and retain the Catholics only insofar as their services are needed to carry water, to chop wood, to put out candles on the Sabbath, and of course to do the more difficult work on the farms.” While continuing to pray for the conversion of the Jews, he argued that more urgent issues were at stake: “This is about saving our property and our national life. This is about saving the Christian religion, the oldest and most fervent enemies of which are the Jews. Either us, or the Jews!” The author acknowledged that this call pushed up against the mandate to love one’s enemies, but he denied that he was violating that principle: After all, the religion of Christ the Lord does not only permit, but even commands that we defend our faith, property, life, freedom—and that is exactly what the so-called anti-Semites are talking about. . . . Christianity proclaims peace, but only to people of good will; it commands, however, that we struggle decisively against perverse people, it commands that we avoid them like fire. . . . Even if we proclaimed a crusade against the Jews, that would be in no way contrary to the Gospels, because our ancestors fought—often armed—against the Turks and the Tatars, and today’s Jews are in no way better for us than the Turks or the Tatars, who once invaded our fatherland. Ominously, M. J. warned that there were eight or nine million Jews alive at that moment, and “whenever the Jews have surpassed that number, Providence has sent upon them various disasters which devoured a considerable portion of them.”39 M. J.’s chilling text was still on the margins of Catholicism—it had to be self-published, and the author hid behind a pseudonym—but by 1903 Dr. Włodzimierz Czerkawski would write openly in Przegląd Powszechny about the “racial needs” of the Jews, with an unapologetic capital Ż. Czerkawski imagined a struggle for supremacy among all the ethnonational communities of East Central Europe, and cast the Jews as a parasitical element that would latch on to whichever group appeared to be dominant. This meant that the Jews were “a dangerous element” from the Polish perspective everywhere except Galicia.40 Czerkawski saw the entire social and political landscape in terms of conflict— not between good and evil, or even between religious groups, but among human communities with earthly goals and methods. In fact he said explicitly that only this terrestrial struggle really mattered when it came to the Jews. Two years later Przegląd Powszechny even accepted an article by the notorious racial anti-Semite Teodor Jeske-Choiński, a longtime contributor to the once-anathematized periodical Rola. He described the Polish-Jewish conflict as a struggle for survival, compared the Jews to a “predatory beast,” and said that conversion was almost

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never possible. The only Jewish baptisms he was willing to accept were those in which the converts “tried to erase as soon as possible the traces of their ancestry, entered into the indigenous population through marriage and ties of blood, and truly assimilated.” Those who did not attempt to dilute their racial heritage, he believed, were trying to “push their way into Christ’s flock” and then, “concealed by baptism, directly influence Christian society.”41 Modern racialist anti-Semitism, then, had established a strong foothold among Polish Catholics even prior to World War I, and the doctrinal restraints of love for one’s neighbor and the universality of salvation were weakening. By the 1920s these barriers were nearly gone. Illustrative of just how thoroughly Catholic rhetoric had changed was a set of sermons delivered in the Kielce Cathedral by Father Zygmunt Pilch in 1925. These homilies were greeted with a great deal of popular and institutional approval and were quickly published as a series of articles in Przegląd Homiletyczny and then as a separate volume bearing the diocesan imprimatur. The title of this volume reflects Pilch’s overall message: The Rejection of the Messiah as a Consequence of the Sins of the Jewish Nation. For too long, he argued, his fellow priests had focused in their sermons almost exclusively on saving individual souls, without realizing how sin could be embedded in a collectivity and thus become far more pernicious and enduring. Pilch reframed the Passion narrative in order to support the idea of collective evil. The Jews killed Jesus, he wrote, because to do otherwise would mean to “abandon dreams about world domination, agree to leave the Synagogue and enter the Church together with other nations as equals.” For Pilch this was unimaginable, because Jewish evil was inbred and ineradicable: All the materialism, all the blindness and hatred that we see in the short life story of the Savior of the World had accumulated among the Jews gradually, over the course of entire generations. Fathers passed to their children with their blood and with their estates their customs, prejudices, false views, and mistaken hopes—and this heritage of poisoned hearts and evil consciences grew ever larger and ever worse. The guilt rose with every generation, so that the whole nation was responsible for deicide—and as a result the whole nation had to bear the punishment for a general sin. Because this “general sin” was passed on though “blood,” the Jews became (in Pilch’s imagination) an eternal enemy; indeed, they were a metaphor for evil itself: “Two worlds clashed here: the spiritual world and the corporeal world, good and evil, darkness and light, and in such a struggle one side must emerge victorious.” Pilch had to accept the possibility of conversion and the inevitable victory of God, but to fit these key points into his argument he relied on a

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creative reading of Romans 11:26 (a prophesy that “all Israel will be saved”), which he interpreted to mean, “At the end of the world, when Christ is to come as the judge in the name of the Lord, then the Jews too will see the light and they will convert. Thus the conversion of the Jews will be one of the signs that the end of the world is near.” So yes, the Jews would eventually be saved—but collectively (just as they had sinned collectively), and only at the time of the apocalypse, not within the course of terrestrial historical time.42 With evil literally embodied in the Jews it became possible to link just about any social or cultural conflict to their supposed nefarious plans. Anti-Semitic writing tends to seem deeply irrational to outsiders because it relies on a series of relational links rather than a logic of causation. If one assumes that the Jews are plotting to undermine all that is good in the world, then anything one deems bad must be the responsibility of the Jews. For example, while defending the Church’s stance on religious segregation in public schools, Przewodnik Katolicki slid effortlessly from substantive arguments to an evocation of their entire rogues’ gallery: Whoever says that they want to take from the schools the most effective means of education clearly opposes the will and the laws of the Holy Church; such a person, in order to achieve negligible and superficial benefits, levels out the differences between children and citizens, tosses away benefits and treasures that are a hundred times dearer and more valuable; such a person prepares the foundation for the de-Christianization and paganization of the world; such a person works for the benefit of Jewry, Masonry, Bolshevism and all the forces of destruction; such a person does not work for progress and civilization but for anarchy, for general savagery and barbarism.43 Positioning anti-Semitism within interwar Polish Catholicism demonstrates that it was only one component (albeit a central component) of a broader set of imagined conspiratorial relations. This in turn helps us avoid the mistake of locating the primary cause of anti-Semitism in the social or political activities of the Jews themselves, or in quotidian observations of Jewish practices. To be sure, we must take into account the on-the-ground squabbles between Christians and Jews in Polish villages and towns, insofar as these conflicts provided additional fodder for a struggle-for-survival message and (sometimes) eased the task of recruiting supporters for the anti-Semitic cause. Nonetheless, the politicized and mythologized anti-Semitism of the interwar years was much, much more than just an emanation from economic or cultural tensions between two communities. If we survey the ways observable social and economic conflicts were discussed by Catholic anti-Semites, we see that it was an ideology of

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anti-Semitism that gave meaning and coherence to Christian-Jewish interactions. To be more precise, this was yet another example of how discourse and experience were mutually constitutive, making it impossible to understand one without the other. Back in 1907 a priest from Galicia visiting the Russian partition described “the classic picture of small-town destitution, negligence, filth, and slovenliness, the main and perhaps the only reason for which are the Jews. . . . Even the once rather common invasions of the Tatars, and later the Swedes, did not drive this town to such ruin as the current conditions tied to Semitic exploitation.”44 By the 1920s Catholic authors no longer even questioned the conviction that rural Jews were harming the peasants by controlling retail trade and spreading alcoholism, and that urban Jews were abusing workers by establishing sweatshops and producing decadent forms of entertainment. Because such depictions of alleged Jewish exploitation became so pervasive, many historians have argued that antiSemitism was in some sense a response, albeit distorted, prejudiced, and hateful, to the unusual position of the Jews in the local and regional economy.45 The socioeconomic divergence of the Jewish and Christian populations was indeed extreme. In the market towns, rural Christians would have encountered Jews as shopkeepers and artisans, and Jews would have encountered Christians as peasant farmers. There were a few Jewish farmers and a few Christian merchants, but not many. In the cities the divergence between the two communities was almost as wide. The overwhelming majority of urban Jews in Poland were poor and working class, although whereas Christians tended to work in large factories, 88 percent of Jewish workers were employed (or self-employed) in tiny familyrun firms. The small minority of Jews who did manage to break into the middle class tended to cluster in a handful of professions. Though constituting only about 9 percent of the population, Jews made up slightly more than 50 percent of all doctors, 33 percent of all lawyers, and almost 25 percent of all journalists. That preponderance should not be interpreted as verification of any stereotype, however, because these Jewish professionals made up only about 5 percent of the overall Jewish population (see chart on page 292).46 Given the almost inverse economic and social profiles of Christians and Jews in interwar Poland, the potential for conflict is undeniable. But for that potential to be realized it was first necessary to ascribe these differing positions with meaning and structure them within an ideology of ethnoreligious struggle. As we have seen, the Church did not do so for most of the nineteenth century; parishioners were usually told that they were responsible for their own misfortunes, and the Jews were rarely mentioned in Polish Catholic homilies or publications. Even as the Church became more engaged with the secular world, the difference between Christians and Jews was only one of several salient conflicts that could have been emphasized. Poland was a remarkably diverse place prior

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to World War II, with many divisions that cut along ethnolinguistic, religious, economic, and regional lines, but one axis of potential social tension emerged to take center stage (sometimes to the exclusion of everything else): the supposed clash of interests between Christians and Jews. Moreover, the ideology of anti-Semitism was nearly identical throughout all of Europe, despite the huge differences between day-to-day Jewish-Christian relations in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Germany (where relatively small Jewish communities tended to be wealthier than their non-Jewish neighbors), and in Poland (where the huge Jewish population was overwhelmingly poor). Those more prosperous Jews almost always spoke fluent German or Hungarian, whereas their less affluent Polish coreligionists often spoke nothing but Yiddish. Despite

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all those differences, the tirades of the anti-Semites were remarkably consistent. In other words, although some elements of the anti-Semitic worldview were undoubtedly related to lived experiences, those experiences were given meaning within a larger conspiratorial vision, and all differences of experience from place to place were washed away by an ideology that projected Jewish homogeneity. Tracing the penetration of racialized, politicized anti-Semitism into the Polish countryside reveals that it was difficult to spread such a significant reinterpretation of lived experience. At the same time, the ultimate success of this endeavor shows that experience alone is rarely enough to either cause or prevent a particular ideological development. Well into the early twentieth century, interactions between Christians and Jews in the countryside were characterized by mutual familiarity, if not always mutual affection. The harmony of Poland’s multiethnic small towns is easy to exaggerate and romanticize, but it is true that daily life was generally peaceful prior to World War I. For this very reason, the conspiracy theories of racialized anti-Semitism were slower to catch on in the countryside because those who personally knew Jews from the shtetls found the global story about the destruction of Christianity and the conquest of the world to be rather far-fetched. Jacek the peasant farmer might not have particularly liked Yitzhak the blacksmith, but their comparable poverty and their frequent personal interactions made it hard to imagine that the latter was plotting to establish global domination. Sadly, even the most outlandish anti-Semitic conspiracy theories eventually penetrated even the most distant corners of rural Poland—but at least it took a little longer. A great many writers and activists were trying to “educate” the peasants about the danger of the Jews, but this task was not easy. In 1906 a pair of magazines, a daily with the straightforward name Polak=Katolik and a monthly called Posiew (The Planting), were launched by Father Ignacy Kłopotowski with the financial backing of Warsaw’s archbishop Wincenty Chościak-Popiel. The archbishop even issued a pastoral letter that year instructing priests to promote subscriptions to Posiew, and he ordered the clergy to send contributions to the magazine with news about their parishes.47 These publications had two goals: to convince the peasants that only Catholics could be genuine Poles, and to urge these Catholic Poles to unite against the Jewish menace. A handbill promoting Polak=Katolik promised that the tabloid would have lots of illustrations and “interesting, sensational stories” that would be sure to “draw the interest of every reader.” The editors also promised that “an exceptionally low price, along with a clear, simple style and language that everyone can understand, will make Polak=Katolik the best daily newspaper for the broad urban and rural masses.” On the back side of this handbill was an advertisement for Posiew, which was also advertised as “clear, understandable, and accessible.” The goal of both publications was to be

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“sincerely and distinctly national and Catholic” and to discuss a range of social issues with particular attention to the “always burning Jewish question.”48 Running through each issue of both periodicals was an attempt to link the everyday experiences of peasants to the phantasm of a grand Jewish conspiracy for world domination. For example, a regular contributor to Posiew who went by the pseudonym “Old Matuś” spun a detailed fantasy about how the Jews used a network of “rabbis and tsaddiks” to enforce a secret order issued to all merchants throughout Europe to simultaneously lower the prices paid to peasants for their grain. Because “no Jewish merchant would dare show disobedience to his rabbi,” the peasants were left with no alternatives.49 The next month, Old Matuś placed the Jews behind a different social problem, arguing that they were spreading “class hatred and jealousy” in order to “sow discord and foment internal feuds” that would make Poland incapable of development and progress.50 Another Catholic tabloid, Warsaw’s Gazeta Świąteczna, similarly struggled to convince readers that the Jews were more of a menace than the peasants commonly believed. In the summer of 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I, the paper published a long series entitled “The Polish People and Their Enemies.” There were four primary foes: alcoholism, ignorance, dishonesty, and the Jews. The author complained that most peasants were blind to this last danger, because they perceived the Jews on an individual basis as neighbors and friends, without understanding the bigger picture. Such camaraderie, he warned, was false and dangerous, because the Jews controlled all the trade in the villages and were using this position to “gather everything into their hands.” Poles, he concluded, needed to show greater solidarity and national vision so that they could thwart this plot.51 This attempt to shape peasant attitudes met with little immediate success. The subscription base of about eight thousand for both Posiew and Polak=Katolik put them far behind the other tabloids of the day, and their reach failed to extend very far beyond the thin layer that Keely Stauter-Halsted has called the “village elite.”52 Those priests, teachers, notaries, and shopkeepers were often inculcated with the big picture of Jewish conspiracy, and they read Posiew with enthusiasm. They reported, however, that their efforts to spread this message met with constant frustration. As a letter to the editor of Posiew put it, “One might expect that as soon as some Poles opened some stores, then nobody would set foot in a Jewish shop, that we would support our own. Hardly! For very many, the Jew is some kind of holiness, without whom it is impossible to do anything. Among us Poles there is no such bond: the Jew can get along without the Pole, but the Pole without the Jew—no way.”53 Another letter grumbled that most peasants seemed to think that it was better to buy from the Jews because they were more willing to bargain and often gave a little extra with each purchase, whereas Christian shopkeepers had a reputation for being more businesslike and meticulous with

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portion sizes and prices.54 This theme was repeated often, leading one exasperated reader to write, “The Jew seems to be the best friend of the peasant. . . . The Jew, our implacable foe, is taking the blood from our veins, and we are still holding out our hands to him.”55 It does indeed seem to have been the case that turn-of-the-century peasants found it easier to deal with their Jewish neighbors than with Christian merchants. The former were in many ways closer to them culturally than the tradesmen, since Christian shopkeepers tended to consider themselves to be of a higher social status than the agrarian poor. Moreover, the rural Jews followed long-standing rural commercial practices by haggling and making deals, whereas Christian shopkeepers often considered such practices to be markers of backwardness.56 With every issue of Posiew the mood of gloom and despair grew stronger, as rural correspondents described their isolation, surrounded by sin, laziness, drunkenness, and Jews. Indeed, for many contributors to Posiew the unwillingness of the peasants to embrace modern, racialist anti-Semitism was an even larger problem than the activities of the Jews themselves. One author pointed to the friendly relations between Poles and Jews as proof of rural ignorance: As far as the villages in our region are concerned, we are all backward, without education, and if someone the least bit reasonable could be found, it would mean as much as a little piece of sugar thrown into a pot of bitter or sour water. In almost every village one can find Jewish tenants; the villagers say that it would be impossible to get along without them, because it is more convenient to go for various little errands to the Jew than to town; here you can even send a child, but it is necessary to go to town yourself, and moreover it is also best to sell something from home to the Jew. No one can persuade the villagers that it is a great evil that the Jew can be found in the countryside.57 After World War I the campaign to persuade the peasants that the Jews were their enemies began to meet with more success. The fantasy of Jewish economic domination was repeated with monomaniacal frequency in the Catholic press of the interwar years, as authors tried to reframe the actual experiences of the peasants so that they would cast their lives in the context of a grand national and religious struggle for survival. An illustrated essay of 1935 in Przewodnik Katolicki exemplifies this tactic. The piece was structured in the form of a conversation between two peasants, Michał and Wojciech, who meet on the road between Warsaw and Płock. They complain to each other about the monopoly of “foreigners” (obcy) among the shopkeepers in their region, and they characterize these Jewish merchants as a “Palestinian nobility,” exploiting them as badly as the old serf owners did. In reality the rural Jews were at least as poor

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and powerless as their Polish neighbors, but in order to encourage peasants to perceive differences where few existed, this dialogue was accompanied by a picture of a village street with the caption “In the impoverished village of the borderlands, the most ostentatious building belongs to the Jew.” Thus were readers urged to interpret any moderately prosperous Jewish homes in their village (if any even existed) as typical, discounting all the other Jewish residences as exceptions. This essay also offered a pair of photographs showing a young and an old Hassidic Jew, labeled respectively “at the start of his career” and “at the end,” as if life for the Jews was defined by their economic activities. And those activities were nefarious indeed, continued Michał: “The Jews will always outwit us, Mr. Wojciech, because they do not respect any laws. They multiply their wealth by bribery and trickery, and they support each other.” But Wojciech is not so pessimistic, arguing, “If we were all together a little bit wiser and united, things wouldn’t be this way!” As he gazes upon some nearby young people, he states with confidence, “Yes, they will live to see better times, when our Poland will be free from foreigners, when it will nourish and embrace its own. . . . And the Holy Cross will be lifted up high in our pure and clean cities, for the greater glory of God.”58 Even discussions of the economy in the Catholic press usually served as a mere point of entry into the grand conspiratorial narrative of anti-Semitism. For example, a contributor to Posiew in 1927 named J. Modrzejewski helped readers interpret Jewish contributions to the Polish economy in a negative light, apparently assuming that without his instructions they might see the development of trade and the growth of towns as something good. “The Jews,” he wrote, “although they have conquered nearly all of our trade and bought up from Polish hands nearly every building in the cities, are not at all the friends of Poland. Rather, they are among our greatest enemies; they have done whatever they could, and will do everything they can, to harm us, so that Poland will be driven to another collapse.” This dark picture was just the prelude to Modrzejewski’s main point, because it provoked the question of why the Jews might want to cause so much harm to the Poles. The answer? “[They] want to make out of Poland a second Palestine for themselves, in the Polish state create a Jewish state and preserve within it their national separateness.” Modrzejewski ended with the cry “Let the Jews colonize Palestine; Poland is only for the Poles.”59 As ridiculous as it may seem, it was common for the anti-Semitic press (and not only its Catholic variants) to imagine Poland as a future Jewish homeland, one that they assumed would surely be preferable to the Zionists than distant lands in the Middle East. The idea first appeared in Julian Niemcewicz’s 1817 pamphlet “The Year 3333, or an Incredible Dream,” but it was only in the interwar years that it became a common motif in popular culture.60 Though some anti-Semites shared a common goal with Zionists, insofar as both wanted the

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Jews to leave Poland, most wondered what real agenda was hiding behind the Zionist program. As one author wrote, very few Jews would ever move to Palestine because “they prefer to sit among other nations and dream of Jewish rule over the earth.”61 Another commentator offered more explicitly religious reasoning for opposing Zionism, arguing that “a believing Catholic will look askance at a flood of Jews to the Holy Land and to the Holy Sites.”62 It was quite common to contend that the Zionists were talking about Palestine only to distract people from the real site they envisioned for their new Jewish homeland: Poland. Father Stanisław Trzeciak, probably the interwar years’ most prolific and virulent anti-Semitic writer, illustrated how easily he could slide from the most mundane economic concerns to this conspiratorial vision of colonizing Poland. Pointing out that interest rates were very low in 1934, he interpreted this as a Jewish plot: [Cheap credit] is the best means to conquer Polish agricultural property, to collect into Jewish hands Polish estates, or, in other words, it is the best means to step-by-step, systematically and slowly capture Poland for the Jews, who are looking for a new fatherland because Palestine will neither hold them nor satisfy them. . . . The process of the peaceful conquest of Poland by the Jews is progressing constantly. . . . Over the centuries that steady flood has transformed the cities and towns of Poland (except in Wielkopolska) into a Jewish domain. . . . Over the course of centuries Poland will cease to be Poland, but become Polish Judea. Trzeciak went on to advocate boycotting all Jewish businesses, but this was not just a means to support Polish shopkeepers; it was a tactic in the struggle to keep Poland from becoming the new Jewish homeland and to avoid “condemning [Polish] young people to starvation or begging.”63 Mass-market Catholic periodicals encouraged reader submissions as a way to involve them directly in the spread of awareness about the Jewish menace. For example, in 1939 Przewodnik Katolicki ran a contest for the best essay on why it was necessary to boycott the Jews (with 30 złoty going to the winner). Submissions were to include both “the moral reasons for obeying the slogan ‘each to his own [swój do swego]’ ” and “what should be avoided from a moral point of view while obeying this slogan.”64 They received 1,546 responses and printed those that corresponded to their agenda. The question about morality was important in this regard because it encouraged responses that stressed the difference between Catholic anti-Semitism and its secular counterpart. For example, one respondent wrote, “When obeying this slogan one must avoid all behavior and action not appropriate for a Catholic and for a Pole, who has always been known

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for his chivalry [rycerskość]. If we want to beat the one who takes the hard-earned bread from the farmer, then we beat him in the pocket, not on the head.” To underline their approval of this suggestion, the editors used it as the title for the article in which they announced the winners. But the primary question for this contest brought in responses that reiterated the other side of the magazine’s message: “It is a sin against the Church and the Fatherland to support elements foreign to me in faith and blood; moreover, by acting in this way I want to repair, at least to a small degree, the mistake made by our fathers, and ensure our children a better future.” Perhaps the best summary of all the answers came from a schoolgirl from Lwów, who itemized five reasons for boycotting the Jews: 1. History teaches that the Jews have always been hostile and unkind in their relations to Poland; 2. Because today they are destroying us from within, carrying out revolutionary [wywrotowa], Masonic, and Communist activities, fighting the Church, spreading demoralization; 3. They take bread and work from the Poles, dominating the economic life of Poland, controlling trade, industry, and handicrafts; 4. They strive with all means to enrich themselves; 5. They resist contributing to the welfare of the State.65 Most of these items were grounded entirely in what this reader had learned from Przewodnik Katolicki (and others periodicals like it); only the reference to economic competition had any relation to lived experience, but even here the author had to translate the preponderance of Jews in the marketplace into a much broader picture of domination. Even more reinterpretation and more filtering of observable phenomena were necessary to spread the idea that the Jews were responsible for socialism and communism. Since the 1920s this stereotype has been captured by the Polish word żydokomuna, an unhyphenated blending of żyd and komuna (a derogatory term for communism).66 The myth embedded in this word is easy to debunk. During the interwar years only about 5 percent of Poland’s Jewish population voted for the Communist Party; the overwhelming majority supported either conservative religious parties or one of the variants of Zionism. Approximately 20 percent of the membership of the interwar Polish Communist Party was Jewish, higher than their overall share of the population (about 9 percent) but about the same as their share of the urban population, where the communists campaigned for support.67 After World War II the Jews did indeed make up a disproportionate 37 percent of those in supervisory positions in the communist security services in Poland, thanks in part to Stalin’s strategy of promoting minorities to administrative or security positions in contested areas as part of a

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divide-and-conquer strategy, and in part to the fact that many Jews owed their survival during World War II to the Soviet Union, which generated some genuine support for the new order. Nonetheless, even in the run-up to the communist takeover, most Jewish Poles supported parties other than the communists, and most communists were from non-Jewish backgrounds.68 In any case, these statistical considerations are of secondary importance, because here too the relationship between the ideological and the experiential is mutually recursive rather than unidirectional. In other words, anti-Semites were primed to notice when someone of Jewish background held a prominent position in a communist organization, and such observations solidified the conviction that the entire movement was a Jewish creation. Conversely, the majority of communists or socialists who were not Jewish escaped attention, much as our eyes often fail to perceive that which we do not expect to see. Already in 1906, when Przegląd Powszechny conducted an informal poll on “the greatest challenges facing Catholicism today,” several answers mentioned socialism and described it as a Jewish creation. It was still early enough in the history of this myth that one respondent felt compelled to acknowledge that the equation might seem implausible, since “by temperament, blood, and tradition the Jews are not socialists.” But he assured his readers that there was indeed a link, because both capitalism and socialism were created by the Jews as part of a broader plan to undermine Christian society and establish their “material rule over the earth.” The banker and the revolutionary only appeared different; driving both of them was a pathological hatred of God and the Church.69 This reasoning is noteworthy because it exemplifies how, for anti-Semites, the visible world was merely a reflection of deeper forces manipulating history from behind the scenes. Moreover, it illustrates once again how Catholic anti-Semitism inverted the old idea to “hate the sin but love the sinner.” In this case the actual ideological content of socialism was portrayed as incidental, just one more weapon in the enemy’s arsenal. Another respondent to that 1906 survey even argued that the Jews controlled the socialists not because of any intrinsic feature of socialism, but because they had “delegated to every party a certain handful of their own people as ambassadors, so as to paralyze in this manner all action.” For this contributor, socialism itself was just an effect; the cause was the intrinsic evil of the Jews.70 Throughout the interwar years Catholics continued to ponder why the Jews had created communism, and in doing so they brought out some of the differences between secular and Catholic anti-Semitism. In an article on this topic in 1935 Father Józef Kaczmarczyk noted some of the possible explanations: Jews wanted to steal the wealth of the bourgeoisie; they wanted revenge against the Russians for nineteenth-century oppression; or (in a stunning inversion of the false-consciousness argument) they wanted to create a movement that would

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draw the attention of the workers away from Jewish oppression and redirect their anger toward their bourgeois Christian compatriots instead. Kaczmarczyk saw some truth in all of these arguments, but he considered them incomplete. “In order to understand today’s participation of the Jews in the Bolshevik revolution,” he wrote, “one must penetrate more deeply, into the secrets of the Jewish soul,” where one would find that all Jewish behavior was guided by their quest for a messiah—not a spiritual savior like Jesus, but “a messiah who is supposed to establish the dominion of the Jews over the ‘goyim’ (that is, the non-Jews)— over the entire world. This messianic idea, which is joined with the most base materialism and imperialism, is consumed by every Jew with his mother’s milk.” This explained, for Kaczmarczyk, the Jewish attempt to exploit “every movement—not just every political or social movement, but every current of human thought, even every religious manifestation.” In Kaczmarczyk’s presentation this project for world domination stood outside of time because the Jews were inherently and permanently driven to sin: “If we survey the history of the Jewish movement from the time of Christ right up to the present day, we notice that nothing has changed, that the Jewish soul has remained the same.” Significantly, Kaczmarczyk discussed religion only insofar as it constituted a field of battle in the eternal war against Jewish domination. Jews attacked Christianity—or more specifically, they “supported with all their soul every international socio-political movement that strives to weaken national distinctiveness and fight against religion”—not because of any theological difference, but because “the strength and cohesiveness of a society lies in its nationality and religion.”71 As suggested by Kaczmarczyk’s text, the żydokomuna myth took on a distinctive form in interwar Catholic writing, blending elements of secular anti-Semitism with a narrative drawn from Christian (though nearly Manichaean) historiosophy. This passage from a 1927 sermon by Father Feliks Bodzianowski is worth quoting at length because it illustrates all the elements of this amalgamation. Here we see how the żydokomuna plot constituted just one chapter in a story stretching from the original battle between God and Satan until the present day: From the time of the fall of the Angels, Satan in his pride challenged God to an eternal struggle, proclaiming “non serviam”—I will not serve you. From that moment the Prince of Darkness passed on to his selected few a hatred of God. So, when the Son of God brought Christianity into existence, the Jews began a struggle with the society that was supposed to be a reflection of God on earth, a struggle with Christ. With Christ, with the awaited Messiah! Why? Because the Jew-materialist did not like it that the promised King would not be the ruler of an earthly kingdom. Because the pride of the chosen nation and a racially

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congenital despotism gave [the Jew] the right to rule over the world, placed in his hands a weapon against Christianity which the unseen power, the leader of the unseen hosts, appeared to have defeated. Today the Jews, to achieve their goal, use the cover of Freemasonry, proclaiming superficially altruistic slogans, luring as many Christians as possible but retaining control for themselves alone.  .  .  . When, nineteen centuries ago, the sons of Israel proclaimed in one voice “crucify Him, crucify Him,” willingly bringing the blood of Christ onto them and all their descendents until the end of the world, the Jews sold themselves to Satan. From then on, their relentless hatred for Christ, for those who represent Him on earth and who lead us to Him, has persisted. . . . So we understand why, in relations with Poland, the Jews of the entire world and the Masons hiding behind them burn with particular hatred. For was Poland not always the bastion of Christianity, did it not defeat the victorious march of the sons of the “Star of Zion” during those memorable August days of 1920, does it not separate the openly BolshevikJewish Moscow from the half-openly Masonic Germany?72 In Bodzianowski’s presentation there was no consideration of the theological or ideological differences between Christianity and Judaism, or between socialism and capitalism, because a hereditary curse and an enduring maliciousness had been incorporated (literally) into a specific community. Nonetheless, even as Catholicism and secular anti-Semitism drew closer together. the two ideological formations continued to employ somewhat different rhetorical styles. Although Bodzianowski’s sermon was unusually elaborate, the idea that Satan was driving the Jewish plot was a common component of Catholic antiSemitic texts, and this tended to give them a religious tone that differed from the Spencerism of secular anti-Semites. This distinction might seem trivial, but overlaying an anti-Semitic historical narrative onto a Christian template led to the identification of the Jews with evil and hatred, and the Christians with goodness and love. Secular anti-Semites, meanwhile, could ground their war against the Jews in a philosophy of national egoism, where (to quote Dmowski), “there is no right or wrong, only strength and weakness.”73 Even when the Endecja repudiated national egoism as a philosophy, their discussions of the Jews tended to stop with an “us or them” argument. Perhaps because of this, there remained a lingering sense in Catholic circles that the nationalist right was a problematic ally—a concern that echoed throughout Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. This sense of unease was captured in 1924 with the publication of a 424-page collection of essays edited by the French Catholic historian Maurice Vaussard, entitled Enquête sur le nationalisme.74 Alongside such luminaries as Hilaire Belloc, Maurice Blondel, and Luigi Sturzo

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there were contributions by Jacek Woroniecki, Adam Żółtowski, and Marian Zdziechowski. The tone of this volume was critical of movements such as the Endecja, L’Action Française, and Fascism, but at the same time the contributors to this volume seemed to be searching for a way to justify cooperation with the radical right. In the preface to the 1927 Polish edition of the book, which had the slightly altered title Nationalism and Catholicism, the translator Antoni Peretiakowicz described an apparent paradox: “There is no doubt that the principle of national egoism without moral-religious boundaries can be accommodated with Christian principles only with difficulty. But there is also no doubt that nationalist tendencies and Christian tendencies are mutually supportive in practical political life. How does this follow?”75 There was no easy answer to this question. Several contributors to Nationalism and Catholicism advocated a patriotism that would eschew hatred, xenophobia, and particularism, combining a love of one’s fatherland with a commitment to the universal message of the Church. But this lofty goal was compromised when it came into contact with the fears generated by the conspiracy theories explored in this chapter. Marian Zdziechowski, for example, complained about the “brutal and deeply anti-Catholic and antiChristian nationalist aggression, which is a deification of one’s own nation with its appetites, with all of its lusts and beastliness.” However, Zdziechowski worried that an even greater danger was looming: “With the speed of an epidemic, a fatal idea is infecting and destroying both my country and all those immediately bordering on Russia—and after them all the other countries of Europe—an idea which, under the ruse of communist doctrine is nothing other than a degenerate judeo-messianism, a transformation of a revived desire for justice, taken from the Hebrew prophets, into a hunger for blood, revenge, and domination.”76 We see from this text that thoughtful Catholics continued to realize that national egoism was a problem, even after Dmowski got his followers to bury the actual phrase. As late as 1936, at the Episcopate’s only interwar Plenary Synod, the bishops passed a resolution urging the faithful to “diligently guard against the errors of national chauvinism and resist the temptation of pagan racism.”77 Nonetheless, these ongoing concerns were overridden by fear of the żydokomuna. One could not be too choosy about one’s allies when confronted by the advance of Satan’s Jewish minions. The coexistence of the doctrine of love with a nightmarish vision of eschatological war led to some awkward but poignant moments of cognitive dissonance. On a single page in the November 3, 1935, issue of Przewodnik Katolicki the editors printed both an essay describing communism as a Jewish plot and a biblical commentary explaining that “Christianity is love, and the summit of love is to forgive with all one’s heart.”78 In the September 15, 1929, issue of Życie i Praca the editors printed on page 2 a commentary on Matthew 22:35–46, affirming

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that Christianity is grounded in two simple commands: “You will love the Lord your God; you will love your neighbor.” Meanwhile, on page 1 of the same issue, readers were told, “Like it or not, the struggle for bread demands that those guests who are too numerous in Poland must go. . . . The Jews, with their international connections and their wealth, must find for themselves a place where they can earn a slice of bread through hard work. Poland, on its own territory, must give bread to its own children above all.”79 In August of that same year a discussion of Luke 10:23–37 proclaimed, “Jesus commands us to love as our brothers all people, near and far, friends and enemies, because all people are the chosen children of the Heavenly father. . . . We do not ask the poor man either for his name, or his nationality, or his race, or his religion; we do not ask him any questions that might embarrass him.”80 Yet almost every issue of the magazine cried out (as did a front-page headline in October of that year) “Be Alert, Because the Enemy does not Sleep!”81 By the 1930s almost no one in the Church would have disagreed with this assessment from Father Jan Rostworowski: “To a large degree, the religious and national and economic future of our Fatherland depends on resolving [the Jewish] question.”82 But just how was this to be accomplished within a Catholic framework? Secular anti-Semites could easily imagine a range of methods for getting rid of the Jews, including, as became all too evident, mass murder. Devout Catholics, however, were doctrinally prevented from going down that path. This was a conundrum. On the one hand, emotional sermons about apocalyptic struggles against Satan elevated the stakes to the point where almost any means of defense would seem justified; on the other hand, Catholicism’s doctrine injunction to “love your enemy” remained a central teaching of the faith. Archbishop Pelczar illustrated this tension back in 1910: I am not proclaiming war here against the Jews; quite the contrary, I command that they be given whatever justice and Christian love demand. But I consider it my duty to warn Christian society against those Jews who intoxicate our people in the tavern and destroy them with usury; against those who maintain houses of debauchery in the towns, who trade in live goods [i.e., selling women into prostitution], who poison our young people with pornographic prints and periodicals; against those who, while buying up our homes and villages, announce impudently that they want to make a second Palestine out of Poland, and turn the Poles into their servants; against those, finally, who from hatred toward Christianity lead Masonic lodges and socialist unions. I remind you, however, that Christian laws allow only the use of honorable weapons even in a struggle with an uncompromising enemy.83

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Even the most outspoken Catholic anti-Semites repeated this message often. Posiew, which worked so hard to propagate myths of Jewish conspiracies among Catholic peasants, similarly complained, “In private life the principle of loving one’s neighbor is to some degree respected, but in international life the habits of wolves reign among people.” Christianity did not allow for those kinds of distinctions, the magazine insisted, because for nations and individuals alike, only “noble methods” should be used against one’s opponents.84 But what, precisely, constituted an honorable and noble means of confronting one’s enemies? In the early 1920s few Catholics imagined any sort of extraordinary legal methods, and the long-term presence of the Jews in Poland seemed to be taken for granted (and lamented). The Christian-National Party, for example, urged moderation and a spirit of charity when dealing with the Jews. Their 1922 platform affirmed, “The Jewish element ceases to act harmfully wherever it encounters moral health, purposeful consciousness, good organization, and integrity. Thus the proper means of dealing with the Jews is not through extraordinary decrees, but rational economic policies aimed at raising up the Polish townsmen and gradually Polonizing our cities.”85 The goal of establishing a Christian hegemony was clear enough, but most Catholics in the early years after World War I seemed to trust that this would be possible without any unpleasant extremism. With amazing rapidity, however, a much more radical agenda began to penetrate Catholic circles. By 1927 the Polish Catholic Populist Party could make this promise in its program: Based on the premise that there are far too many Jews in Poland, that their influence on our life is in general very negative and harmful, and that this saturation of Poland (particularly of the Polish cities) by Jewry is for many of [those cities] the very source of misery, the [Polish Catholic Populist Party] will support with all its might the emigration of the Jews from Poland to other countries, and defend the country against a new flood of them from the East. Granting the Jews equal rights with other citizens and condemning the reprehensible mischief [karygodne wybryki] carried out against them by irresponsible elements, we will nonetheless not allow the Jews to create a separate state within a state and we will step forth with all our energy against the activities of some Jewish parties that harm the state and its sovereignty.86 By the 1930s there was a consensus throughout the Catholic press that emigration was the only solution to “the Jewish question,” but there was still a nagging concern among many authors that implementing any program of deportation would lead to serious moral dilemmas. One of the most vitriolic

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anti-Semitic columnists at Przewodnik Katolicki, who went by the folksy pseudonym “The Uncle from Baranów,” argued on several occasions that it was acceptable to force the Jews to leave. On one occasion he composed an imaginary conversation between two Poles, one from Wielkopolska (around Poznań, where there were few Jews) and one from Małopolska (around Kraków, where there were many Jews). The Wielkopolan was telling his compatriot how good life was without all those Jews, and he recommended that other regions of Poland force the Jews to leave. The man from Małopolska objected, saying, “I am not a particular friend of the Jews, but after all, the Jews are people and citizens of Poland. Is it just, is it Christian to kick them out of their homes just because they are Jews?” The Wielkopolan could only express pity at such naïveté. Yes, he said, the Jews were technically citizens according to the law, but “thousands upon thousands of them” had infiltrated Poland from the USSR and couldn’t be trusted. When the Małopolan protested, “Among the Jews there are good Poles,” his new friend responded that there were so few of these as to not matter. To every counterargument, the Uncle from Baranów offered a simple demand: the Jews had to go. He even composed a little ditty, sung to the tune of Poland’s national anthem: Poland has not yet died, Since we are bidding you farewell. What your cunning took from us, We have regained through our labors.87 Even the Uncle from Baranów did not specify how the Jews were to be removed. This seemed to be a taboo topic, because it led invariably to a moral quagmire that secular anti-Semites were happy to wade into but that devout Catholics found problematic. There was a pattern to the anti-Semitic tirades in the Catholic press: they would begin with a vehement depiction of the Jewish menace, then proceed to a call for Poles to “support their own,” then end by imagining an almost magical (or perhaps Providential) disappearance of the Jews. Father Józef Janiszewski recounted this entire narrative in a 1924 children’s poem, which he urged mothers to read to their patriotic sons and daughters: For whenever two get into a fight, The benefit always goes to a third! These “third ones” are the Jews with their locks, Whom all humanity finds repulsive, And who settled our Poland Like ants, and practically consumed us To the bone, fattening themselves on our labor,

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And like a cancer infecting our land! They are our greatest enemy, “The Leeches of Poland,” a severe misfortune! For them, like insects living in manure, It is best wherever there are many vices, And people given over to their passions, Who serve them with their honor and possessions! So we will get rid of these parasites When all of us stand together Under the banner that proclaims, “Sobriety and unity among the children of Poland, Work,” and this slogan: “To Each, His Own!” Then soon the Jews will disappear from the Polish lands, And all of Poland will come back to life, And from then on will have a happy life! For those who poisoned her will no longer be there, And brother will no longer set upon brother! And the “left,” which loves the Jews so much, Will vanish with them. Only one “Party” will remain: The Polish-Catholic Party!88 Setting aside the repugnant image of someone reading this poem to a young child, we see here a disjuncture that was typical of Catholic writing about the imagined war against the Jews. Janiszewski seemed to believe that if Poles practiced sobriety, hard work, and ethnic loyalty, the Jews (and the leftists) would simply “vanish.” At this point of logical disjuncture stood the commandment to love one’s enemy. Catholics in interwar Poland found it nearly impossible to reconcile this teaching with their desire to get rid of the Jews, and the result was a conspicuous silence when it came to discussing how this goal might be attained. In 1917 the Catholic literary historian Józef Ujejski published a small book called Nationalism as an Ethical Problem, in which he directly addressed this dilemma. Ujejski believed that “nations are bound by the same morality as are individuals, but only the same, not higher.” Catholic just war theory had always included provisions for self-defense, so Ujejski saw no moral problem in resisting an invader. But what to do when faced with an enemy using conspiratorial methods to infiltrate the nation and undermine its spiritual and economic well-being? How could one defeat a foe whose methods had not been foreseen by the just war theologians? Ujejski described these problems with clarity rarely seen in interwar Catholic writing, then concluded with an abrupt evasion:

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Solving this problem would take us too far beyond the purely general sense which this book has had from the start. Generally, we can only say that in the aforementioned relations one must obey both the voice of moral conscience and the voice of the national instinct for self defense. As long as both one and the other are speaking clearly in the consciousness of those who act in the name of the nation, we can be sure that they will not conflict.89 When Christian morality came up against the struggle for survival—particularly the struggle against the Jews—caginess became a refuge against the implications of hate speech. Even the Uncle from Baranów was sometimes brought up short by this apparent contradiction. After a series of particularly brutal columns, the Uncle was challenged by several letters from readers charging him with spreading hatred rather than love. In response he acknowledged that Christians were called to universal love, but in his opinion that did not imply equal love. “I must not ignore my own children in order to care for foreigners,” he wrote, “so I cannot look passively on the fact that my own brothers starve and waste away while a foreigner, a Jew, grows fat and wealthy on our land. A Christian will not hate or oppress the Jew, for he is also a human and our neighbor; but [a Christian] will, insofar as his strength and abilities allow, support his own.”90 Again we see militancy in describing Jewish aggression, a call for some form of active resistance, then a jarringly mild conclusion asking readers to patronize Christian rather than Jewish shops. Probably no one embodied this tension between Catholic ethics and militant anti-Semitism more than Father Maksymilian Kolbe, who was both the editor of the devotional magazine Rycerz Niepokalanej and the publisher of the viciously anti-Semitic tabloid Mały Dziennik. Because Kolbe was later imprisoned in Auschwitz, where he died after volunteering to take the place of another prisoner in a punishment cell, he was designated a martyr and canonized in 1982. Kolbe’s anti-Semitic past ensured that his canonization would be controversial, but in fact his story illustrates how hard it was to maintain one’s moral bearings at a time when Jewish conspiracy theories were virtually unchallenged in Catholic circles. As noted in chapter 7, Rycerz Niepokalanej had on its masthead the slogans “She will crush your head” and “You have destroyed all the heresies throughout the world.” Explaining the aggression captured by these slogans, Kolbe stated why he had carefully used the word heresies rather than heretics: “We love [heretics], we long for their conversion, and with love toward them we will free them from their heresy, destroy the mistaken views and convictions within them.”91 These qualifications were exemplified in a 1928 text in which Kolbe described a recent Masonic conference that had (supposedly) taken place in Bucharest, at which (Kolbe claimed) the delegates had boasted of the influence

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they enjoyed over the governments of Europe. Kolbe’s response to this is revealing: “It seems to these gentlemen that they are ruling, but let us hear what The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has to say.” He went on to quote at great length from that infamous text, which he treated as entirely reliable. According to that source, Jews had created the Masons precisely as an instrument of their conspiracy to take over the world. He concluded by addressing the Masons themselves, as well as their Jewish masters, in a passage that deserves quoting at length: Did you Masonic gentlemen hear that? Those who organized you and who secretly govern you, the Jews, consider you to be like cattle, herded into the Masonic lodges to achieve goals that you do not even expect, to pull the wool over the eyes of the goys. . . . Think about this, and say honestly, would it not be better to serve the Creator with inner peace, with joyous love, than to obey the orders of the secret, insidious, unknown, cruel Jewish clique that hates you? And to you, that small handful of Jews, the “Elders of Zion,” who . . . have already deliberately caused so much unhappiness and are preparing even more, I ask you: What will you get from this? Let us even assume that the foretold time of the Antichrist’s rule is near, that you are preparing the way for him, let every one of you ask yourself: What will I get from this? Mounds of gold, delights, pleasure, power—none of that brings a person happiness. . . . And even if it did bring happiness, how long will it last? . . . We do not know when the thread of life will be broken. And then? .  .  . Would it not be better for you, Polish Masons who have been cheated by a handful of Jews, and you, Jewish leaders who have been flirting with the enemy of humanity, Satan, to turn honestly to God, to recognize the Savior Jesus Christ?92 It would be easy to dismiss the last part of this passage as a rhetorical flourish, a disingenuous attempt to stir up hatred while pretending to be worried about the salvation of the Jews and the Masons, but Kolbe’s concern for the spiritual fate of his enemies is displayed consistently across his writings, in ways far more explicit and uncompromising than in most of the Catholic writing of his day. In an untitled editorial in that same issue of Rycerz Niepokalanej he repeated all the old lines about Jewish corruption and conspiracy and attempted to demonstrate that the Talmud was a vicious text that taught hatred of all non-Jews. His conclusion, however, was a typical mixture of sympathy and prejudice: “It is no surprise that normally neither the average Jew nor the rabbi have any idea about the Christian religion. Nourished on a hatred of their Savior, buried in earthly affairs, pursuing gold and power, they do not even guess that the faithful, fervent, and

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lofty love of the Crucified One brings peace and happiness even here on earth.” With this in mind, Kolbe issued orders to all the members of the Militia of the Immaculate. He reminded them of their duty to pray each day for the conversion of the Masons “because the Masons are nothing other than an organized clique of fanatic Jews, striving unseen to destroy the Catholic Church.” Every time members of the Militia encountered a Jew they were to pray for the conversion of his or her soul. (For an ordinary Jew a quick prayer would suffice, but for a rabbi it was necessary to say a complete Hail Mary.) Above all, he concluded, good Christians must remember that “the Lord Jesus died for everyone, without regard to nationality, and that everyone, and thus every Jew, is a child (albeit an ungrateful one) of our common Mother in heaven.  .  .  . Even among the misguided sons of Israel, let us try to bring them to an awareness of the truth and the attainment of the true peace and happiness through an unqualified surrender to our common Lady and Queen, and through her to the Most Holy One.”93 On the pages of Rycerz Niepokalanej, love actually meant more than just conversion. A vignette from 1933 illustrated just how far the love of one’s enemies should go. According to the story, when Hungarian forces were struggling to retain control of Slovakia in 1919, a Magyar soldier was killed in the town of Michalovce and a local resident was chosen at random to be shot in retribution. The unfortunate individual was Moshe Deutsch, a father of six children who had no connection with the killing. In response, the local parish priest, Father Aleksandr Oppitz, offered to give up his own life in exchange for the innocent Jew. Rycerz Niepokalanej held this up as an example of true Christian love.94 This eerie foreshadowing of Kolbe’s own fate at Auschwitz hints at the moral standards that would guide him at his moment of martyrdom, and at the sincerity of those who propagated the most frightening anti-Semitic stories of global conspiracies even while preaching love of one’s neighbors and enemies. Even Kolbe could not really reconcile these two facets of his worldview; the latter simply stood there as a potential restraint when it came to realizing the consequences of the former. Interwar Polish Catholics somehow managed to preach about a war with the Jews, using explicitly militaristic rhetoric in calling the faithful to action, and then suddenly became silent when they came up against the wall of Catholic moral teaching. Plenty of individuals decided to scale that wall, thus plunging wholeheartedly into the violent realm of the secular anti-Semites. In doing so, however, they could no longer justify their activities within a Catholic framework. Probably the clearest taboo for a Catholic was the use of violence. Even an author in Przewodnik Katolicki who advocated mandatory expulsion of all Jews from Poland made sure to add, “Am I advocating the beating of Jews? God forbid! Or the organization of pogroms? God forbid! Am I telling you to hate them? God forbid!” No, he was only suggesting, “In the New Year we clean out of our

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Polish home the Jewish garbage.”95 In December 1918, at a time of widespread anti-Jewish riots, the freshly reconstituted Polish Episcopate issued a pastoral letter in which they warned the faithful not to perpetrate crimes against the Jews. In a move that would become typical, they both justified anger against the Jews and blamed the Jews themselves for the unrest: We know your accusations against [the Jews] and we do not deny the fairness and justice [of your claims]. But remember that you can best defend against the usurious raising of prices and against exploitation with your own economic organization. It is never permitted to commit a crime in order to mete out justice or revenge on your own. We do not say this as a reproach against you. We know that Jewish agents, in the service of Bolshevism, are themselves spreading the storm that is turning against us. We know that in some sad and reprehensible incidents of Jewish disorder [as in “disorder directed against the Jews,” a carefully chosen phrase used to identify pogroms], mobs of criminals released from jail took part, and the Russian prisoners of war, taking advantage of the lack of any army on our territory, permitted violence against the Jews. And thus we protest against the accusation that you or the entire nation are responsible for this offense. . . . But we call upon all of you, dearest ones, not to soil your hands with dishonorable pogroms, which we condemn both from a human standpoint and from the standpoint of God’s law.96 A revealing exchange took place in the summer of 1934 when a group of prominent Warsaw rabbis visited Cardinal Kakowski of Warsaw to deliver a joint letter urging him to make a public denunciation against those who violently attacked Jews. Apparently he disappointed the rabbis when they met with him in person, because their appeal was leaked to the press, forcing Kakowski to issue a public statement. He began with a firm assertion of the Church’s stance: “I absolutely condemn all violence and excesses, from whatever side they come from, whether Catholic or Jewish. Even the most complex questions and problems should be resolved in accord with the dictates of Christian ethics. This is our fundamental position.” After that terse remark he moved to the offensive. He accused the Jews of organizing an “atheist movement” that had “assumed the most aggressive forms of fighting against the Christian religion, ridiculing its dogmas, and insulting its clergy,” for publishing “free-thinking papers insulting the Catholic religion” and for generally “offending good morals and inundating Poland . . . with pornography.” Insofar as there were “regrettable excesses” by Polish anti-Semites, it was only because they had been provoked by all this anti-Catholicism. And all this could easily be stopped, Kakowski believed,

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because “the Jewish community, which unites in solidarity to defend its own interest, should be able to guarantee respect for the faith and traditions of Christians.”97 An almost identical reaction to anti-Semitic violence came from Primate Hlond two years later, in a lengthy (and infamous) pastoral letter. Hlond began in familiar fashion with a recapitulation of the Jewish plot against Christianity: It is a fact that the Jews are fighting with the Catholic Church, that they are embedded in freethinking, that they constitute the avant-garde of godlessness, the Bolshevik movement, and revolutionary activities. It is a fact that Jewish influence on morality is pernicious, and that their publishing houses spread pornography. It is true that the Jews permit fraud and usury, and that they carry out trade in live merchandise [a euphemism for prostitution]. It is true that in the schools the influence of the Jewish youth on the Catholic [youth] is, in general, negative from the religious and ethical point of view. Having said all this, Hlond proceeded to offer the equally familiar caveats: “But let us be fair. Not all Jews are like that. A great many Jews are people of faith, honest, just, merciful, charitable. In a great many Jewish families the sense of family is healthy and edifying. We know people in the Jewish world who are, in an ethical sense, talented, noble, honorable.” More significant than those oft-quoted lines is the primate’s explanation of what Christians should and should not do in response to the Jewish menace. He preached universal love, denounced all violence, urged conversion, and advocated a series of moderate actions to counter Jewish perfidy. It “contradicts Catholicism,” he wrote, to mimic those foreigners who were “ruthlessly antiJewish.” One may love one’s own nation more, but one may not hate anyone. Not even the Jews. In commercial matters it is good to prefer your own ahead of others, avoiding Jewish stores and Jewish booths at the market, but one may not plunder Jewish shops, destroy their goods, break windows, throw explosives into their houses. One must close oneself off to the harmful moral influences of Jewry, separate from its antichristian culture, and in particular boycott the Jewish press and the corrupting Jewish publishing houses, but it is not permitted to attack the Jews, beat them, wound them, injure them, defame them. One must respect and love the person and the neighbor [bliźni] within the Jew, even if one cannot manage to respect the indescribable tragedy of that nation, which was the guardian of the messianic idea and whose child was the

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Savior. When, then, the grace of God enlightens a Jew and he sincerely comes to his and our Messiah, we will greet him joyously into the Christian ranks. Significantly, this document was not primarily a discussion of the Jews. It was entitled “On Catholic Moral Principles,” and Hlond devoted most of the text to a condemnation of the brutalization of both public and personal life. He did not, however, focus mainly on personal weakness and sin; instead, he repositioned evil outside the Church and described it as a tool of Poland’s enemies. So when he noted that “moral anarchy is ravaging the world,” he could only conclude that “some sort of unseen forces are breaking down peoples’ conscience.” He called this force “bolshevikation” (bolszewizacja), and equated it with “the elevation of hatred to a slogan, a principle, a duty. . . . Today we are living through the era of the glorification, the canonization of hatred. Hatred is undermining society. . . . Here hatred has grown rampant mainly in public life. Whoever is from another camp, and even more, whoever is a political opponent, is generally considered an enemy. Nothing good is recognized in him, no virtues, no service. An opponent must be evil.” No Catholic should accept the reign of hatred, warned Hlond: “We will love even the Bolsheviks, as people and as misguided people, and commend them to God in His mercy as neighbors and as brothers.” It was only at this point in his pastoral letter that Hlond discussed the Jews, whom he identified as the creators and purveyors of communism. For the primate, Jewish Bolshevism was the ultimate evil, because it strove to “liberate the animal in man.” He even attributed eugenics to this pernicious force, because “the ethics of racial breeding [is only] suitable for a person without a soul, religion, and life after death.” Ultimately he blamed everything wrong with modernity on Jewish Bolshevism: “The ethic of moral freedom [swoboda obyczajowa] serves Bolshevism. Depraved co-education [i.e., mixing Jews and Christians in the same schools] serves Bolshevism. The secular ethics of socialists, free-thinkers, and Masons directly serves Bolshevism. The progressive codification of the marital laws serves Bolshevism. Despite itself, racial ethics leads to Bolshevism.” Thus we come full circle, with an explanatory model that identified a source for all the evils in the world, including racism, amoral nationalism, and antiSemitic violence. Within this circle there was no irony in the implication that the Jews themselves were to blame for the attacks against them, nor in Hlond’s stunning diagnosis and prophesy that “the Jewish problem exists and will exist as long as the Jews will be Jews [problem żydowski istnieje i istnieć będzie, dopóki żydzi będą żydami].”98 This line encapsulates a form of reasoning that made the Jews responsible for their own fate, not merely by implying that imagined Jewish provocation led to regrettable Christian “excesses,” but by identifying the source of the problem in Jewishness itself. The term Jew in this circular formulation

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triggered a cascade of related terms—Bolshevik, socialist, liberal, pornographer, usurer, modernist, atheist, and even racist and eugenicist—resulting in a totalistic worldview of enormous flexibility. Hlond may have provided a rough coherence to the juxtaposition of antiSemitic conspiracy theories and the principle of nonviolence, but an inexorable tension remained. Catholics were being fed a steady rhetorical diet of apocalyptic warfare and Jewish Bolshevik conspiracies; meanwhile, they were offered no plan of action aside from boycotting the Jewish media and shopping at Catholic-owned stores. Just how brittle this mixed message could be was illustrated by a 1934 article in Życie i Praca. The author repeated the familiar line, “It is not only inappropriate, but forbidden for us Catholics to resort to violence. We look upon every Jew as our neighbor, we love him, we do not wish him ill; indeed, we wish him success.” Then, with the very next sentence, the pressure started to build toward a thinly veiled threat: Nonetheless, we cannot allow ourselves to be paralyzed by love for the Jews. Love of one’s neighbor, understood in a Christian manner, commands above all that one take care of oneself, of one’s nation, and then of the Jews. Moreover, the Jews often provide our nation with an opportunity for sin, so we want to remove that opportunity, to push it far away from us. Let them live somewhere else, far from us, and then, maybe, if they don’t bother us, we can establish better relations. But the way things stand today, the Jews ought to behave submissively, stop pushing themselves into the first ranks and stop striving for privileges, stop offending the Poles by inserting their three groszy into our domestic relations and stop spreading moral or communist infections. Only if the Jews accept these conditions will it be possible to restrain the Polish populous from extreme, harsh actions against the Jews. We just want the Jews to give us more space, with good will and without disturbances.99 One can hardly imagine a more dramatic illustration of the contradiction that ran through nearly every interwar Catholic depiction of the Jews. From one page to the next this article slid from a reminder that Catholics must never engage in violence to a threat that it might soon become impossible “to restrain the Polish populous from extreme, harsh actions against the Jews.” Against this backdrop the growing frequency of anti-Semitic violence in Poland in the 1930s is hardly surprising. One historian has identified ninety-seven such episodes in Poland during the five years prior to World War II, leading to fourteen deaths and about two thousand injuries.100 Indeed, the greater puzzle is why the violence was not a lot worse—and here the answer probably lies within the very

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same rhetorical formation. The irresolvable tension—indeed, paradox—of Catholic anti-Semites was that they consistently condemned violence and hatred even as they elevated suspicion, fear, and even hatred itself to a fever pitch. Catholic texts from interwar Poland were marked by an unrelenting drumbeat of fear-mongering about the war against the Jewish-BolshevikMasonic plot, but despite the apparent militancy it was very difficult to both remain within a Catholic morality and take the next step toward actual violence. There could be no doubt that the Church was at war, even though no one seemed to know how to fight that war in a way that would be both efficacious and ethical. In the end they could merely “support their own” and trust that doing so would make the Jews magically go away. There was no magic involved in the disappearance of the Jews of Poland, though it might have seemed so for the country’s anti-Semites. Polish Catholics, like their coreligionists all over Europe, responded to the Shoah in a wide variety of ways, ranging from the heroic to the vile. In discussing this sensitive subject, any generalizations will quickly become overgeneralizations.101 On the one hand, there were those who took enormous risks to aid the Jews, not despite their Catholicism but because of it. Probably the most famous example is Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, a popular novelist who had published in the Catholic press prior to 1939 and who was known for her right-wing nationalism and anti-Semitism. During the occupation, however, Kossak was a cofounder of an underground Catholic organization dedicated to saving the Jews from the Shoah. Kossak was arrested in 1943 and imprisoned in Auschwitz, though the Polish underground was able to secure her release and she continued her partisan activities until the end of the war. In 1985 she was posthumously named one of the “Righteous among the Nations” by Yad Vashem, a title bestowed on non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Kossak’s activities during the war were undeniably courageous, but her motives seem paradoxical. In a short text entitled “Protest” that she published in the underground in 1942 she depicted the murderous policies of the Nazis toward the Jews and expressed her outrage that “the world looks on at these atrocities, more horrible than anything history has seen, and is silent. . . . Whoever is silent in the face of murder becomes a partner of the murderer. Whoever does not condemn, approves.” But in the very next paragraph Kossak assured her readers, “Our feelings toward the Jews have not changed. We do not stop thinking of them as the political, economic, and ideological enemies of Poland.” She wanted to help the Jews because she considered it her Christian duty to love her enemy, not because she questioned her prewar anti-Semitism. Moreover, she even saw in the mass murder of the Jews “plans for a hostile action against [Catholic Poles],” designed to “promote indifference to injustice and sadism, and above all to promote the conviction that it is acceptable to murder ones neighbor [bliźni,

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the biblical term] without punishment.”102 In other words, even in the midst of the Nazi occupation of Poland, Kossak’s mind-set remained trapped within the nationalistic narcissism that made it possible to interpret even the Shoah as a plot against Catholic Poles aimed at undermining their moral fortitude. From the perspective described in this chapter, however, Kossak’s attitude makes more sense. To a greater degree than most, she took the whole structure of Catholic anti-Semitism seriously, rendering the cognitive gap between hate and love into a program of action. She promoted the view that the Jews were a mortal danger to Polish Catholics, she longed for a Poland that would be free of the Jews, but she was prevented from pursuing this objective by the Church’s denunciation of violence and the commandment to show charity to all. Commenting on Kossak’s story, the Polish literary critic Jan Błoński wrote, “Everything seems to indicate that we were a step away from a crime [during World War II]. But that is not what happened. Rather, it was as if the antisemitic fury went right up to an invisible boundary and our hand, already balled into a fist, fell to our side.” That boundary, he felt, was Christianity.103 People like Kossak constituted a small minority, probably equal to the small minority on the other side who betrayed Jews to the Nazis or, in a few horrific instances, carried out their own murderous pogroms.104 Although the clergy tended to support the mainstream underground movement, the Home Army (Armia Krajowa), there were many high-level ties between the Church and an anti-Semitic splinter group, the National Armed Forces (Narodowy Sił Zbrojny, or NSZ). Bożena Hlond, the niece of the primate, was the head of an NSZ women’s group, and Tadeusz Wyszyński, the brother of the future primate, led an NSZ platoon. Chaplains were assigned to NSZ units with the approval of the hierarchy, and an underground magazine called Lux Mundi was published by the NSZ for the clergy. The extreme anti-Semitism of this group was by no means typical (NSZ was tiny in comparison to the Home Army), but neither was it beyond the pale. One Home Army officer even submitted this report to the émigré Polish government in July 1941: As far as the Jewish question is concerned, it must be viewed as a special sign of Divine Providence that the Germans, regardless of the many injustices they have inflicted and continue to inflict upon our country, did well to demonstrate that it is possible to liberate Polish society from the Jewish plague and to show us the path that we should follow unrelentingly, albeit in a less cruel and brutal fashion. It is clearly God’s will that the occupiers themselves have contributed to the solution of this burning question, because the Polish nation itself, weak and unsystematic, would never have taken the energetic steps that this matter demands.105

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With the Righteous among the Nations on one side and the NSZ on the other, the overwhelming majority of Catholic Poles were stuck in the middle, doing little or nothing to either facilitate or hinder the Shoah. There were several reasons for this passivity: most Poles were afraid of Nazi reprisals, they were preoccupied with their own survival under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, and they tended to view the suffering in the ghettos and the camps as someone else’s problem. In addition to these factors, however, most Catholics were frozen with moral uncertainty generated by the ambiguity transmitted from the pulpit and the Church-affiliated press before 1939. The idea that the Jews were behind a massive plot to destroy Christian civilization was so deeply ingrained that most Poles could see the Jews as victims, but not as innocent victims. Priests later related being asked during the war whether it was possible to be forgiven for the “sin” of protecting a Jew.106 When confronted with the Nazi war against the Jews, all too many Polish Catholics were uncertain whose side they should be on. Most understood that Nazi brutality was morally wrong, but prior to the war they had been taught that the Jews had long been engaged in their own nefarious activities. For most Polish Catholics, intervening in a fight between two dangerous foes made no sense. After World War II the idea of a Satanic conspiracy against God and the fatherland helped many Catholics make sense of the whole string of mid-twentiethcentury tragedies. This narrative, however, did not present an easy way to look back upon the Shoah and assimilate it into the twentieth-century history of Poland. With both Hitler and Stalin depicted as examples of “godlessness” and “totalism,” and with both positioned within a legend that had long included the Jews as the primary villains, how could a Polish Catholic make sense of the death camps? Concentration camps for political prisoners (whether Nazi or Soviet) were easily appropriated into this story, since for at least twenty years Catholics had argued that secular modernity would lead to the utter debasement of human life. But a program to annihilate the Jews appeared incomprehensible. With the ruins of the Nazi death camps as a constant reminder, no one in Poland could doubt that the Jews had suffered unspeakable horrors. Even anti-Semites in Poland have rarely tried to deny that those camps were indeed factories of death. However, because Christian Poles had also been imprisoned in those camps— indeed, Auschwitz had originally served as a camp for Polish political prisoners—it was possible (as long as one did not pay attention to the comparative numbers) to equate Christian and Jewish suffering, and thus evade any need to account for the Shoah as a distinct phenomenon. Only a few months after the end of the war Primate Hlond said, “For the followers of Christ, but also for the Jews, [World War II was a time of] terror, unbelievable cruelty, slavery, camps, and gas chambers.”107 This would become a

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typical formulation, sustaining a tale of a long struggle against the evils of modernity and atheism that had reached its ultimate form (but not its conclusion) with the death camps. In 1946 Stefan Wyszyński explained that the camps were “an example of how low man falls without religion. . . . This is the modern man, raised in the spirit of a separation of Church and state, in schools without God. . . . What the wags once did to God in their leaflets and brochures, or what their students did in the museums of atheism, barely constituted playing at godlessness. Only the [concentration] camp showed our amazed eyes the full horror of the godless soul.”108 This universalization of misery shifted attention away from the specifics of anti-Semitism and toward a broader critique of modernity. Without even trying to deny what the Nazis had done, one could effectively strip the Jews of their status as victims. This became a tale about Christians and atheists, God and Satan, and the leading figures in the Polish Church had no need to revise the worldview that had carried them through the turmoil of the midtwentieth century. The key element of that worldview, as we have seen, was the belief that Poland was ground zero in a war between the forces of good and evil. The Jews had been the imagined vanguard of Satan’s forces for so long that they had become an integral part of the whole story. Indeed, by defining the death camps as a generic product of godlessness, and by casting Hitler and Stalin as relatively undifferentiated examples of “totalitarianism,” it was possible to leave the Jews at the center of the plot despite the fact that millions of them had just died. The żydokomuna myth in particular was more useful than ever before, insofar as it supported the belief that the Jews, via the USSR, had developed their own distinctive style of totalitarianism to rival Nazism. In fact, Wyszyński’s reference to the “museums of atheism” suggested that the communists (i.e., the Jews) were even indirectly responsible for the Nazi camps. In the decades to come, however, a persistent and potentially fatal challenge to this ideological edifice was always lurking: the suggestion that the Church had played a role in facilitating the mass murder of the Jews by spreading conspiracy theories of Jewish perfidy, or that Catholics had been anything other than heroic in resisting Nazi intentions. Such assertions implied not only that the historical narrative cultivated by so many Catholics was false, but that the narrative itself was partially responsible for the death camps. Because the word anti-Semitism was tarnished by its association with Hitler, many Catholic authors responded by defining it very tightly as an ideology of violence. Stories of anti-Polish and anti-Catholic Jewish plots were not anti-Semitic at all, they argued, but merely descriptions of reality. Only those who moved against this very real enemy with violent means were problematic—only they were real anti-Semites. To suggest that anti-Semitism should have a broader definition, and that the Church had propagated key elements of it, not only made Catholics look bad, but went right

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to the heart of the ideological underpinnings that gave meaning to the entire twentieth century. In place of a frightening but self-valorizing battle with Masonic-Jewish-Bolshevik-Satanic enemies, such accusations posited a much messier history. These concerns were evident after a pogrom broke out in Kielce in 1946, leading to the deaths of thirty-nine Jews. Hlond responded with a condemnation of the violence, but his comments revealed that he considered it self-evident that the Jews were responsible for the Soviet occupation and thus partially to blame for provoking Christian anger: The Catholic Church has always condemned killings, and has done so immediately. It condemns them in Poland as well, irrespective of whether they have been committed by Poles or Jews, in Kielce or in any other part of the Polish Republic. The course taken by the unfortunate and grievous events in Kielce shows that racism cannot be attributed to them. They developed against a wholly different background, a painful and tragic one. They are a great calamity that fills me with grief and regret. When Jews were being annihilated in Poland, Poles—though themselves persecuted—supported and hid Jews at the risk of their own lives. Many are the Jews who owe their lives to Poles and Polish priests. Blame for the breakdown in these good relations is borne to a great extent by the Jews. In Poland they occupy positions in the first line of the nation’s political existence, and their attempt to impose forms of government completely rejected by the great majority of people is a pernicious game, for it is the cause of dangerous tensions. Unfortunately, in the fateful armed clashes taking place on the front line of the political struggle in Poland, not merely Jews but incomparably more Poles are losing their lives.109 Hlond’s blame-the-victim response to the Kielce pogrom was not universally shared, but very few were willing to consider the role that the rhetoric of prewar Polish Catholicism might have played in setting the stage for violence. The editors of Tygodnik Powszechny expressed horror and outrage over the riots, but even they argued, “The Kielce incident painfully breaks with our historical tradition. It does our nation great harm in the opinion of the civilized world. There will doubtless be those who want to place responsibility for this crime on broader circles of our society. The truth is different.” According to Tygodnik Powszechny, Catholicism guaranteed that Poland “never succumbed to the psychosis of mass persecution,” because “Catholic ethics advance an injunction of love and justice as the basic principle of interpersonal relations, without regard to race, nationality, denomination, or viewpoint. And conversely—these ethics

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preclude hatred in the most categorical manner.”110 I have been able to locate only one dissenting Catholic voice: in late 1946 the theater critic and literary theorist Stefania Skwarczyńska published two articles in Tygodnik Powszechny criticizing those who tried to “displace the responsibility” for violence onto others, and called on Catholics to search their own hearts for the roots of antiSemitism.111 More typical of the story that became entrenched during the decades to come was an anonymous contribution to Biblioteka Kaznodziejska in 1957 acknowledging that there had been “serious abuses and exploitation” in Polish history, but that such things “were always a departure from the spirit of the nation and from the spirit of the Christian Gospel.”112 For some, such as those at Tygodnik Powszechny, denying that Catholic Poles had ever propagated anti-Semitism was probably a means of drawing a thick line through the past so that they could start anew to build a very different kind of Catholicism. Doing so by openly confronting and negating that past would have been an enormous challenge, and these authors and activists wanted to focus on the future. Moreover, Catholics of all stripes in the late 1940s and 1950s were wary of bringing any internal squabbles into the open, lest they provide an opening for the regime’s salami tactics. There is no evidence in Tygodnik Powszechny that any of its contributors continued to believe in the old plots and conspiracies; they simply did not want to take on the elephant in the room by directly debunking those myths. Before long this tactical silence slid into genuine forgetting, and for most of the communist era the Shoah was an enormous blank spot in popular memory and history. Meanwhile, for others in the Church, World War II continued to be remembered as just one part of an ongoing conflict in which the Jews were one of the primary foes. To be sure, it was rare after 1945 to explicitly mention the Jews as the driving force behind the anti-Polish conspiracy. In place of the specificity of the 1920s and 1930s, Catholic texts after World War II were more likely to use depersonalized nouns. This did not entail a shift from blaming people to blaming ideologies, in line with the “love the sinner, hate the sin” principle. Instead, Catholic priests and lay authors removed the proper nouns from their stories precisely to continue talking about anti-Christian and anti-Polish plots at a time when they could not name their enemies. That silence was in part due to the state censorship office, which obviously wanted to suppress any versions of the żydokomuna mythology (and, for that matter, any criticism of the communist authorities). Perhaps even more important, though, was pressure from the postconciliar Vatican. With the publication of Nostra Aetate in 1965 it became official Church policy to denounce anti-Semitism in all its forms, and a new sensitivity was required. In this environment, a handful of alternative keywords were inserted where Jew would have stood in the 1930s, often leading to awkward sentences in

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which an abstract ism was used as if it were a conscious historical agent, and in which it was impossible to be certain whether the implied subjects were the communists, the Jews, or (most likely) both. For example, in 1960 a joint pastoral letter from the Episcopate warned, “At the present time the Christian faith is threatened—in nearly every country, and in our own—by attacks from atheism, which from month to month intensifies its activities and struggles with the Christian Church with a downright inhuman fanaticism.”113 Clearly the main proponent of atheism in Poland was the communist state, but whether intentionally or not, the rhetoric used in these lamentations was often directly parallel to earlier discussions of the supposed Jewish danger. Moreover, the allusion to a global assault suggested that the struggles of the Polish Church were part of a process that extended far beyond the Soviet bloc. On another occasion Bolesław Cardinal Kominek of Wrocław told an audience, “Eastern Europe is at this moment under pressure . . . from militant atheism, which wants to spread its ideological system more or less violently. There were moments when this ideological atheism acted more forcefully. Today this force is less evident, but it is there.”114 The phrasing here was typical, with atheism replacing any references to specific atheists (or communists, or Jews, or anyone else) but nonetheless retaining the image of a conscious entity who “acts” and “wants.” Other techniques included using the passive voice (which is even easier in Polish than it is in English) or employing vague expressions like some individuals or certain forces in order to discuss enemies without stating exactly who they were. As Bishop Ignacy Tokarczuk once said, “Today the role of the family, a good spirit in the family, is extraordinarily important, for today once again, in another way, various enemies would like to oppress us. What is their goal? To tear the child away from the family, so as to educate him without God. That is what all this is aiming at.”115 These linguistic practices made it possible to speak about political, social, and cultural developments in a way that was simultaneously personified and anonymous. The (now absent) Jews were pushed into the shadows at the edge of public speech, but it remained possible to talk about the plot to demoralize, conquer, and destroy Catholic Poland. Audiences would quite rightly interpret such passages as references to the communist state, thinly veiled so as to blunt official retribution or censorship. But the use of the plural (“various enemies” active in “every country”) and the familiar story about an ongoing but malleable anti-Catholic assault kept anti-Semitic imagery alive even as the Jews fell further and further into the realm of allusion and implication. To be sure, in this case the state really was pursuing policies aimed at weakening the Church, and it is hardly surprising that Catholics complained about this. But the rhetorical framing and narrative plotting of these polemics perpetuated a worldview from the 1930s throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

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In fact, an image of Jewish agency occasionally rose to the surface. For example, in 1968 the Episcopate revealed that a majority of the bishops still saw the world in terms of old theories about anti-Polish and anti-Christian conspiracies in which the Jews played a central role. In that year student demonstrations in Warsaw provoked a violent government response, and in an attempt to justify their actions and buttress their popular support more generally, the regime labeled the protestors Zionists and claimed that they were disloyal to Poland. It was one of the most disgraceful moments in the history of Polish communism, but it presented the bishops with a dilemma. Most of them were willing to believe that the Jews constituted a fifth column within Poland, but no Catholic wanted to endorse an act of communist repression. Meeting in Częstochowa in May 1968 (two months after the demonstrations), the Episcopate attempted to position themselves above the whole affair. They denounced the police crackdown as a violation of the rights of free speech and free assembly, but then, without any transition or explanation, they continued: [We] reflect with deep dismay upon the injustice that is done to the good name of our Nation by certain foreign groups [środowiska]. Specifically, there is an attempt to blame the Poles for the extermination of the Jews, carried out in Nazi death camps. This is a horrible moral injustice if one considers that millions of Poles died in those camps. In the memory of these compatriots of ours, and also based on all the proof of love for one’s neighbor which Poles demonstrated toward the persecuted Jews during the occupation, we demand a halt to this deceptive and unjust propaganda and to its provocation. The Second Vatican Council, in its declaration about the relationship toward non-Christian religions, clearly stated the principles by which Christians must relate to (among others) those who adhere to the Old Testament. The Bishops of Poland remind everyone about those principles, with regard to their deep humanitarian content.116 To the outsider this might seem like a string of non sequiturs, but it all makes sense if we consider the contradictory pressures facing the bishops. They wanted to criticize the communists, but they did not challenge the idea that “foreign groups” were indeed plotting against Poland. Indeed, from the bishops’ perspective the communists were themselves one of those “foreign groups.” Thus a critique of the state crackdown on dissent in 1968 and a protest against those who wanted to defame Poland’s reputation were two sides of the same coin. Most observers saw 1968 as an act of communist-sponsored anti-Semitism; the bishops’ letter remained evenhanded by criticizing both sides of what was effectively depicted as an internecine struggle. In this view the Jews were attacking

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Poland with defamatory charges of anti-Semitism, and the Communist Party was striking back by using inappropriate and unjust means. The bishops criticized both. Developments since 1968 have in no way weakened the power of this message. In fact, after the fall of communism it may have become even more compelling, insofar as it allowed those frustrated by the negative aspects of capitalism and democracy to understand their travails within a single historical narrative that stretched back at least a century. One of the best-known exemplars of the conspiracy mind-set was Father Henryk Jankowski of Gdańsk, the unofficial chaplain of the Solidarity movement in 1980 (his parish, St. Brygida’s, was near the shipyards where the movement was formed) and a controversial gadfly right up to his death in 2010. After the fall of communism he was frustrated by the failure to implement the Christian nation-state he had longed for, but he was well-equipped to perceive the forces that had caused that disappointment. In 1995 he attracted international attention with a particularly shocking display. It is a Polish Easter tradition for each church to build a representation of the tomb of Jesus, and that year Jankowski decorated his with the logos of Poland’s liberal and leftist parties, alongside those of the KGB and the SS. As he explained, all these groups were part of a united front that hoped to bury the Church, much as Christ had been entombed two millennia ago. He went on to tell an interviewer, “I did not include the Star of David only because it is already inscribed [wpisana] in the symbols of the swastika and the hammer and sickle.”117 Once again we see the tendency to collapse the Jews, the Nazis, and the Bolsheviks into one overarching enemy that continues to use the left to further its malicious agenda. And again, one of the pillars sustaining this ideological apparatus is the claim that views like Jankowski’s do not constitute anti-Semitism, and any implication to the contrary is yet another maneuver in the plot to weaken Poland. By the end of the twentieth century, however, that pillar was cracking. In 2000 a Polish American historian of Jewish ancestry named Jan Gross published a book describing a horrific wartime massacre of several hundred Jews in the small town of Jedwabne. These murders were not carried out by Nazi troops, but by the Christian residents of the town.118 Most people in Poland, including many prominent Catholics, came to accept Gross’s evidence, and a great deal of public soul-searching led to a wide-ranging reassessment of treasured national myths. Church-affiliated periodicals like Tygodnik Powszechny, Znak, and Więź played a leading role in using the Jedwabne story to confront some uncomfortable issues, and though most of the ensuing conversation centered on the concept of collective national responsibility, there was also some exploration into the contribution of the Church in spreading anti-Semitic myths prior to World War II.119 The involvement of Catholics in that reevaluation must not be understated, because

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it indicates that the conspiratorial thinking that had once been hegemonic within Catholicism had lost its uncontested status. For a vocal minority, however, Gross’s book served only to reinforce the idea that Jews were trying to defame Poland’s reputation. Father Jankowski’s response was to construct another controversial Easter tomb, this one styled to resemble the barn in Jedwabne where the Jews had been burned alive, along with the caption, “The Jews murdered the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and they persecute us as well.” In Jankowski’s twisted view, the “legend” of Jedwabne was nothing more than another Jewish lie aimed at weakening Poland. The bishop of Gdańsk ordered Jankowski to remove the tomb’s vile caption, but the image itself remained.120 It would be comforting to dismiss Jankowski as a fringe figure, a living ideological fossil. Unfortunately, his interpretation of the Jedwabne scandal was by no means isolated. The historian Tomasz Strzembosz, for example, has attempted to depict the massacre as an unfortunate response to ongoing assaults on Poland by the Jews and their communist allies.121 Antoni Macierewicz, a prominent right-wing politician, wrote: Gross is undertaking a hate campaign directed at Poles and Poland, declaring a journalistic and propaganda war on us. Why? . . . When the myth of Polish anti-Semitism—previously fueled by stories about the “Kielce pogrom”—ceased to be useful, it was decided to find a replacement. Is the tragedy of the Jedwabne Jews to become such a tool? Is the hubbub surrounding Jedwabne intended to eclipse the responsibility of Jews for communism and the Soviet occupation of Poland?122 The whole portfolio of postwar Polish anti-Semitism is in this short passage: the assertion that any discussion of crimes committed by Christian Poles is part of a plot; the use of conspiratorial verbs (“it was decided,” “it is intended”); the żydokomuna myth. Even Primate Józef Glemp appeared to retain this mind-set, as indicated in an interview that he gave in 2001: For me it is incomprehensible why Poland is constantly being slandered, particularly in the American press, and why we are continually being ascribed with antisemitism, as if it is greater here than in other countries. The Jewish side continually demonstrates their dislike of Poles. I do not understand what the source of this is. After all, in comparison with Europe, in Poland the Jews had it relatively well and they felt at home. So why do so many false accusations fall upon us today? How much harm is done also to those Jews who authentically love Poland and live in friendship with Poles! Let us consider whether the Jews ought not to recognize that they are guilty vis-à-vis the Poles, in

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particular for the period of collaboration with Bolshevism, for cooperation with the deportations to Siberia, for sending Poles to jail, for degrading many of their fellow citizens, etc. The fact that Poles also took part in these repressions does not preclude that the leading roles were played by functionaries of the Security Services of Jewish descent. . . . I do not perceive [among the Poles] any aversion to the Jewish faith and so far I have never noticed the phenomenon of antiJudaism. That is the past.123 Glemp obviously saw no irony in this statement. Both the story of anti-Polish Jewish conspiracy and the self-image of Polish victimization are sustained by two claims: on the one hand, the depiction of communism (and more broadly liberal modernity) as a Jewish project; on the other hand, a reinterpretation of the Holocaust’s significance through a focus on the supposed defamation of Poland. Views such as Glemp’s are still expressed in Poland from time to time, even as their appeal steadily contracts. For several years in the 1990s Poland received unwanted international attention when a group of Catholics set up hundreds of crosses just outside Auschwitz in an attempt to defend the camp against what they saw as Jewish efforts to monopolize its memory. In the process, these activists recapitulated the historical narratives discussed in this chapter and emphasized an equation between the żydokomuna on the one hand and Hitler on the other. They called themselves “defenders of the cross,” but on a deeper level they were protecting their view of the twentieth century as a struggle between Jews and Christians, God and Satan.124 Among those affiliated with Father Tadeusz Rydzyk’s Radio Maryja network, the mythology of Christian victimization at the hands of the Jews continues to thrive. In those circles, Archbishop Józef Życiński of Lublin (the most outspoken critic of Radio Maryja in the Episcopate) is nicknamed “Żydciński” ( Jew-ciński). Father Czesław Bartnik has written about “Krakow’s Judaizing Tygodnik Powszechny center,” described Tadeusz Mazowiecki (a Catholic activist and the first noncommunist prime minister, in 1989) as “a member of the Judaizing lobby,” and explained the political developments of the early 1990s as a product of the “clever diplomacy of the Jewish Trilateral Commission.” At the same time Bartnik insists that anyone calling him an antiSemite because of these views is participating in a “battle against Polishness and Polish Catholicism.”125 The lay activist Ryszard Bender uses his status as a historian (he is a professor at the Catholic University of Lublin) to promote the view that the mass murders of World War II were part of a larger assault against Poland and against God, and not particularly against the Jews. As he put it in an interview in 2000, when he was asked to respond to the charge that he was a Holocaust denier, “Smoke came from the crematoria there, corpses were burned, and

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Poles, Jews, Gypsies, as well as people from more than fifty other nationalities were murdered or gassed.”126 According to another publicist on Radio Maryja, Jerzy Robert Nowak, the Jewish plan is to convince the world that Poles were responsible for the Holocaust, so as to prepare the ground for demands of financial indemnification and a return of Jewish property. That would entail surrendering so much land and so many key national assets, Nowak argues, that it would strip Poles of any real sovereignty in their own homeland. But for Nowak this is only a single chapter in a much larger history of Jewish polakożerstwo (an untranslatable term meaning roughly “preying on Poles”). He imagines a history in which Jews have longed for the establishment of “Judeo-Polonia,” a state in which Poles would be subservient to Jewish rule, and he argues that they have been using “antipolonism” for centuries as a means of rallying international support for their objectives. For all these things, Nowak concludes, the Jews ought to apologize to the Poles and stop demanding that the Poles apologize for anything.127 These recycled conspiracy theories should not give the impression that Radio Maryja is just regurgitating the Catholicism of the 1930s. As always, more than just anti-Semitism is at work here, because the rhetoric can easily be adapted to meet new needs and circumstances. For example, Father Witold Jedynak told an audience in Przemyśl Cathedral in 1993 (on April 1, though this was no joke) that the European Union was “ruled by anonymous forces, by various Masonic powers and others” who wanted to create a “godless European empire” that would “cut nations off from their roots, from national culture, from tradition.”128 In recent years this fear of European encroachment has been given a twist by positioning a new enemy where the Jews used to be. In 2005, while serving as mayor of Warsaw, Lech Kaczyński provoked an international scandal by attempting to ban a gay rights parade. Commenting on the controversy, Bishop Stanisław Stefanek of Łomża warned the faithful, “The wealthiest people in the world, who want a small number of specialized geniuses to conquer the globe, drive the rest of humanity toward moral ruin and the complete destruction of the family. That is why they organize parades, cynical theaters of lies for a mob that has been intoxicated by propaganda.”129 The parallel between antiSemitism and homophobia became even more disturbing (and more obvious) when thugs at antigay demonstrations took to chanting “Fags to the Gas Chambers” and “We will do to you what Hitler did to the Jews.”130 Father Jerzy Bajda, writing in Nasz Dziennik, explained the plans of the gay conspiracy: Behind the empty and conceited slogans of liberalism hides a very concrete program to destroy the family, and through this to destroy the nation, its spiritual constitution, its moral cohesion. The realization of these programs is served in a particular way by the so-called

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homosexual revolution, which (as the competent work of specialists has shown) was hatched under the wings of communism, that patron of all anti-human revolutions that “liberate” man from everything that constitutes the essence of humanity.131 Rydzyk put all this together by linking the gay rights movement with the Freemasons. He noted that in 2000 an estimated two million young people made a pilgrimage to Italy for that year’s Catholic World Youth Day, and surmised that this outpouring of support must have enraged the enemies of the Church. “Masonry was so nervous at the time, that a week after this meeting a march of homosexuals was organized in Rome, in order to erase those prayers and the impression that those young people made. This is the method: destroy symbols, reverse them. This is a sort of Satanism: the cross can be there, but the cross must be turned upside down.”132 Assessing the popularity of these views is tricky because surveys are unreliable if people believe they are speaking to members of a Jewish-controlled academic and media establishment. Nonetheless, even the six million or so people who occasionally listen to Radio Maryja constitute a small minority of the approximately thirty-five million Catholics in Poland. Among young Catholics the station’s popularity is even lower: 42 percent of Radio Maryja listeners are over sixty-five, and another 19 percent are between fifty-five and sixty-four. Almost half have only an elementary education.133 Perhaps more important, most members of the Catholic hierarchy now realize (thanks to regular run-ins with the international media) that they should avoid spouting conspiratorial views in public. On several occasions the bishops have even spoken out against anti-Semitism, and many of them have come to sincerely accept the positions articulated in Nostra Aetate. In fact, in 2000 the Episcopate commemorated the thirty-fifth anniversary of that momentous document from the Second Vatican Council by issuing a pastoral letter that refuted many of the old anti-Semitic legends. This text even debunked the claim that the Jews were responsible for communism; accepting that some Jews did hold high positions in the Communist Party in the immediate postwar years, the bishops continued, “We must acknowledge that the source of inspiration for their actions was certainly not either their heritage or their religion, but the communist ideology, which after all was the cause of many injustices against the Jews themselves.” Equally noteworthy was the letter’s recognition that, though many Poles had indeed sacrificed their very lives to help the Jews during World War II, “there were also those who remained apathetic toward that incomprehensible tragedy” as well as some “who caused the deaths of Jews.” This undeniable truth, the bishops wrote, “will always remain a source of remorse on a social scale. If even one Christian could have helped but did not extend a helping hand to the Jews at the time of danger, or

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caused his death, we are called upon to beg our Jewish sisters and brothers for forgiveness.”134 Today there is even an official Day of Judaism in the Catholic Church in Poland, organized by the Episcopate’s Council for Religious Dialogue—the mere existence of which testifies to significant changes.135 There can be no doubt that anti-Semitism no longer plays the role in Polish Catholicism that it played in the interwar years. It is entirely possible to be a Catholic in good standing while repudiating the idea that history is driven by unseen agents. That said, there is still plenty of space within Polish Catholicism for Rydzyk, Jankowski, Nowak, Bartnik, and their ilk. As noted earlier, the boundaries of Polish Catholicism may have expanded well beyond anti-Semitic militancy, but they have not contracted enough—yet—to push such views outside the Church.

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When Roman Dmowski died in January 1939, Przewodnik Katolicki put his picture on the front cover and lauded him as a national hero. The anonymous author of this obituary singled out Dmowski’s greatest contribution to the nation: It was he who first elevated the Jewish Question to the level of a political issue. That effort did not go smoothly, but faced resistance amidst the mockery and the hatred of Jews from all over the world. Dmowski managed to conquer that. . . . The hidden forces, the Masons and the Jews, the sworn enemies of Dmowski, spared no effort to make Poland as weak, as incapable of life as possible. Dmowski declared war on them.1 This, ultimately, was what drew Catholicism and National Democracy together during the interwar years: they shared a common worldview according to which both Church and nation were under assault by a nefarious conspiracy of enemies, with the Jews first among them. The clergy believed that good Christians must love their neighbors and their enemies, but even so they tried to ensure that Poles would be acutely aware of the dangerous assault on their faith and fatherland. As the Church became more infused with talk of the Jewish-MasonicBolshevik (etc.) campaign to destroy Christianity and achieve world dominion, it seemed increasingly vital to establish a common front with all those who hoped to resist the encroaching armies of Satan. Reinforced by a shared vocabulary of struggle, Catholicism became more national and nationalism became more Catholic. That fusion between nation and faith was built not on a demographic observations; as we saw in chapter 5, Catholic political commentators had long been wary of basing any of their claims on mere numbers. The Polish state may have attained near religious homogeneity only after 1945, but in 328

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Catholic texts the Polish nation had been imagined as exclusively Catholic for several decades already. In the summer of 1920, against the backdrop of the Polish-Bolshevik War, Father Nikodem Cieszyński gave a sermon with a title that inverted the famous passage from Isaiah 2:4: “Turn Your Plows into Swords.” Referencing the Book of Revelations, he told his audience, “[We] no longer need any imagination to fly to the inaccessible plain of the apocalypse, since in reality, here on earth, here before us—what am I saying—here among us we have that visible and horrifying cursed beast, the furious and licentious monster of Red Bolshevism. It carries, as if stamped on its brow, the horrifying mark of the beast of the apocalypse.” Because this beast was committed to the total destruction of Christianity, Cieszyński cried, it had to be stopped by the armies of God—or more specifically, the armies of Poland: “And behold, against that beast of the apocalypse . . . Poland, as it goes forward, is supposed to fulfill and will fulfill one of its most important historical tasks.”2 The Polish-Bolshevik War, understood through the prism of the conspiracy mythologies described in chapter 7, facilitated a return to a very old image of Poland as the antemurales christianitatis, a label first used when Polish armies confronted the Ottomans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Father Jan Rostworowski said in a lecture from 1936, “Poland stands once again as the bastion of Christianity against the storms from the east, a hundred times more dangerous than all the past centuries of the Turkish deluge.”3 Supporting this imagery was the conviction that the struggles for Poland and for the Church were linked, insofar as the two shared a set of powerful enemies: the Jews, the Bolsheviks, the Masons, the Liberals, and so on. Because these enemies were perceived as different manifestations of the same conspiracy, it followed that they should be resisted as one. The Episcopate made this linkage in 1920, in a pastoral letter promising that “the Catholic Church will become the national shield and a fortress against the inundation of anarchy and evil.” The bishops imagined themselves standing alongside the Polish Army in the battle to protect the nation: “[ Just as] our brave, heroic soldiers defend [Poland] against the external enemy, we all must defend it against the internal enemy.”4 Just as the Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy myth brought together all imaginable enemies within one supposedly cohesive structure, so did this specter facilitate an equation between the Church’s ideological opponents and Poland’s international foes. This in turn transformed the Church’s pastoral agenda into yet another front in the war to defend the Catholic nation. The image of a unified struggle for faith and fatherland was on display during a major youth pilgrimage to Częstochowa in 1936. (Participants said that 100,000 attended, but skeptical observers reported 20,000.)5 The organizers

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prepared a “Proclamation to the Polish Nation” in which they described their pilgrimage not only as a spiritual quest, but as a preparation for battle: “Today, at a time of moral collapse for individuals, families, nations; today, when Satan is striving to rule over the earth through the godless, the free thinkers, communism, Bolshevism, neopaganism; when organized Masonic action is striking at our Fatherland with ever greater force, the young people of Poland come to the feet of the Mother of God so that, with Her help, we might unite the Nation and defeat evil.”6 One speaker at this event declared, “Every Pole, whether in uniform or not, is a soldier in the national army. Fight with the enemy of Catholic, National Poland. In that struggle do not flinch before any sacrifices.”7 The Catholic tabloid Mały Dziennik, which reported extensively from the pilgrimage, even hinted that this metaphorical war might someday become literally violent: The enemy wants to undermine our existence with internal disharmony before it comes to armed conflict. It spreads revolutionary ideas among the Polish masses, it struggles against the Catholic family, it ridicules Christian morality, it proclaims godlessness—everything so that Poland, once made spiritually powerless, will fall once again under a foreign yoke. It is, after all, an irrefutable fact that Poland, if it would renounce God, if it would believe in the ideals of the red international, would not survive, would have to lose its independence.8 Once again evoking the antemurales christianitatis, another speaker depicted Poland as “the last bastion of Catholic culture in Eastern Europe” and argued that to fulfill this role and save the world from the “red banner of destruction,” it was necessary to perceive clearly the interconnectivity between the enemies of the Church and the nation. “We, today’s Polish youth,” he cried, “who have recognized that behind Masonry and behind communism there has always stood international Jewry, have resolved to fight the horrible Jewish-Masonic plague that is destroying our nation by preventing us from building our own civilization, by taking from us the space designated by God for us along the Vistula, the Warta, the Bug, and the Dniester, by poisoning our collective soul.”9 Here the battle for Poland’s international boundaries and the battle against the enemies of the Church became two skirmishes in the same war. The linkage of the Church and the nation within this vision of struggle was so common by the 1930s that it is easy to forget how unusual it would have been a generation earlier. Not only was the passivity and loyalism of the nineteenthcentury Church forgotten, but interwar authors transposed their own commitment to action back in time, constructing a memory of Catholic patriotic engagement. The most common way to do this was to cast the Church as a  sanctuary for the (necessarily Catholic) national essence and to equate the

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denationalization policies of the partitioning powers with the more general process of secularization. One early attempt to do this came with the founding of the sister periodicals Polak=Katolik and Posiew in 1906. The title of the former is probably enough to reveal its agenda, and the latter was no less explicit in summarizing its goals: Pole and Catholic are words that are practically synonymous. In common, everyday speech we use these names interchangeably, understanding (not incorrectly) that one cannot be a Pole without being a Catholic, and vice-versa. . . . It matters a lot to the entire nation what religion a person professes. For us Poles, partitioned as we are, the Catholic faith is a mainstay and a support, the bastion of our nationality. It is the bond that unites us and keeps us Polish [przy polskości nas trzyma].10 Soon some of the leading figures in the Polish Church took up this message. In 1915 Bishop Józef Pelczar contended, “The Catholic religion guarded [the nation’s] spiritual treasures and protected them against Germanization and Russification on the one hand, and infection by antireligious revolution on the other.”11 Archbishop Teodorowicz similarly declared in 1917 that throughout the era of the partitions “the Church was the font from which the nation took its life; it was the spring that watered the depths of the national soul. . . . Every plan to oppress the life of the nation began with the oppression of the life of the Church. . . . Did not the suffering of the Church and the dioceses become a symbol of the suffering of the nation?” Teodorowicz claimed that the Church had actually led the national movement: “The spiritual government in the Church was in fact [the nation’s] national government. . . . On the map [the nation] was divided, but under the leadership of the Polish Episcopate it felt like a single and whole nation.”12 The irony of all these statements was that they posited a link between Catholicism and Polishness that was only just then being formulated. To be more precise, one can trace the idea of equating the nation and the Church back to at least the seventeenth century, but as recently as the 1860s the dominant understanding of Polishness was nondenominational and even multilingual. The project of creating the Polak-Katolik for the twentieth century was still in its early stages prior to World War I. In 1917 Archbishop Kakowski of Warsaw summed up the emerging Catholic view of the nation by writing, “[Poles, over many centuries,] were without interruption a free, religious, Catholic nation, and our brave ancestors guarded with their own breasts and in thousands of struggles both the Fatherland and the Church against rapacious enemies.”13 The archbishop’s reference to enemies was the glue that held together the emerging fusion between nation and faith, and committed both to an apocalyptic war against Satan. In this context it is no

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surprise that Catholic authors in the interwar years strove to insert the Church into the tradition of national rebellion, transforming rebel priests who had defied their clerical superiors into representatives of Catholicism. Books such as Bishop Paweł Kubicki’s Clerical Warriors for Church and Fatherland, or his The Social Activism of the Church in Poland, and the Martyrology of the Roman Catholic Clergy and Faithful under the Prussian and Russian Partitions painted a picture of the rebel priest, devoted to serving the nation in its time of need. In these texts the fact that nationalist clergymen were rebelling against their bishops as well as the partitioning powers was passed over in silence.14 The writings of Father Mieczysław Żywczyński and the translated work of the French Jesuit Adrian Boudou cast the Vatican’s record vis-à-vis Poland in a more positive light, explaining away (in the latter case) such uncomfortable documents as Cum Primum.15 Those who had pushed at the outer edges of Catholicism in order to serve an anathematized national cause were posthumously welcomed back into the fold as if they had never been condemned in the first place. Even romantic poets like Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki—men who were attacked in their own lifetimes for their heterodox views—were rebaptized (so to speak) by interwar literary critics.16 Popular Catholic texts made this reconceptualization of the nineteenth-century national movement seem entirely natural. For example, a children’s play written for peasants by Father Józef Janiszewski in 1924 was to be performed on a stage decorated with images of the Virgin of Częstochowa, the white eagle, Adam Mickiewicz, and Tadeusz Kościuszko, even though both of those men had been repudiated by Rome in their own day. In that play a child asks, “Tell me, my dear mother, for whom am I to pray to God?” The response is “For Poland, for she is your beloved Mother.” Father Janiszewski firmly established the link between Poland and the Church: The Faith and Poland have been joined together So strongly, that it would require a supernatural force To snatch the Faith away from the hearts of Poland’s children! With the Faith would fly away the Polish spirit! Thus the Catholic Faith is called “the Polish faith.” A Pole today holds to the Faith With the fervor of the apostles, Because it sweetens for him this life of thorns! Thus also we often hear That Pole and Catholic are synonyms! Thus also when a Pole loses his Faith He usually renounces his brothers too! He loses his language, his Polish spirit, And rushes into the enemy’s camp.17

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Just as Janiszewski reached into the past to appropriate heterodox patriots like Mickiewicz for the Church’s cause, so did he project unanimity into the future by equating religious dissent with national betrayal. The assertion that Poland would collapse without Catholicism—that even the language would disappear without the Church—would become widely accepted in Catholic circles. As a parish priest from the mountain village of Muszyna told his congregation in 1933, “Every page of history is stamped with the slogan ‘God and Fatherland,’ ” because the enemies of the nation had always “wanted to first tear out and destroy the faith in a desire to destroy Polishness, to denationalize us.”18 In other words, Poland’s enemies saw that to strike at the ethnolinguistic side of the nation, it was first necessary to undermine its religious side. This linkage was presented as an assertion rather than an argument, as if the connection between faith and language was self-evident. At the root of the Polak-Katolik myth was a tautology: a Pole must be a Catholic because without Catholicism a person can no longer be a Pole. This seemingly circular reasoning was sustained in part by the antemurales christianitatis historical narrative and in part by the claim that the Church had preserved the nation from extinction in the nineteenth century. If the Church needed Poland in order to defend against the Bolshevik hoards, and if Poland needed the Church in order to survive the assaults of its enemies, then it followed that the two were necessarily and inextricably intertwined. In turn the common bond holding together this ideological scaffolding was the vision of a struggle for survival in which the nation’s enemies and God’s enemies were one and the same. The proponents of the Polak-Katolik ideal often recognized the gap between the actual population of their country and their model of true Polishness, but this too facilitated the turn toward militant action. Roman Catholics constituted about 66 percent of the country’s population, with the mostly Ukrainianspeaking Eastern-Rite Catholics making up another 10 percent. To deal with this uncomfortable demographic reality, interwar Catholics (and others as well) tended to make a sharp terminological distinction between state and nation. Father Jan Rostworowski explained the difference between these two words in a 1923 book, arguing that the state was a “framework that might, and frequently must include people of a different language and a different national tradition, and by including them it must treat them more or less equally, that is, more or less apathetically.” On the other hand, the nation was “undoubtedly a creation of God” because it was rooted in “natural” social bonds rather than “abstract” and utilitarian human reason.19 We thus see the state, utilitarian human artifice, and cultural diversity on one side of the ledger, with the nation, nature, and God on the other. Given that dichotomy, it is not surprising that Catholic texts from the time show little concern about the state, except insofar as it could be made coterminous

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with the Polish nation. Archbishop Teodorowicz asked in 1931, “What, after all, is the state without the nation? Is it not merely a great, empty hall, closed to the public, inside the walls of which reverberate the echoes of just a few people, bound together by ties of mutual adoration and mutual interests?”20 Using a different metaphor, Archbishop Bilczewski wrote in a pastoral letter in 1923 that language and territory were just components of the “body of the fatherland,” and these alone were nothing if not joined with a “collective soul.”21 The PolakKatolik ideal, then, was not an assertion that every citizen of Poland—or even every speaker of Polish—was a Catholic. That would have been obviously false. Rather, the label was used to describe the Polish nation, which was seen as a subset of the population of the Polish state. “Our ideal is the Pole-Catholic!” one priest wrote in 1937. “We desire unity for Poland, but not at the cost of its Polishness and Catholicity! We respect other nationalities and denominations, but we feel that Poland will be stronger the more deeply convinced Pole-Catholics it has.”22 This author was willing to acknowledge that unity within the Polish state was at odds with the Polak-Katolik ideal, insofar as a Catholic nation-state would marginalize the millions of people who thought of themselves as Poles but were not Roman Catholics or native Polish speakers. He wanted the Polish Catholic national community to become strong and assertive and to dominate the Polish state. This would necessarily bring tensions and divisions to the multicultural, multilingual, and multireligious state that currently existed, but that was a price he was willing to pay. Obviously not everyone in Poland shared this view. Though the multicultural ideal of the 1860s had faded somewhat, there were still a great many people who saw Poland as a broad locus for patriotic devotion regardless of language or faith. For example, in 1929 a Polish Lutheran published a plea for “the words of the Polish Constitution to be made manifest, so that the general public of Poland would come to fully understand that Polishness and Catholicism are not synonyms.”23 As the historian Sean Martin has written, the Jews of Kraków demonstrated repeatedly that they considered themselves to be simultaneously Poles and Jews. They too used the state/nation dichotomy, but for them this served as a means of enabling separate but equal loyalties to both. In an evocative show of this duality, the patriotic hymn “Boże coś Polskę” (usually rendered in English as “God Save Poland”) became popular among Kraków Jews, both in Polish and in a Hebrew translation. Despite the Christian origins of the song, there was no reason the Jews could not also sing a prayer asking God to protect their homeland.24 Even as the Endecja pushed from the one side and Zionism pulled from the other, many of those whom we now call Polish Jews might just as well be described as Jewish Poles—or perhaps Jews and Poles in equal measure, with no implication that one label had to serve as a qualifying adjective for the other. Although such blended identities were getting harder and harder to sustain with

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each passing year of the twentieth century, prior to World War II there were still a great many in Poland who resisted the idea that being Polish implied only one religious or cultural identity. The Christian-National Party refused to trust that sort of multiethnic patriotism. In their first program they acknowledged that Poland did not currently match their Polak-Katolik ambition, but that just made them all the more fervent in their quest for homogeneity. “Poland contains within its boundaries a rather significant population segment different from us in religion and speech,” the party acknowledged, using the first-person plural pronoun to underscore that “we” did not (yet) constitute the entirety of the Polish population. But there was a difference between recognizing diversity and accepting it. The program went on to complain, “Our enemies proclaim arrogantly that Poland is not a nationstate. This is a deliberate exaggeration. For 100 years forces hostile to us were at work in our land, and Polishness was deprived of the force of attraction that is exerted by every state organization. The compulsory neglect of the past must be fixed now.”25 In other words, now that Poland had regained independence, the state apparatus had to be used to “attract” its citizens to a single, properly Polish cultural norm. The desire to make the Polak-Katolik nation the master of the Polish Republic even inspired the popular magazine Przewodnik Katolicki to protest the burial of a Polish senator in a Protestant cemetery—even though the politician had converted to Protestantism. Why would one lead this huge parade for a Polish delegate, this gathering of Polish children, the symbol of the state—our white eagle— into a German cemetery? Who proposed this unfortunate idea? Have you forgotten that every Protestant congregation in our town, and everything connected to it, was an explicit cell of the Iron Chancellor [Bismarck]? . . . Where is your national instinct, that you would bury a delegate to the Polish Sejm, a son of Polish and Catholic parents, in land belonging to a congregation with a past so hostile to us?26 For Przewodnik Katolicki, apostasy was an act of national betrayal as much as it was a danger to the convert’s soul, and a Protestant member of the Polish Senate was as much an enemy of the nation as Bismarck had been. When Teodorowicz was discussing the non-Catholics of Poland, one of his favorite metaphors was the tunnel. This imagery allowed him to link Poland’s multicultural diversity with the conspiratorial visions explored in chapters 7 and 8. In a 1917 sermon delivered in Warsaw’s St. Jan’s Cathedral, Teodorowicz said that Poland’s foes were trying to infiltrate Poland with “underground tunnels that could join up with secret organizations in our midst.”27 Later he wrote, “The enemy is already at the gates; it is digging tunnels under our dearest

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Christian and Catholic principles and it is trying to confuse the national spirit and poison its soul. Poland is therefore in a state of war, as the battle is joined between the enemies of the Kingdom of God and Christ, and between those who are guarding that Kingdom and those who ought to be.”28 For Teodorowicz this “state of war” did not set the Polish state against rivals beyond the country’s borders; this was an internal conflict over the soul of the nation, into which enemies had penetrated. In another speech from that same year he recalled the military victory the Polish Army had won against the Bolsheviks seven years earlier. That apparent triumph, he said, had been an illusion. Having failed to take Warsaw by force of arms, the enemy had “tossed away the sword that kills the body, and prepared for [Catholic Poles] a poison for the soul.” Teodorowicz believed that the communists, Masons, national minorities, and all the nonCatholic religious “sects” were cooperating for a common end: by undermining morality and public order they aspired to “reduce in size, weaken and defeat Poland.”29 Teodorowicz’s rhetoric was quite mainstream within the Catholic hierarchy. In fact, a joint pastoral letter of the entire Episcopate in 1934 described those outside the Church as national enemies, even if such people had Polish citizenship: “With pain we must state that in Poland certain groups have declared war on the faith of Christ. . . . These ideas are not native [rodzime], not Polish. They have nothing in common with the needs and the sentiments of the Polish soul, but despite this they are praised as if they were the true Polish spiritual reality.”30 In a commemorative album published after the 1936 Synod, the anonymous author of the introduction praised the Church for defending the nation against Bolsheviks, “free-thinkers,” and the “moral rot in everyday and public life.” If Poland was to continue to resist these enemies, it had to “regain cohesion and moral strength in the face of the danger,” for “just as without history there is no state tradition, so without the Roman Catholic Church there is no mighty [mocarna] Poland!”31 In the guidebook on child rearing cited earlier, Father Józef Janiszewski included an appendix titled “Interesting Facts about Poland.” Among these was the following summation of the dangers facing the nation: Poland is located between two very “dear” neighbors [sąsiedzi, not the  biblical term bliźni]: Russia and Germany, counting together 128,200,000 inhabitants. If we add to this the 8,531,000 Jews, Germans, etc. living in Poland, who are also hostile toward Poland, we have two camps standing against each other: the Polish camp, counting 18,629,000 inhabitants, and the enemy camp, counting 136,731,000 inhabitants. In other words, one Pole is opposed by seven Germans, Moskale, Jews, etc.32

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The perspective here revolved around the nation rather than the state, with Jews and Germans (regardless of citizenship) counted among the enemies, and only the Roman Catholics included as Poles. In almost all considerations of security issues in the Catholic press, this division of the world was the one that mattered. In contrast, there was very little coverage in the Catholic press of the Polish Republic’s increasingly precarious diplomatic position. An author in Posiew wrote in 1927, “Our greatest enemies [are] the Germans and the Jews,” but he was referring to those living within the boundaries of the Polish state. He imagined that “global Masonry, directed mainly by the Jews, is trying strenuously to weaken and overthrow the Catholic Church in Poland; they want, in partnership with the Germans, to replace the influence of the Catholic clergy on the masses of our people.” They were doing this, supposedly, by supporting the efforts of Protestant missionaries in Poland, but this author based his argument entirely on national grounds (equating Protestant with German) rather than religious ones.33 Similarly, when an anonymous contributor to Życie i Praca itemized the greatest dangers that confronted the nation and the Church in 1929, he warned, “The communists, with their underground machinations, are trying to weaken the edifice of our Fatherland, and moreover, various national minorities are burrowing into and undermining our independence.”34 Insofar as foreign affairs (a problematic expression in this case, though the Polish sprawy zagraniczne [literally “affairs beyond the boundaries”] is clearer) were discussed by Catholic commentators and journalists, it was mainly as a means of illustrating the broad scope of the Masonic-Judeo-Bolshevik menace. For example, commentators in Poland paid very close attention to the Cristero rebellion in Mexico in the early 1920s, but any particularities of the local context were erased in an attempt to present the conflict as a foretaste of what was to come for Poland.35 Even Pope Pius XI himself drew this connection in a conversation with the Polish ambassador to the Vatican, Władysław Skrzyński, during a private audience in 1930. In his report on the meeting (labeled “Top Secret”), Ambassador Skrzyński summarized the pope’s view that currently relations are disturbing and unsettled not only in Poland, but all over the world. In this way he once again returned to the activities of Masonry. He asserted that when it comes to the Catholic countries, such as Poland, France, Spain, and South America, then activities from Masonry on the one hand and the communists on the other might lead to a total collapse of any sense of authority. Pius XI asserted that he does not see at this moment the foundation on which any reasonable person could base an optimistic view of the near future. He perceives that the foundation on which rested the eternal base of stabilization is crumbling, and in its place nothing new, or even somewhat lasting, will arise.36

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Cardinal Hlond told the delegates to a Catholic convention in Poznań in September 1929, “A Catholic nation that allows itself to become depraved awaits in some form or another the Masonic atrocities of Mexico or the Bolshevik horrors. I do not exclude any country from this possibility; I do not exclude Poland.” The primate clarified that he was not talking about the “everyday conflict between good and evil,” because the danger faced by Poland and the world had become much greater. This was about “the integrity and future of Christianity! Forces preparing for international anarchy and world revolution are gathering to oppress [the Church], and their plan of action encompasses the entire world. The headquarters of these forces lies beyond us and beyond Christian culture.”37 In 1927 a contributor to Rycerz Niepokalanej recalled the suffering Poland had endured in the nineteenth century, but foresaw that worse was to come. “There was a time when we feared for the integrity and freedom of the dear Fatherland,” he wrote, “but there have never been times like these now. Today our spiritual well-being, our eternal well-being is threatened. There hangs over Poland the threat of oppression and persecution of the Church and the Faith. That which is happening in far-away Mexico is coming toward us. Radical elements—led by the Masons—are getting ready for the struggle.”38 Starting from this position, it was hard for the Catholic press to fully grasp the dangers posed by Poland’s western neighbor, because Nazi Germany was difficult to fit within the familiar line-up of enemies. A startling example of this came in a pastoral letter from Archbishop Aleksander Cardinal Kakowski, issued after the Munich Conference of 1938. He gave thanks that peace had been preserved and ordered that a special mass of thanksgiving be held at every church on October 9 for “the return of Cieszyn to the Polish Motherland,” a reference to the small patch of Silesian territory seized by Poland when Hitler dismembered Czechoslovakia.39 During Holy Week of 1939 Father Szczepan Sobalkowski of Kielce delivered a series of sermons addressing the danger posed by Nazism and Bolshevism, both of which he declared to be antithetical to Catholic teachings. However, in this long series (which took up sixty-five pages in print) he mentioned Germany only twice, spending the entire remainder of the text denouncing the Soviet Union.40 Also exemplary of this imbalance was a 1935 note in Przewodnik Katolicki’s “From the Week” news column that related tales of “neopagan” campaigns of forced sterilization and anti-Catholic persecution, and even mentioned that Jews were among the victims. But all this took up only a few lines, whereas discussions of Soviet atrocities were frequent themes in frontpage articles.41 Sometimes Catholic authors went through ideological contortions to squeeze the Nazi threat into their worldview. As late as 1935 Przewodnik Katolicki tried to argue that the unusual trio of Marx, Lenin, and Ludendorff (an early supporter of Hitler) were the definitive enemies of God in the modern

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world, and that Nazism was bad because it was yet another “liberal and godless element” in German public life.42 Posiew was initially dismissive of Hitler, because the editors were sure that he would eventually “feel the revenge of the Jews.”43 Later an anonymous contributor used highly creative reasoning to acknowledge that Nazism was a menace. The anti-Christian conspiracy, he wrote, had been managed by the Jews for two millennia, only to fail repeatedly in its goal of uprooting Christ from European life. Because of this, the shadowy (Satanic) forces behind this plot switched strategies: “[Now] a sad scene in that struggle with Christ’s Church is today’s Nazi Germany, which is holding nothing back in its desire to tear the true faith from the Catholic heart of the German people, and implant an old-German, pagan faith.”44 In other words, Nazism was just another tool used by the Jews in their long-standing plot to destroy Christianity. Even in 1939, with Hitler openly threatening an invasion, the Catholic press continued to prioritize the danger of religious diversity to the nation, not the military danger to the state. An article in Życie i Praca in January of that year recalled the nineteenth-century occupation of Poland by foreign powers but argued, “Today we are threatened by a different danger. Neither the German nor the Moskal is spitting into the face of the Pole-Catholic, but the internal enemy is defaming and spitting on everything that is dear and holy to us. No German is punishing our children for saying a Polish prayer, but our socialists want to tear those children away from God in order to paganize them.” This author went on to argue that “the enemies of God” who were advocating secular education were the gravest threat confronting Poland at that time.45 Rycerz Niepokalanej offered a similar interpretation of current events in 1939, perceiving the Jews as the primary threat to Poland and mentioning the Soviet Union only insofar as it was (in this author’s mind) controlled by Jews: The secret and mighty power standing behind communism is international Jewry. We do not know of a country in which Jews do not stand at the head of the revolutionary-communist movement. Satanic and godless materialism is the foundation not only of communism, but also of Talmudism and freethinking Jewry. From the moment of the most horrible crime of Jewry against God—that is, the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus—Jewry descended lower and lower. The idea of the MessiahSavior, distorted by the Jews, corresponds completely to the perverse idea of “heaven on earth” proclaimed by communism. A lust for bodily pleasure and power over other people is the same among the first (the Jews) as among the second (the communists). The danger of communism is particularly great for Poland, since it is the closest neighbor of the Bolshevik state and since it has nearly 4 million Jews, because these

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two elements directing communism find Catholic Poland in their way, as a barrier preventing their march into the heart of the civilized world.46 In April 1939 Przewodnik Katolicki declared that resolving “the Jewish question” was “the most important task of [Poland’s] national life,” even as a news item on the very next page discussed the recent German threats of invasion.47 In May a regular contributor to the magazine noted that the Jews were proclaiming their patriotic loyalty to Poland as the international situation darkened: “But this will not persuade any of the Poles! . . . Even in these difficult moments we must not forget even for a moment that the struggle for Polish ownership is ongoing and it must remain ongoing in every field. . . . In these days of our international state of readiness, it is good to remember that the battle on the front lines is won by the army that has a rear guard that is peaceful, secure, of its own kind [swoje], and faithful.”48 A decade earlier the magazine Posiew had actually suggested that defending Poland would require cooperation from “everyone, regardless of estate or heritage.”49 But in 1939, when such unity was in fact needed, the paper was actually looking to Germany as a model for how to deal with the Jewish question: If the Jews have assumed thus far that they will manage to endure the wave of antisemitism in Europe, and wait for better times in order to continue pursuing their “interests,” then they are fundamentally mistaken. More and more states are following the example of Germany, and even democratic states like England and the United States, perceiving what is happening and understanding the essence of the Jewish problem, want to solve it somehow.50 The very last issue of Rycerz Niepokalanej, from August 1939, included an article by Walenty Majdański (a National Democratic writer and a founder of Poland’s anti-abortion movement) titled “God Save Poland!” The tone of this piece was in equal parts heart-wrenching and horrifying, for the author clearly realized that a disaster was looming, yet could not grasp its contours because of his anti-Semitic blinders. He contended that “Poland was created for no other reason than to show how great is the might of God,” and thus He would always watch over Poland in its time of need. After all, Majdański argued, “the whole world predicted that the Jewish communists would overrun Poland [during the PolishBolshevik War]. But God did not allow the Antichrist’s forces to torment the country where the Most Holy Mother ruled.” Unfortunately, continued Majdański, despite that promising start Poland continued to be plagued by the Jews: Our nation inherited from the partitioning powers a larger mass of Jewry percentage-wise than any country in the world. And that Jewry

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harmed and will harm us at every step. It eats into us like a cancer in the body of the nation. It spreads depravity and corruption among adults, and debauchery and godlessness among the youth. It seizes from us trade, industry, handicrafts, even land. . . . And how great we would be today if the towns and the wealth that are in their hands were in purely Polish hands! What an upright nation we would have if it had not been ruined by certain newspapers and books, admittedly printed in Polish but prepared by confused people. And how wise would our country have been governed if our intelligentsia—those of the older generation—had lived and thought more in Polish, in a Catholic way. But Majdański did not want his readers to despair; they could defend themselves if they ensured that Poland truly was a “great Catholic state.” If they did so, then God would in turn “show the world how mighty is a state in which the government and every family serves God and everyone loves one other.” Such a country could never fall: Poland might be weaker than Russia or Germany in terms of arms and industry, but those countries had “betrayed Christ,” whereas “Poland has the advantage over them because it is Catholic.”51 Some subscribers might have been lucky enough to receive this issue before the invasion disrupted the postal service and the Nazis forced Rycerz Niepokalanej to close. If the Polak-Katolik was an important cultural theme prior to World War II, during the communist era it became one of the most prominent components of Catholic rhetoric. Primate Wyszyński made the concept of the nation such a central part of his thinking that it came to shape his approach to a wide range of political, cultural, and even doctrinal issues. For many Catholics there seemed to be little difference between patriotism and religious devotion. Catholicism and nationalism became entangled in many countries in the twentieth century, but in few places did the nation so thoroughly penetrate to the very core of the Church. Throughout the postwar era the Church and the communist authorities hotly contested ownership of the words nation and people. The postwar territorial settlements established a new Polish state that was ethnically, linguistically, and religiously homogeneous (or nearly so) for the first time in history. Once all the ethnic cleansing of the late 1940s was over there were only about 800,000 nonCatholics in the country (out of a total population of twenty-five million).52 The deeply unpopular Polish Workers Party tried to gain some legitimacy by assuming the mantle of nationalism, arguing that only the ongoing support of the USSR and the eventual victory of socialism would guarantee the new borders against German irredentism. The communists’ sensitivity on this topic was exemplified when, in 1970, the Episcopate submitted a routine communiqué to the censorship

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office (as was required for every public text the bishops released). The authorities allowed the document to go out, but only after imposing a few redactions: “The Conference [of the Episcopate] announced a program of prayers for the Polish nation to the Victorious Mother of God on behalf of the faithfulness of the Church. This program asks for supernatural support for the Holy Father, Paul VI, on the occasion of the golden jubilee of his service as a priest, as well as for all the Polish priests who are devoted to service without rest among the Polish people.”53 These deletions might seem petty, but they point to a key battleground between Church and state in communist Poland. Few aspects of Polish Catholicism annoyed the communists more than the Church’s attempt to cast itself as the representative of the nation, because this implied that the state authorities were little more than foreign puppets. Because the communists were in fact widely perceived as agents of the Soviet Union, party officials bent over backward to demonstrate their patriotic bona fides, displaying the red and white on every possible occasion and attaching the adjective national to almost every institution.54 But the party was not alone in the attempt to portray itself as the representation of the nation; under the leadership of Primate Wyszyński, the Church integrated nationalism and Catholicism more thoroughly than ever before. Catholic texts throughout the communist era tended to treat Poland as much more than a cultural or political community; the nation had a role to play in God’s plan of salvation, so its importance related to the next life as well as this one. Whatever concerns earlier Catholic thinkers had expressed about the contradictions between a universalistic faith and a particularistic political philosophy were either worked out or silenced after World War II. Consider how the Episcopate justified their call for nonviolence in 1948: The Polish nation in its robust essence correctly senses the deeper meaning of the current moment. And thus it will keep up its spirits and not get lost in complaints and lamentations. It is, after all, the most peaceful nation on the continent. . . . We call everyone to creative work. Let us all conscientiously carry out the duties of our profession. Let the farmers honestly sow the fields. Let honorable work, which is the calling of man, be carried out in the foundries, the mines, the workshops, the offices and the shops. Let the reconstruction of Polish life— the capital, the cities, the gardens, the churches—grow from month to month. Let us preserve our trust and spiritual peace. . . . Let no one succumb to provocation to ill-considered steps by dark elements. Polish life should be dear and holy to us. It must not be unnecessarily threatened. Polish blood must not be squandered in pointless games. The Polish nation must remain strong, vital, and capable of realizing that which will in the future constitute its greatness.55

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Poland had to be preserved because it was a combatant in the eschatological battle to come; peace was important because it would facilitate the reconstruction of Polish (not merely human) life. Throughout the communist era the Church authorities ensured that the faithful would be constantly reminded that patriotism was a spiritual value. In 1981 the Episcopate even declared that the coming liturgical year would be devoted entirely to the relationship between Catholicism and Polish culture, and priests all over the country were instructed to prepare their sermons so that “the examples illustrating the proclaimed truths will be drawn from the history of Polish national culture.” Even when the theme under consideration was taken directly from the Bible, “those issues will be discussed in terms of the history of our nation as well as the current situation of the Church in Poland.”56 The titles for some of the exemplary sermons that year illustrate how this instruction was put into practice: — — — —

“God Enters Human Life and ‘Builds His Home’ on Earth: Sacred Architecture in Poland, What It Expresses and What Effects It Can Have” “Polish Traditions Tied to the Celebration of the Christmas Holiday: An Expression of Faith and Hope” “The Polish Nation, in Its Most Difficult Moments, Placed Its Trust in the Maternal Love of Mary: A History of Jasna Góra in the 19th Century” “Respect for Human Dignity in Polish Culture.”57

Literally every sermon published over the following year in Biblioteka Kaznodziejska had at least some reference to the specificity of Polish Catholicism. While this year-long focus on a distinctly national Catholicism might seem extraordinary, it could not have seemed unusual to those who heard the sermons. To be sure, Catholics in 1981–82 heard a bit more about the nation than usual, but the difference was quantitative rather than qualitative. Catholic texts often evoked the near religious homogeneity of the state created after 1945, but demographic numbers were not emphasized as much as one might expect. Bishop Ignacy Tokarczuk, for example, complained, “A tiny handful of atheists—a few percent of the population—has the nerve to impose an atheist program onto an entire nation that is more than 90% [Catholic].”58 Cardinal Wojtyła similarly insisted, “We are not from the margins! It is not the margin that builds a common fatherland! The Nation builds it! Society builds it! A society with an overwhelming Catholic majority cannot be treated as marginal!”59 Though the 90 percent figure was cited repeatedly, it was not really essential to this argument; Catholic nationalism was grounded in something much more profound and enduring. In a 1953 letter from the Episcopate to the state authorities, the bishops described Poland as a country “that has been

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Catholic for a thousand years, where more than 90% of the population consists of Catholics who are tightly bound to their faith.” They then argued that they should be allowed to help “re-Polonize” the newly acquired western territories.60 Note the juxtaposition of three claims: Poland has always been Catholic, 90 percent of the population is Catholic, and a portion of the population needs to be re-Polonized. For all three of these statements to be true, Poland’s religious identity could not be based on demography. Catholic texts actually tended to downplay the highly contingent and very recent accomplishment of near homogeneity, treating the country’s religious identity as both natural and eternal. For example, Wyszyński wrote in 1950 that the lands taken from Germany after the war, which became Polish in an ethnolinguistic sense only after a massive ethnic cleansing campaign, were indeed “recovered territories” (ziemie odzyskane, the term used in communist propaganda). Their “return” to the Polish fatherland, he believed, was clearly God’s work.61 In 1973 the Episcopate released a pastoral letter protesting communist slogans about building a new Poland, writing, “We know well that there is only one Poland! One and the same from prehistoric times to today. It depends upon our love, service, sacrifice, and even death if God demands it. In order to be always ready for this, we must have unity in Christ and in the Church. The Nation is strong in faith, and not in unfaith, because only a believing Nation knows what it wants.”62 From this perspective the changes of 1945 merely brought the population of the state into line with the essential nature of the nation. The claim of historical continuity was either incorrect (given the country’s past religious diversity) or an assertion that Poland’s former heterogeneity had been epiphenomenal, a feature of the state but never of the nation. In a pastoral letter in 1955 the bishops used the “more than 90%” figure to demonstrate that all Poles “look upon the sense and meaning of life in a similar way. Basically they evaluate human actions in the same way, identically reacting to the behavior of others. Some things provoke universal admiration, respect, and sympathy in all of us, and others general contempt or loathing.” This homogeneity, the bishops continued, stemmed not from anything as mundane as statistical dominance: The aforementioned principles and customs came to us as if in the blood, becoming the common property of the nation and an essential value that is not subject to any discussion. In this case we are no longer talking about Poles in this or that percentage, but of the entire Nation, understood morally, for even people who do not fully accept the faith of the Church rarely reject this moral unity with us. Indeed, they usually  accept it with genuine pride and sympathy.  .  .  . The Church and Poland have been so tightly bound through the centuries, their moral

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and spiritual roots have grown so deeply with each other, that they can hardly be separated.63 Similarly, a memo distributed to priests within the Warsaw Archdiocese in 1976 complained, “Today the situation is such that we must inform ourselves and others of something obvious: that the Polish nation is a Catholic nation. Not only because a large majority of Poles today proclaims the Catholic faith. Also because our history and culture are tightly bound to Catholicism. Catholicism shaped our spiritual and moral thinking, our social institutions, as well as our sense of dignity and human rights.”64 Most succinctly, Bishop Zygmunt Kamiński once asked in a sermon, “What would ‘Poland’ mean without religion? It would not be Poland.”65 Wyszyński often used the state/nation dichotomy to support his belief that “in the linkage between the Family, the Nation, and the Church, there have not been any significant breaks over the course of [Poland’s] history.” The state had shifted in form and occasionally ceased to exist altogether, he explained, but throughout this “the Church was united above all with the family and with the Nation.”66 Wyszyński effectively removed the nation, the Church, and the family from earthly historical time altogether: these were the great constants that move though time without really being part of human history’s shifting sands. In a slightly different way the theologian Jerzy Lewandowski suggested that the Church was the bearer of the timeless national essence, whereas the state was just a man-made institution of limited consequence. Religion should never be based on the state, but on the nation. For Catholicism, the organization of the Church is more important than the state. The Church can base its life only on the family and the nation.  .  .  . Through epochs, cultures, languages, and revolutions, nations manage to endure thanks to Christianity. Something else occurs with the state. In difficult moments for the nation, the state often collapses, disintegrates, fails to defend the nation. Then the Church remains, with a mission that is religious but also national and social.67 According to this view, the state was a potential source of oppression because it was artificial and contingent, whereas the nation was a natural community sustained exclusively by bonds of kinship and affection. It followed that the way to true democracy was to bring nation and state as close together as possible. Whenever the state truly served as “the common, social property of all the children of the Nation,” wrote Wyszyński, then by definition there could be no tyranny and no “chauvinism and mistaken nationalism.” This, he said with a startling bit of historical revision, was the principle that sustained the prepartition

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Republic, so much so that it “entered our blood” and imbued Poles with a democratic spirit for all time.68 Thanks to this understanding of history, the Reformation and Counterreformation appear not as a time of religious strife, but as a period when a few stray sheep wandered from the faithful Polish flock, only to return later to their natural home. A pastoral letter from the Episcopate in 1965 asserted, “When the wave of the Reformation visited our country in the 17th century, the Nation persevered in faithfulness toward the Church—and not because of force from the authorities, but in complete tolerance guaranteed by the state.”69 Whenever religious conflict did break out, it followed almost by definition that the blame for such disturbances had to come from outside. Cardinal Wyszyński believed that Poland has never, over its thousand-year history, known wars or disturbances based on religion. We cannot count as Polish the attack of Brzetysław [in the eleventh century], which is sometimes called a “pagan reaction” in the history books—that was imposed [upon us]. We also cannot count as a fruit of the Polish spirit the so-called “pseudoreformation”—that was also imposed. We cannot take the later Russification or Germanization—or rather, the effort to force Orthodoxy or Protestantism upon us, as an expression of our cultural development. Those were all things brought in from elsewhere, imported.70 Alongside an equation between linguistic denationalization and religious conversion, this passage implied that the atheist regime of the People’s Republic could never be truly Polish. The conviction that the state was an alien force and that Poles needed to struggle for “independence” was not only a reference to the undeniable Soviet hegemony over the Warsaw Pact countries. More deeply it was an assertion that only a fully Catholic state could be a national state. This is why many hardliners in the Church refuse to this day to acknowledge that their country is independent; as a secular liberal democracy it cannot, by definition, be Polish. The new masters might be labeled EU bureaucrats, Jews, gays, Masons, or something else, but it is accepted as a given that they cannot be Polish because they are not building a Catholic state. For Primate Wyszyński, the nation’s Catholicism ensured a genuine sense of unity and cohesion that set Poland apart, and any threat to that homogeneity was an attack on the nation. He believed that “it is our national good fortune that we are homogenous spiritually as the children of one universal Church. It is precisely the Church today that gives us the social value of the unity that joins us all in the crib. This is the ‘cornerstone’ that joins all into one.”71 Elsewhere he wrote, “Forces both natural and supernatural created from us a society that is

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spiritually, morally, religiously, ideologically [światopoglądowo], and culturally homogenous, so that we are in this regard a happy exception in the family of nations.” Of course he recognized that it was not literally true that everyone in Poland was Catholic, but he characterized those outside the fold as aberrations who were destined to return to “us.” That is why we receive with mistrust all efforts to divide us ideologically or religiously, perceiving in this a threat to the complete unity that is so important for our existence. All efforts to separate us from the faith we take to be an attempt to lead us from the Christian path and the light, toward a place without any paths and toward the illusion of false lights. Although we are, in an overwhelming percentage, a Christian society and virtually all of us acknowledge Christ, perhaps, nonetheless, one can see among us those who are wavering in faith, who fear to acknowledge the cross, who live far from the transcendent community of the Church, succumbing to the propaganda of atheism, indifferent, lost in ignorance of the main truths of the holy faith or enslaved by calculations, fear, the desire for a more comfortable life. Let us remember that such deviations [odstępstwa], even if secret, weaken our unity, our spiritual homogeneity, and our ability to defend against the dissolution of our strength.72 Defending what the theologian Jerzy Lewandowski has described as “the gift of unity” became one of the top priorities of the Church.73 In 1970 the Episcopate argued, “Whoever does not work for unity in national and public life does not love his nation and fatherland.”74 Thanks to the censors it was difficult to openly identify communism as a source of disunity, but there were plenty of other divisions that worried the clergy. When some Protestant charitable organizations set up aid programs in the aftermath of World War II, the bishops felt the need to “raise our pastoral voice of warning against the activities of the sectarians who are breaking up the Nation.” The Episcopate postulated that foreign aid must be aimed at winning converts, so they wondered, “Who might benefit from breaking up the nation’s unity by sects? Who might benefit from this peculiar custom of struggling with religion, once so alien to the Polish press? In the struggle with sectarianism we must perceive a great danger, which threatens not only the unity of the holy faith but also the desired unity of the nation.”75 It was striking—but typical—that this letter characterized Protestantism as a danger not to the souls of the faithful, but to the unity of the nation. In fact, the familiar, conspiratorial cui bono question implied that religion was not even the real issue. After Vatican II these references to “sects” were silenced, and the new slogans of dialogue and ecumenicism became obligatory. Responding to this challenge

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was in some ways even harder than dealing with the communists, because Catholics could not ignore or evade Rome as easily as they could Moscow. One example of how “tolerance” could be domesticated within the Catholic national view can be seen in a memo sent to the clergy of Warsaw from the archdiocese offices in 1976: Just as a point of order—for this is obvious—we underline that although we are a Catholic nation, non-Catholic Poles are our brothers with equal rights [pełnoprawnymi współbraćmi]. Beyond this we strive to respect those valuable strains in our culture that are not of Catholic origin. This tolerance of ours—and even more than tolerance, complete respect—comes precisely from a deeply understood Catholicism. Catholicism from its very nature aspires to universality and thus it tries to be open to every person, to every truth, to everyone of good will. Falsehood, disdain, and force are alien to it. . . . Our history provides much evidence that the Catholicism of Polish culture does not prevent Poles who are not Catholics to feel that they are its fully endowed heirs and co-creators.76 This passage reflects a logic that would become very common, and is still encountered frequently in Catholic writing and speech. Despite the apparently expansive view of Polishness, here was an inherent (but usually unrecognized) tension in the acknowledgment that non-Catholics could serve as “heirs and co-creators” of a culture that nonetheless must remain fundamentally Catholic. The alleged national predilection for freedom and tolerance was said to both stem from the nation’s underlying Catholicity and contribute to the eventual incorporation of nonCatholics into the national whole. Openness was depicted here not as an acceptance of diversity, but as a means of realizing the Catholic claim to universality; it signifies an open embrace rather than an opening of oneself to difference. Father Mieczysław Brzozowski advanced this position in a subtle way in a 1989 sermon: In Poland there has always been tolerance. In Catholic Poland there has always been respect for the Orthodox and for the Protestants; Catholic Poland for long centuries was the fatherland for many Jews. This is the fruit of the respect for freedom, and simultaneously that respect for freedom shaped our behavior vis-à-vis other nations. We did not conquer anyone, we never annexed foreign lands by force. If Poland grew, it was on the strength of pacts and treaties. If Poland grew, it was on the strength of a union, when others sought protection in Poland. We never destroyed foreign countries with sword and fire, and we never deprived anyone of their freedom.77

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On the surface all these sentiments seem benign (if historically tenuous), but the devil is in the pronouns. Here (and in many similar texts), “we” were always Catholic, showing tolerance to “foreign nations” with different religions and “others” who found safety under Polish protection. The very concept of a Protestant (much less Jewish) Pole is precluded even within this pledge of openness. As Brzozowski himself put it elsewhere, “On this land, literature and art, customs and mores, the accepted value system, all of history is so fused with Christianity so that even the atheist, if he wants to feel like a Pole, must accept the Christian element of Polish national culture. To reject the Christian cultural elements one would have to simultaneously annihilate everything that constitutes Poland.”78 Probably no Polish Catholic was a stronger or more consistent advocate for ecumenicism than Karol Wojtyła, but precisely because of this commitment, his tendency to equate Pole and Catholic generated tensions in his worldview. Shortly before his election to the papacy he said, “I include in the prayer for the Fatherland all Poles without exception; I do not segregate anyone, I do not exclude anyone. Let everyone know that we embrace everyone in this prayer for the Fatherland.”79 He made such statements often, both as Bishop Wojtyła and as Pope John Paul II, but he also believed that Poles did not see the past “individually as a unique person,” but “in a community, in the particular community that for a thousand years experienced the secret of Christmas as a community, as a Nation.”80 Wojtyła’s frequent references to history must be read in this light, because for him Poland’s past was essentially a story about Christ’s enduring presence in the nation. His appeals for tolerance recognized the rights of nonCatholics even while affirming that they stood slightly apart from the national whole. As he put it in a rambling but revealing sentence from 1976, “We Poles, remaining Catholic in an overwhelming majority and finding in Catholicism, in the Catholic Church, the foundation for a spiritual defense against our conquerors . . . preserving, I say, in our Catholicism, in the Catholic Church, a sort of foundation of inner strength, of our identity and of our spiritual resistance, thanks to which the nation endured—at the same time we respect the convictions of others.”81 As always the division between “us” and “others” makes it possible to claim that “we” are committed to openness and diversity, without suggesting that such heterogeneity could ever change who “we” are. Grounding national unity in Catholicism was not without some doctrinal risks. Above all it threatened to instrumentalize the Church as a mere component of the nation, not a universal bearer of transcendent truth. It was quite common to argue, as in a memo to the clergy from the Warsaw Archdiocese in 1976, “In Poland attacks on Catholicism are simultaneously attacks on the national spirit, on the national heritage—they are attacks on our very selves.”82 Or as the Episcopate put it in 1973, “A blow to the Catholic religion would be

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simultaneously fatal for Poland, and destroying religion would constitute the destruction of the foundation of the Nation. For the bond between the faith and Polishness was and is so strong that undermining one leads to the ruin of the other.”83 The logical implication of this assertion of mutual dependency was made clear in the sermon Wyszyński gave at the dedication of the reconstructed Warsaw Cathedral in 1960, when he argued, “In order to weaken and destroy the nation, it is necessary to strip it of its Christian spirit. Thus the ‘political atheism’ of the invaders. . . . If the enemy fights the Church, then obviously it serves him in the struggle with the Nation. And we cannot assist in anything that serves the enemy. That which the enemy fights against, we must respect and honor.”84 The surprising upshot of this argument was that atheism was not a genuine objective for the communists, but merely a tool to weaken the nation, and that one should “respect and honor” the Church because of its service to the nation. Primate Wyszyński seemed to view religious disputes through a national lens, not the other way around. Obviously this is not a view he would have accepted if it were presented in such blatant terms, but his frequent defense of Catholicism as a national institution introduced subtly heterodox implications to his pronouncements. In fact, one might say that Wyszyński lived on a razor’s edge between universalism and nationalism. The end result of that balancing act was something Wyszyński called a “theology of the nation,” an attempt to base national sentiment on firm doctrinal principles and (hopefully) avoid the risk of instrumentalizing the Church. Nationalism has been such a marginal topic among Catholic theologians that Gregory Baum was able to argue, “To this day, there is no Catholic theory to offer guidance to nationalist movements in Catholic countries such as Poland or Croatia.”85 His choice of examples is ironic, because Poland is in fact the one country where such theological guidance is available, and has been for at least half a century. The first premise of Wyszyński’s theology of the nation was that God created the constituent units of social life, starting with the family and culminating in the nation. As summarized in a 1951 memo to the Warsaw clergy from the archdiocesan office, “We must remember that just as every individual person belongs to God and depends upon God, because God is his Creator, similarly, the nation as such is dependent upon God, because it owes Him its entire existence.”86 Father Mieczysław Brzozowski explained this perspective more fully, affirming that the nation’s origins must be sought in the eternal mind of the Creator. It is from the will of  the Creator—over the course of centuries—that various nations appear. It is He who gives them the strength necessary to endure and to realize their intended goals. Forming the nation, God endowed it with a unique spiritual personality. One can speak here of a national spirit or

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character. This includes supernatural and natural talents, and a mentality thanks to which the nation receives the ability to shape a culture, traditions, and customs appropriate only to itself. The national spirit determines national identity, shapes its history, and is expressed in its consciousness. For Brzozowski the nation deserved respect not merely because it was part of God’s creation, but because it served a vital purpose in the process of salvation.87 Father Czesław Bartnik attempted to translate this perspective into more formal academic language. His definition was not designed for popular consumption, but it does clarify the doctrinal issues involved: One can define the nation most concisely as a separate, most developed and most precisely formed branch of social anthropogenesis. More broadly: it is a natural human society that is self-defined materially, somatically, and spiritually. The most complete definition: the nation is a subsistent, collective anthropogenetic personality with a common “we” and a common genetic root, an awareness of the fatherland, of history, of tradition, of culture, of speech (language), as well as of the full communion of life. The obscure terminology actually gives some precision to this theology. By granting the nation an “anthropogenetic personality,” Bartnik affirmed that nations make people, not the other way around. Though given physical life by our parents and spiritual life by God, we are imbued with our traits, our traditions, our behavior patterns, and our language by the nation. This is much more than a declaration that cultural context matters; the nation here is not just a cluster of cultural practices or traits, but a full-fledged historical agent with its own form of “awareness.” As Bartnik put it: The nation possesses not only an objective sphere, but also a subjective sphere—that is, the whole range of that which constitutes its inner identity and its life ad intra. One might even say that the nation is a certain process of movement from material reality to psychic and spiritual reality, from the sphere of things and objects to the sphere of subjects, from a community of human nature to the community of persons creating a certain higher form of collective life. This subjectivity is not a “person” in the sense of an individual, but it possesses some personhood so that it constitutes something like a personal subjectivity, something like a “person.” The nation has its own mind, heart, will, activity, feeling, psyche.

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This lofty ontological status is crucial because it allowed Bartnik to insert the nation into the economy of salvation and assign it an independent redemptive capacity. The Polish national “personhood,” he argued, became Christian and received its mission at the moment of Mieszko’s baptism in 966, even though only a handful of individuals were brought into the Church at that time. From that moment the nation began to participate in the “mystery of Christ, Mary, the Church, and the history of salvation,” even though most Poles were not yet Christians. Bartnik dismisses demography: “It is enough that there is a ‘little flock’ (Luke 12:32), some ‘sacred leaven’ (Genesis 11:16, 1 Corinthians 5:6–7), some ‘yeast’ (Matthew 13:33). We believe that Christians in the nation are like a spark for the mystery of the entire nation in its Christian aspect.”88 A similar theology of the nation was at work in Wyszyński’s claim in a pastoral letter of 1965 that Mieszko “decided to join his Nation in the great, transcendent community [społeczność] of the People of God,” and in the Episcopate’s assertion a year later that the 966 baptism was “the origin of the moral and spiritual order that penetrated all of Polish history.”89 The nation thus bears Poland’s collective redemption so that membership conveys divine grace, facilitating the individual salvation of Poles over the course of a thousand years (and beyond). A priest from Katowice told his flock in 1982, “[Christ] brings new life not only to particular individuals, but also to entire nations. Jesus became, through his resurrection and ascendance to glory, the true Lord of history.”90 In other words, Jesus does not merely reveal Himself through millions of individual salvific acts, but by granting collective grace to entire nations so that they may carry His blessing into historical time. To quote Wyszyński yet again, “Just as a Christian lives for his or her entire life with the initial grace received with baptism . . . so does a baptized community [wspólnota] grow from the strength of that first community [społeczność] of faith. Every baptized Pole is grafted onto it, and through it, in a certain sense, onto the universal Church.”91 The concept of a national mission takes on a whole new meaning in this context. “A society with a mission,” Bartnik wrote, “receives movement, life, a goal, and (as a consequence) meaning. No social group could exist if it did not have a missionary structure [struktura posłanniczości]. This is particularly true for the nation. Every nation is humanity’s great path through reality [wielką drogą ludzkości przez rzeczywistość].”92 As we saw in chapter 6, the idea of a national mission was popular in the mid-nineteenth century, with writers like Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, and many others positing a unique Polish mandate to spread freedom and justice in the world. But despite all the religious terminology these thinkers used, their visions were predominantly secular and political (and they were denounced for this reason by contemporary Church officials). In the late twentieth century, in contrast, leading Polish Catholics described a mission that was moral and spiritual. Their presentation of the nation’s contribution

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to history offers a novel theory of spiritual agency, but one that is nonetheless grounded in Catholic categories. Not only are nations created by God in order to guide individuals to salvation, but nations themselves become actors in the divine drama. As Wyszyński put it in 1978, “The community of the baptized Nation has a mission that is not only corporeal, but also eternal. Christ the Lord, sending His Apostles unto the entire world, commanded them ‘Go and teach all the nations.’ We are thus responsible not only for the salvation of individual people, but for the entire Nation for which we are pastors by the will of God.”93 In this circular passage the nation is both the object and the subject of salvation; it is both redeemed collectively by the Church and commissioned for its own “eternal” mission. Jerzy Lewandowski expanded on the primate’s teachings, arguing that the nation “has a relation to God just as the individual does. It is created and directed towards a special higher goal by God. It remains entirely and always under a special Divine Providence, a sort of Providence of the nation.” The most startling innovation of this theology was Wyszyński’s belief that “the Church gives to the nation, and not only to the individual, all the Christian gifts of redemption, including theosis.”94 This term (przebóstwienia in Polish) is surprising in this context. More characteristic of the Eastern Orthodox tradition than Roman Catholicism, theosis refers to the goal of reaching such an advanced stage of holiness that one directly experiences God—a sort of Christian corollary to the Buddhist concept of nirvana. Lewandowski, the chair of the Modern Theology Department at the Catholic Theological Academy in Warsaw (in other words, not someone who can be dismissed as a marginal thinker), argued that nations could be collectively brought closer to God and redeemed. Just as the lives of individuals could be plotted within an arc of personal improvement that led ultimately to sainthood, so did nations have a mission to advance collectively toward a higher stage of existence. In all of these texts we find lots of qualifying phrases: “in a certain sense,” “as if,” “sort of,” and so on. It is understandable that these authors would hedge their assertions, because the theology of the nation risked undermining the universality of Catholicism, the unique salvific role of the Church, and the importance of individual faith and virtue. Lewandowski was cautious when he wrote, “In a certain sense, the nation in a natural sense is like the ‘body,’ and the Church of the nation is like a ‘soul.’ The nation is, in a certain way, a concrete embodiment of the universal Church in a specific history, in time and space.”95 The use of wellplaced equivocations kept the theology of the nation perched precariously at the edge of orthodoxy. In many of these passages it is unclear whether individuals are saved because they are baptized by the Church or simply because they have the good fortune to be born into a baptized nation. The latter stance would be unusual (to say the least), and Wyszyński tried to preclude this interpretation by specifying that only “baptized Poles” were truly part of the “baptized nation.” As

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he wrote in 1967, “Through the spiritual unity of every Polish child is created, in the holy Church, the spiritual unity of the nation. One could say that baptized Poles create a supernatural baptized society that is homogeneous spiritually, morally, religiously, socially, psychologically, and historically. . . . This testifies to the conscious merger of the Nation into the supernatural divine current, which has flowed through our Fatherland from the moment our first princes and kings were baptized, and lasts to this very day.”96 This brings us back to the idea of national unity and homogeneity, because to sustain the orthodoxy of this vision of national salvation Wyszyński was ultimately compelled to confirm that only “baptized Poles” were truly, in the fullest sense, part of the nation. Father Henryk Skorowski reiterated the importance of unity in a theological tract of 1999, in which he defined the nation as “a society growing from a homogenous ethnic trunk, joined in solidarity by ancestry and culture, and having a sense of its own identity.”97 John Paul II would never have been so explicit in demanding national uniformity, but he did come extremely close to ascribing an eschatological role to nations. In his 1994 encyclical Tertio Millennio Adveniente, he said that the Church as a whole should “become more fully conscious of the sinfulness of her children,” and that Catholics everywhere should work for “reconciliation with God on the part of both individuals and communities.” For example, he believed that the Church should repent because of “the acquiescence given, especially in certain centuries, to intolerance and even the use of violence in the service of truth,” and he called on “the European nations to make a serious examination of conscience, and to acknowledge faults and errors, both economic and political, resulting from imperialist policies.”98 The wave of apologies that followed Tertio (one Vatican observer counted ninety-four statements of contrition issued by John Paul II alone) provoked a lot of controversy, but few noticed the theological implication of this undertaking. Without fully articulating a defense of this position, the pope was implying (perhaps unintentionally) that nations had a spiritual status that made both collective sin and collective “reconciliation” possible. Elsewhere he described the family and the nation as “natural societies, not the products of mere convention. Therefore, in human history they cannot be replaced by anything else. For example, the nation cannot be replaced by the State, even though the nation tends naturally to establish itself as a State.” Like Wyszyński, the pope accepted that nations were more than just ethnolinguistic communities; they were creations of God, and they participated in the “history of salvation.” In characterizing the nature of that participation the pope had to walk a thin line: “Admittedly, it is people and not nations that have to face God’s judgment, but in the judgment pronounced on individuals, nations too are  in  some way judged. Can there be such a thing as an eschatology of the nation? Nations have an exclusively historical meaning, whereas man’s vocation

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is eschatological. Yet man’s vocation leaves its mark on the history of nations.”99 The phrases “in some way” and “leaves its mark on” once again typify the tendency to employ phrases that allow for multiple interpretations, in this case making it possible to imagine the nation as a collective participant (albeit in a mediated way) in the story of salvation, while still affirming that only individuals have souls. At the end, John Paul’s rhetorical question about an eschatology of the nation does not have a clear answer. If the nation is a creation of God and if it is implicated somehow in the process of salvation, then patriotism becomes a moral obligation and Catholicism becomes a national duty. A parish priest from the town of Gorzów told his congregation in 1962, “Love of the Fatherland is a divine commandment and thus Catholic duties vis-à-vis the Fatherland are duties in a certain way based on God, religion, and the conscience. God commands love for the Fatherland, and Christ, the Son of God, gives humanity the most perfect example of that love.”100 Much later Father Franciszek Cegiełka even composed a list of “national commandments,” including affirmations that “As ordained by the Creator, I am a Pole” and “The highest terrestrial good for a Pole is the Fatherland.”101 Claims like these are often grounded in a novel exegesis of the fourth commandment, “Honor your father and mother.” Reasoning by analogy, priests told their flocks that nations were like parents, insofar as the family constituted the fundamental building block for the national community, so it followed that the obedience and love commanded by God in Exodus 20:12 and Ephesians 6:1–3 extended from the father and mother to the fatherland/motherland. As Karol Wojtyła put it in 1967, “The great family of humanity consists of many microscopic families, in which a father, a mother, and children live in fellowship. And the great family of humanity also consists of many nations: they are like great families within the universal family.”102 It helped that the Polish term here, ojczyzna, is ambiguous in its gender: the etymological root is ojciec (father), but the grammatical form is feminine. In actual usage it could be translated as either “fatherland” or “motherland,” depending on the context. As we will see in chapter 10, this flexibility mirrored the way the Virgin Mary was appropriated within a national ideology, allowing Catholicism to encompass both masculine and feminine categories. Similarly, priests could build sermons around the fourth commandment that evoked duties and sentiments typically directed at both mothers and fathers, for the nation was the ultimate motherland/fatherland. Above all, this made it possible to cast patriotism as a “natural” obligation, in keeping with the Thomist naturalism of twentiethcentury Catholic moral philosophy. Just as the injunction to love one’s parents was merely an affirmation of an inborn, organic bond, so was devotion to one’s motherland/fatherland a sentiment that only a true deviant could deny. This worldview even structured the way the Church’s moral teachings were presented in Poland. For example (as noted in chapter 2), issues related to

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abortion, divorce, birth control, and sexual morality take on a distinctive, more nationalist coloration in Poland. An unpublished text distributed to the priests of the Warsaw Archdiocese in 1959 urged them to teach their parishioners: Every decision of a wife “to bear children or not to bear children” is not just a personal matter. She is deciding about the right of the nation to its own land, about the strength of the state, about the growth or destruction of the Church in all regions of the world. . . . The number and density of population is the first condition for the development of culture, technology, and production. . . . All the great civilizations of the world emerged in states that achieved the greatest density of population and the highest natural growth. Propaganda aimed at limiting reproduction, the text continued, was nothing but a Protestant plot, whereas “the Catholic population, faithful to the law of God, wants to live and fill the earth.”103 In 1967 Cardinal Wyszyński condemned the “alleged right to divorce,” expressing outrage that people were acting “as if the family were just a personal matter for the couple, as if the children did not have a right to a family hearth, as if the Nation were not interested in that which happens in the cradle of its existence, as if the Creator of the family—the Father of Life—did not have anything to say here.” A proper marriage, Wyszyński argued, should be marked by “reasoned love, sacrifice, self-denial, and social service.” The object of this service was ultimately God, but more immediately it was the nation: A powerful stimulus for overcoming the calculating egoism of the couple is the welfare of the Nation, which the family owes for the extraordinarily great assistance and care in carrying out the tasks of upbringing. [The family] thus ought to thank the Nation with love, guaranteeing it continuity as well as the biological and moral strength that constitutes progress for the Nation and allows it to endure the attacks of enemies. It is not permitted to set a family program as if the Nation has no rights in the family, or in general did not exist. If the duties of the family are separated from the rights of the Nation, it would be quickly “cut off from the land of the living” (Psalm 69:29).104 The focus on a distinctly national morality was most evident in the discussion of Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI’s 1968 pronouncement that birth control was a sin. In a pastoral letter issued to explain this text, the Episcopate described it as “a warning for the nations against self-destruction. Doubtless those who see in this the light of the prophets are right. That light should be perceived above all by the

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eyes of our white race.”105 A year later they went even further in a text entitled “The Voice of the Polish Bishops in Defense of the Threatened Existence of the Nation,” which was originally scheduled to be read in every church on December 27, 1970, only to be postponed into January because of the violent unrest in Gdańsk that week. “For the first time in its history,” the bishops wrote with surprisingly Spencerian logic, Poland stands before the danger of depopulation.The roots of our existence are being cut off, because the nation that stops growing will collapse. More energetic neighbors will overtake it and occupy the place of those who lack successors. Several once magnificent societies have been irretrievably covered by the fog of history. We too risk being pushed into the cemetery of history. . . . Today we are deciding about our long-term future, about “to be or not to be” for Poland on the world map. Although the Polish Church enthusiastically embraced Paul VI’s repudiation of birth control, their reasoning differed from the pope’s. In Western countries and in most Vatican texts, the primary concern was that birth control interfered with the God-given processes of reproduction; in Poland the rationale behind Humanae Vitae was that any limitation on reproduction was a sin against the nation. “A child is not the private concern of the parents,” the bishops wrote, “but a value about which the entire society must be concerned. . . . The woman who decides for motherhood is undertaking a responsible social service.”106 The linkage between personal morality and national duty was not limited to maters of sexuality and reproduction. As we saw in chapter 2, the clergy often chastised their flocks about laziness, drunkenness, petty theft, disobedience, and corruption, but after World War II they increasingly did so in the name of preserving the nation. For example, Cardinal Wyszyński preached against the abuse of alcohol in 1959, but he characterized the sin primarily as a danger to the nation, not as a threat to the spiritual and physical health of the individual.107 Bishop Zygmunt Kamiński must have surprised his audience in the summer of 1980 (only a month before the strikes that led to the creation of Solidarity) when he delineated “the main threats to the nation today.” Not the communists, nor the atheists, nor the oppressive factory managers, nor Soviet domination; instead, Bishop Kamiński said, the lack of respect for the Sabbath was the most troubling danger. Honoring the Sabbath was important, he argued, because it led to all sorts of related good behaviors; conversely, ignoring Sunday duties led on a slippery slope to a range of vices. “If we become a collection of drunks and licentious people,” he cried, “then nothing will be left of the Fatherland. As a nation we have constantly feared those who persecute us, who rob from us, who

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conquer the nation. Today we are starting to destroy the nation with our own hands.”108 Views like these are still very much alive in the early twenty-first century. Jerzy Robert Nowak, Radio Maryja’s leading lay publicist and ideologue, has gone so far as to describe religious conflicts as proxies for national struggles. “In order to completely enslave the Nation,” Nowak wrote in 1999, “the authorities had to first subjugate the Church. And not only in the name of their godless Bolshevik obsessions. The communists tried to break up the Church also in order to dispose of that which has traditionally been the strongest support for Polishness.”109 When Rydzyk himself addressed this issue he maintained the priority of the Church over the nation (barely) by making the fate of each dependent on the other: We are worked over well as a nation in order to enslave our nation, in order to take this land, in order to realize a certain plan. There is some sort of force, there are people and interest groups hostile to us. . . . I think that this is also a struggle with the Church. This is not just about Polish land. This is tied to a new plan for the world, which is called atheistic globalism. The European Union is not a construction of unity, but a way station on the road to globalism. This is being done by those for whom God is not the God of Jesus Christ, for whom God is not Jesus Christ. . . . That is why acts against Poland should be understood as acts against the Church. Poles are a Catholic nation. A healthy Catholic nation can change the world—or may be the germ that changes the world. This is dangerous for the atheistic globalists. That is why they want to strangle our nation, and meanwhile appropriate the land and make their own republic.110 Rydzyk’s particular form of national Catholicism had been countered by Archbishop Józef Życiński of Lublin, who considered it a “theological pathology” to “treat God and the nation as two equal components of Catholicism. . . . Either [the Church] is a Catholic Church or a Polish-National Church—but then it can no longer be called Catholic.”111 Elsewhere he issued a call to his compatriots to “get away from the provincial mentality whose representatives are prone to almost believe that the Lord God is a Pole.”112 Even Życiński, however, would agree that the nation is a creation of God with some sort of eschatological purpose (if only an intermediary one). For even the most liberal Catholics in Poland, patriotism and faith are intimately linked, and there is no sign that this bond is weakening. Almost no one questions the way patriotic and religious images blend in the decoration of churches; no one seems to find it noteworthy that “masses for the Fatherland” have become regular events; and few would consider

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it odd when a particular sin is condemned because of its effect on the nation rather than on the individual soul. When confronted with Rydzyk’s rants about anti-Polish, anti-Catholic plots, most Poles today (particularly most younger Poles) see nothing but laughable paranoia. Fewer and fewer people would say today that someone must be Catholic in order to be Polish, or that Poles must rally around the Church in order to preserve their national existence. Nonetheless, the legacy of the Polak-Katolik lingers on.

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Mary, Militant and Maternal

When Karol Wojtyła became Pope John Paul II in 1978 he announced that the slogan for his papacy would be Totus Tuus (Totally Yours). The “you” to whom he was addressing this commitment was the Virgin Mary, Blessed Mother, Queen of Heaven, Handmaiden of the Lord, Mater Dolorosa, Woman of Valor, Paragon of Chastity, Supreme Mediatrix, and (certainly not least) Queen of Poland. As suggested by this list of her titles (and there are many more; the popular Litany of Loreto includes forty-nine invocations, with various additions in specific countries), Mary is what we might today call “multivalent.”1 Over the centuries of Catholic history she has been made to carry a wide variety of meanings and serve a multitude of purposes. Nonetheless, she isn’t quite all things to all people; when one invokes the Virgin, one must contend with a legacy that both constrains what one may say and grants (sometimes unintended) significance to what one does say. This legacy is heavily determined by doctrinal claims that provide a great deal of continuity across time and space, but culturally distinctive metaphors and local shifts in emphasis nonetheless allow Mary to assume a variety of visages. Just as Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe has been configured to play a role in that country’s discussion of indigenous rights, and just as the Virgin of Lourdes has been deployed in debates about rationalism and secularization in France, so has Poland’s Virgin developed alongside the Polak-Katolik.2 For many, the Marian cult virtually defines Catholic spirituality. Rather than fading against the onslaught of modernity (as some had predicted), the Marian strain in Catholicism has only intensified over the past two centuries. In fact, some scholars have labeled this period “the Age of Mary.”3 This is equally true in Poland, though perhaps there we would have to extend the Marian era back all the way to the seventeenth century. Since at least 1656, when she was crowned Queen of Poland by King Jan Kazimierz, the Virgin has stood at the very center of the Polish homiletic tradition and has served as an object of deeply felt devotion for countless ordinary believers.4 Few Catholic homes in Poland lack a 360

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reproduction of the Virgin of Częstochowa, and it is no coincidence that Tadeusz Rydzyk called his station Radio Maryja. A century ago Archbishop Józef Bilczewski affirmed Poland’s bond with the Virgin: What God has joined together, let no man put asunder. God has joined Mary and our nation. . . . Mary has established roots among us more deeply than anywhere else, because together with the Catholic faith, her veneration has penetrated to the very foundation of the nation, has become a constituent part of the Polish soul, has left its mark on our traditions and customs. Our nation—I won’t hesitate to say it—is the most Marian of all nations. Our history, throughout the centuries, is virtually a history of Mary in the nation.5 Even a casual traveler to Poland will notice the pervasive Marian cult: today there are more than eight hundred Catholic shrines in the country, and seven hundred of these are devoted to the Virgin. (Sixty are devoted to Jesus and fiftysix to assorted other saints.)6 The most important of these shrines, the Jasna Góra monastery in Częstochowa, was visited during the interwar years by about 1.5 million pilgrims annually, a figure that increased to 2.5 million by the early 1980s and 3.5 million by the start of the twenty-first century.7 Needless to say, each individual within those huge crowds of worshippers envisions the Virgin in a distinct way, but framing all their personal appropriations are several themes transmitted through sermons, devotional booklets, pilgrimage guides, and other sources. It would be a mistake to differentiate too sharply between popular and clerical Marianism, because at least in Poland the two are mutually reinforcing.8 Some of the highest figures in the Polish Church, including both Primate Wyszyński and Pope John Paul II, demonstrated an emotionally intense commitment to the Virgin that would blur any distinctions we might wish to draw between a systematized official Marianism and its syncretic, theologically heterodox popular variant. Father Jerzy Lewandowski went so far as to argue, “Cardinal Wyszyński looks at Polish history through the prism of the Mother of God, and thus creates a Mariological vision of Poland. That is a Marian theology of Polish history.”9 Polish Marianism gains much of its power from the way it links together seemingly contradictory models of femininity within the national perspective described in chapter 9. Mary, the Queen of Poland, has been offered to the faithful as a model for conceptualizing the feminine within the nation, a model that is flexible enough to endure because it rests on a basic dichotomy: on the one hand, Mary is a powerful, sometimes militant protector of Poland; on the other hand, she is an exemplar of feminine domesticity. She guides the nation to victory even as she demonstrates how to sustain the national hearth and home.

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As we have seen, Polish national rhetoric has shifted back and forth over the years between geopolitical ambitions and the disciplining of social relations, and Polish Marianism has smoothly shifted along with it. Sarah Jane Boss has argued that Mary’s image in Western Christianity has changed over the centuries, moving from the mighty Queen Mother of medieval devotion (typically depicted enthroned, either supporting the infant Jesus on her lap or receiving a crown from the adult Jesus) to a more submissive, quiet, passive figure in the modern era (usually displayed alone, as a young woman).10 In Poland, at least, this transition has been less pronounced. Although her function as a model of obedience, domesticity, and compassion did indeed become a central component of her modern visage, her royal power continues to be evoked in the struggle against the nation’s enemies. A mortal woman might find it hard to contain such divergent personae, to move from the battlefield to the kitchen without one role undermining the other. Mary, however, has the advantage of being both a terrestrial woman and the mightiest of all saints, and a mystical duality lies at the very foundation of her cult. She provides an image of authority and power that poses little challenge to traditional norms of femininity; indeed, she is frequently called upon to fortify those norms. Marianism thus provides some of the glue that helps hold together two otherwise distinct strains of Polish national thought, one focused on maintaining sharply delineated gender relations and the other on attaining victory against the enemies of the faith and the fatherland. In determining what Mary signifies for Polish Catholics we cannot rely much on the Bible. She is mentioned only a handful of times in the canonical books of the New Testament, and most of what we know about her comes from either popular mythology or apocryphal texts (mainly the Gospel of James, an account written in approximately the year 150 and later repudiated by the Church).11 That Mary conceived Jesus without the intervention of a mortal man is perhaps the only thing about her that Christians throughout the ages have accepted with little dispute, but as soon as early theologians tried to characterize this event with more precision, Mary’s unique status among humans became evident. St. Augustine first raised the vexing question of whether Mary was encumbered by original sin, as all (other) humans are, thus launching a debate that lasted (for Catholics) until the nineteenth century. That Mary never sinned of her own volition was almost universally accepted, because, as Przegląd Katolicki put it in 1896, “it was necessary that the house of God was a house worthy of her Lord.”12 But how did Mary avoid all sin (of thought and deed, of commission and omission), since vulnerability to temptation (or “concupiscence,” to use the theological term) has been part of human nature since the Fall? One resolution was suggested by Augustine; he proposed that Mary might have been created

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differently from the rest of humanity, with a perfect alignment of reason and desire that allowed her to avoid temptation and thus sin.13 This possibility was debated by theologians for centuries, until Pius IX’s Ineffabilis Deus of 1854 proclaimed definitively that Mary “was preserved free from all stain of original sin.”14 A parallel controversy involved Mary’s death (or lack thereof). As early as the fourth century, legends told of the Virgin’s bodily assumption into heaven prior to the moment of her death. This too was a point of debate throughout Christian history, but it was resolved for Catholics in 1950, when Pius XII declared in the encyclical Munificentissimus Deus, “The Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.”15 Taking the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption together, we get an image of someone who stands apart from the remainder of humanity, even as she served as Jesus’ entry point to the human condition. Mary was (and is) more than just “the one who bore Jesus,” more even than a saint. In the words of Pope Pius IX, “She approaches as near to God himself as is possible for a created being.”16 The Liturgical Commission of the Polish Episcopate even took the unusual step in 1961 of mandating that the Virgin’s name be spelled using the archaic form Maryja, to distinguish her from mere mortals named Maria.17 Given all this, it is hardly surprising that Protestants have long accused Catholics of polytheism because of Marian devotion. Sensitive to this accusation, the clergy have worked hard to police the fine line between Mary’s intercession with God and unmediated action of her own, between latria (the adoration reserved for God alone), dulia (the reverence given to the saints), and hyperdulia (a special category of reverence postulated by St. Thomas Aquinas for Mary). In this scheme only latria entails an expectation of direct intervention in human affairs; the rest imply the intercession of the saint with God, who must then decide whether or not to act.18 The standard Marian prayer, established definitively by Pope Pius V in 1568 and recited regularly by millions of Catholics to this day, does not ask Mary to help us on her own, but only to “pray for us sinners.” As a nineteenth-century Polish catechism explained, “When we say ‘pray for us,’ we are signifying that the Virgin Mary is not omnipotent, that she is a created being, albeit the most perfect creation, so we do not say ‘give us,’ ‘absolve our sins,’ but we say ‘ask on our behalf,’ ‘pray for us.’”19 Theologically, then, Mary is the Mediatrix: her elevated position next to her Son allows her to persuade him to perform miracles, to restrain his anger over our misdeeds, and to show mercy upon us when we suffer. To be sure, this point is probably lost on the millions of Catholics who regularly recite the rosary or make pilgrimages to Częstochowa, Lourdes, Fatima, or Guadalupe. Nonetheless, the theology of intercession would shape the way the Virgin was depicted in sanctioned Catholic texts and sermons, and this in turn would frame the cultural significance of Marianism.

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Poles have been praying to (or rather, with) Mary since the conversion of the country to Christianity more than a thousand years ago. The oldest extant song in the Polish language is the hymn “Bogurodzica” (She Who Bore God), which Polish warriors sang before their victory over the Teutonic Knights at Grunwald in 1410. It was, however, the siege of Jasna Góra in 1655 that propelled Mary to the very center of Catholic devotion in Poland. During a time of domestic chaos and foreign invasion that came to be called “the Deluge,” the Swedish Army laid siege to the fortified monastery of Jasna Góra near the town of Częstochowa, which possessed an ancient icon of the Virgin that was reputed to work miracles. The battle of Częstochowa, as a victory by Catholic Poles over Protestant Swedes at a Marian shrine, had obvious symbolic power. Publicists loyal to King Jan Kazimierz took full advantage of this victory, and it became the war’s turning point. After peace was restored, and against the backdrop of the counterreformation Church’s effort to entrench orthodox Catholicism in what had been a notoriously pluralistic and heterodox country, the king staged an elaborate ceremony (attended by 150,000 people) at which the icon of Częstochowa was crowned “Queen of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Ruthenia, Prussia, Mazovia, Samogitia, Livonia, Smolensk, and Chernigov.”20 From this point Jasna Góra became the country’s leading site of Catholic pilgrimage and devotion, and the Virgin of Częstochowa would remain the most familiar image in the repertoire of national symbolism. From this story comes one of the central elements of the Polish Marian cult: the Virgin as the military protector of the Polish nation. The Poles were not alone in invoking Mary’s help in battle, but they were particularly fond of this tactic. In 1683, when King Jan Sobieski led the combined armies of central Europe against the Ottoman siege of Vienna, he credited his victory to the Virgin’s support. A century later, a popular battle song for Polish soldiers included these lines: For the cause of the nation and the Virgin Mary, We serve the Virgin, who gave birth to God. Under her sign we dedicate our swords, Under her protection is the road to victory, She, with her word, will crush the might of the devil.21 In the eighteenth century and particularly the nineteenth, reproductions of the Virgin were often used on battle flags and Mary’s intervention on behalf of the antemurales christianitatis was persistently evoked by those seeking to regain national independence. A nineteenth-century guidebook for pilgrimages to Częstochowa offered a set of hymns and poems to Mary, and every one of them focused on her help in attaining Poland’s national restoration; none appealed to

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her for personal, individual maternal aid (as would have been typical at the time for Marian shrines in Western Europe, such as Lourdes or La Salette). Zygmunt Krasiński’s poem “To the Crowned Queen of Poland” was among the patriotic verses reprinted in this volume: Queen of Poland, we appeal to You, Come to our aid, we call for help, Save us, save us, merciful Mary, Vanquish the enemy’s stubborn fury.22 A poet from a later generation, Stanisław Wyspiański, used similar imagery to depict Mary commanding the Polish knights, summoning them to battle: And the Mother of God in her crown, Sitting on her throne in the Wawel castle, Writes a manifesto: A summons that flies throughout the entire country And awakens and stirs thousands.23 When leading the nation in this way, Mary was not only Poland’s queen but also the supreme Hetmanka. In prepartition Poland the hetman was the field commander of the armed forces, the one who actually led the troops into battle. The feminine form of this rank was a linguistic oddity reserved exclusively for the Virgin, as when a 1904 Marian Congress in Lwów issued a proclamation announcing, “The trumpet call of Mary has begun to play, summoning the entire Nation to a meeting, the goal of which will be to proclaim once again that the Immaculate Mother of God is the Hetmanka and Queen of the Nation.”24 Mary was thus both monarch and field commander, both the crowned embodiment of power and the active leader of Polish troops in battle. She was more than just an inspiration for the soldiers; she was the one who guided them to victory, the actual cause of their triumphs. In a 1910 guidebook on Marianism for priests, Father Franciszek Walczyński explained that Mary recognized the “virtues of our forefathers” and decided to devote herself to the protection of the nation throughout time. “She gave our kings good inspiration and advice,” he wrote; “she sat in the Senate Council; she served as Hetmanka to the knights [hetmaniła rycerstwu]; she worked with the people in the fields, she lightened the severity of slavery for the prisoners captured by the Tatars. . . . Mary has fought for us and with us, and she has been victorious. She has brought glory to Polish arms—she, therefore, justly deserves the crown of victory.”25 In 1927 Bishop Kazimierz Michalkiewicz of Wilno crowned that city’s famous Mother of God of Ostrobrama icon, describing Mary’s protection

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over Poland primarily in military and political terms. After the Poles pledged their fealty to Mary as their queen, “the Most Holy Mother not only deigned to accept that title, but she mercifully carried out the duties flowing from her position as almighty Queen. Poland, as you know, . . . stood at that time before the precipice of ultimate destruction. . . . And after the pledge everything changed.”26 Mary the Mediatrix was thus subtly transformed through her juxtaposition with the nation; rather than (or in addition to) being a caring mother who asks God to act on behalf of His pleading children, she became Poland’s ultimate commander in chief, leading it through the tribulations of history. This bond between Mary and militant nationalism was a bit awkward for the nineteenth-century Church, given the loyalism of the hierarchy. At a time when, according to most homiletic presentations, Poland was supposed to be penitently enduring collective punishment, it was discordant to call upon the Hetmanka to resolve the nation’s dilemmas. Apparently some devout Catholics even doubted that it was appropriate to speak of Mary as a protector in battle; in 1886 Father W. Mrowiński felt compelled to write a small book (which received the imprimatur) insisting that there was indeed a “genuine historical foundation” to the idea that Mary was the Queen of Poland and that “the invocation of that name is not an invention of national agitators.” Mrowiński, though, tried to guard against the insurrectionary potential of this imagery by speaking mainly of the past and by depicting the Virgin, not willful and disloyal humans, as the central historical agent.27 One way to finesse this issue was to link Poland’s fall with an alleged turn away from Marian devotion, arguing that only after Poles once again resumed a proper veneration of the Virgin would she return to lead the country to freedom. A nineteenth-century guidebook to Częstochowa claimed that every Polish monarch since 1448 had made a pilgrimage to the Black Madonna, but that the last king, Stanisław August, had not done so. The consequences were grave, for “the Mother of God turned away from the nation, which had forgotten about Her in the moment of its disintegration.”28 This particular variant of the historical narrative of collective sin, punishment, and penance was quite popular. In 1877 Józef Pelczar, then still a young priest, offered a survey of Poland’s relationship to Mary during a ceremony to crown an icon of the Virgin in the village of Stara Wieś, not far from Oświęcim. He explained that in the eighteenth century the leaders of the Polish nation demonstrated that they had “contempt for the old faith of their fathers” and that they were “embarrassed about the Queen Mary.” These sins brought “divine punishment” in the form of the partitions, but even then the Virgin was the source of relief: “[She] held back the cup of God’s anger, so that it would not be entirely poured out upon us; instead, she administered God’s comfort to us, drop by drop.”29 In 1893 a delegate to the Catholic Convention in Kraków praised the recent increase in the number of Marian

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sodalities because these groups had been strongest when the old Polish Republic was at its peak. He also pointed out, “The weakening of the Marian sodalities appeared among us simultaneous to the weakening of the national spirit, and the start of the collapse.”30 Archbishop Józef Bilczewski lamented, “In the 18th century Mary did not abandon us, but we abandoned her, forgot her. . . . We all know what happened next.”31 It followed from this logic that when the nation did regain its independence, the Virgin must have returned to her place at the head of the Polish Army. In 1917 Archbishop Aleksander Kakowski of Warsaw noted that the Virgin, together with Poland’s patron saints, had often “saved the country from doom, and often gave meager military forces a victory over mighty enemy armies with a hundred times more troops.” So it would be now, he predicted; Mary would “guide Poland from a life of misfortune and suffering to the blessed land of freedom and joy.”32 And so (in the eyes of the faithful) she did, particularly during the Polish-Russian War of 1919–21. The key victory of that war, the so-called Miracle on the Vistula of August 1920, was widely attributed in Catholic circles to Mary’s intervention. Shortly after the battle Kakowski wrote a pastoral letter making comparatively modest claims about the Virgin’s contribution to that victory. As he put it, “The Bolshevik soldiers, surprised by the courage and fortitude of the Polish warriors, withdrew in fear and fell down in wonder, for before the patrols of the Polish Army they saw a banner with the image of the Mother of God hung aloft.”33 More common (particularly after a few years had passed) were sermons attributing to the Virgin a far more direct role. As one priest put it a decade later, “Every unbiased observer must acknowledge that the resurrection of our Fatherland did not come about just thanks to the wisdom of our politicians or the weapons of our armies, but above all thanks to Mary, whom we justly honor and praise as the Queen of Poland.”34 Maria Friedrich-Brzozowska, writing in Posiew in 1933, considered it self-evident that “something more than just the run of accidents and the heroism of the Polish soldier” had led to victory against the Bolsheviks. She scorned those who suggested otherwise, arguing, “The negations of small-minded people who cannot take their thoughts beyond the world of matter will not undermine the basic historical truth that this defense of Poland was an answer to the prayers of the nation to Mary.”35 The leading proponent of Marianism in interwar Poland was St. Maksymilian Kolbe. While studying for his doctorate in Rome in 1917 he launched a new religious order called the Knights of the Immaculate (Rycerstwo Niepokalanej). According to one legend (recounted later in a sermon by a Warsaw priest), while in Rome Kolbe heard “the enemies shout ‘death to the Pope!’ and understood then that an organized evil was descending in a broad wave upon the entire earth. How could that wave be restrained? The answer came quickly. New knights must come forth to do battle. The Immaculate will lead them.”36 By the

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late 1930s the order’s devotional magazine, Rycerz Niepokalanej, was printing one million copies of each issue; its daily newspaper, Mały Dziennik, was one of Poland’s most successful; and the seven hundred monks and novitiates at the Niepokalanów headquarters made it one of the largest monasteries in the world. In 1937 Kolbe moved into the new medium of radio, broadcasting “Radio Niepokalanów” on a short-wave transmitter that reached virtually the entire country. With all these resources Kolbe propagated a new style of militant Marianism in line with the combative style described in chapter 7, bringing the Hetmanka fully into the twentieth century. In 1933 a contest was held to create an anthem for the Militia of the Immaculate, the informal lay group that was promoted by Rycerz Niepokalanej as the frontline unit in the battle against the Virgin’s enemies. One of the finalists for this contest was praised by the editors for capturing the goals of their movement. Heavenly Lady, our Monarch, You know how the servants of the Antichrist are sowing evil. Your armies are not frightened by the might of that darkness. Lead us to battle, heavenly Hetmanka! Immaculate one, grant us this entire world For Your and Christ’s glory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . You know what leads the poor world to misery: Sin, committed even in hiding. Allow us to burn away the weeds of sin as quickly as possible, And happiness will come to every home. Immaculate one, grant us this entire world For Your and Christ’s glory. Armed with your emblem—with the Miraculous Medal, We go forth under your blue banner. O Queen, lead us to the mystical battle, To the battle of virtue against sin—to the summit of redemption. Immaculate one, grant us this entire world For Your and Christ’s glory.37 In the next issue the editors featured another entry, and the imagery was even more martial: Under your banner! Under your banner, Mary! For life! Death! The call to battle has sounded: Although the earth is trembling, although thunder is booming all around us,

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We go forth together! To avenge the Divine blood! To battle! To battle! The final call has sounded. For your banner We will give our lives! Our blood! From the chains of hell the beast of Satan has been unleashed. Your inheritance has been tied up in a web of sin. O, come down, Immaculate One, from the luminous summit. Lead Your Knights to vanquish hell.38 As exemplified by these lyrics, the publications of the Niepokalanów were awash in metaphors of battle, conquest, blood, victory, banners, armor, shields, and swords. On a certain level this terminology was a metaphor for the struggle against sin, but as we have seen, Rycerz Niepokalanej (not to mention Mały Dziennik) also targeted more earthly foes. Kolbe’s Mary was not the meek, compassionate Virgin who appeared to children at places like Fatima or Lourdes; this is a mighty Hetmanka engaged in an all-out war against the enemies of the faith. This side of Marianism was fully on display in 1936, on the occasion of a massive pilgrimage of young people to Częstochowa organized by a radical-right youth group. A student activist from Kraków told the assembled pilgrims, “As our Fatherland stands between the godless red leadership of the Kremlin and the racist nationalism of the brown Germans, where could we ever find better help and rescue than with the Crowned Queen of Poland?” Under Mary’s leadership, he continued, they would go to battle: “We must fight! We must fight for our ideals, for the emancipation of thought from the fetters of unbelief and sin, for the realization of the Kingdom of Christ on earth.”39 The popularity of the Hetmanka metaphor did not fade after World War II. In fact, even Tygodnik Powszechny (a publication that tended to be more Christological than Marian) was not averse to calling upon the “mighty protection of [Poland’s] Heavenly Queen,” reminding her, “In the past you guided our statehood through the storms of history,” and beseeching her, “Guide us also today!”40 Perhaps the most comprehensive summary of the Hetmanka narrative of Polish history came in 1982, when Biblioteka Kaznodziejska published a set of thirtyone readings for the month of May in which Father Wincenty Zaleski recounted each of the key moments of Marian intervention in Poland’s past. Zaleski endowed Mary with an awkward label: Jasnogórska Hetmanka rycerstwa polskiego ( Jasna Góra Hetmanka of the Polish Knights), and itemized all the occasions when she guided Poland to military victory. Zaleski’s Virgin was a surprisingly secular character, concerned above all with matters of worldly (mainly national) survival and glory. For example, he was convinced that Mary would continue to protect Poland, not because the Poles were especially virtuous but because “a

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nation cannot die if it has the Mother of God as its Queen. After all, that would be a shadow cast upon [Mary] herself.” Conversely, the Poles should worship Mary not so much because of her exalted spiritual status, but because their national welfare depended on the Virgin’s aid. “Who knows what our history would have been like without Jasna Góra,” he wrote, “without Mary as Queen, as our most mighty Guardian and Helper before God! Thus the instinct for self-preservation alone, the national instinct, commands us to stay close to Jasna Góra.”41 Despite the Hetmanka’s popularity, however, there are some undeniable tensions between this metaphor and orthodox Catholic doctrine. Militant Marianism transposed Mary’s position as intercessor onto a geopolitical stage, as the image of her beseeching God for mercy on behalf of her children was recast as a much more active participation in human affairs. She became a Joan of Arc figure leading men into battle for God and fatherland, not merely watching over Poland but forcefully “vanquishing the enemy’s stubborn fury” in order to preserve the country’s independence and domestic well-being. She was characterized, above all, by power—so much so that her most enthusiastic followers did indeed flirt with polytheism. But ultimately Mary’s power was mediated, both by Catholic theology and by the specifics of her national mythology. The tensions between the Hetmanka and the Intercessor flowed together in the idea of Mary as Queen of Poland; like a female monarch, she displayed power yet could not fully embody power. Her role was depicted as unique, and her authority was cast in a way that preserved the primacy of masculine agency (insofar as God and Jesus, the Father and Son, were envisioned as male, which they virtually always were in the Polish Catholic tradition). Nonetheless, this side of Polish Marianism was rich with possibilities for heterodox implications (for both Catholic doctrine and gender norms). The Hetmanka imagery pushed the limits of both doctrinal clarity and gendered expectations, and the official teachings of the Church barely provided enough theological cover to keep her within those boundaries. In September 1883 a popular preacher (and convert from Judaism) named Izaak Isakowicz explained why Catholics worshipped Mary, and in doing so he illustrated how theology kept the Hetmanka in check. First, he said, she was given special honors because God himself had selected her above all other humans to play a key role in the salvation of mankind. Second, she was worthy of respect because of “her great power, her high authority, her exceptional position in the Church. . . . As the Mother of God she participates in the power of God, in God’s Majesty.”42 The verb here, participates (ma udział), was repeated formulaically in Catholic texts as a way of drawing a very subtle distinction: Mary did not actually possess such power autonomously, but only drew upon the power that rightfully belongs exclusively to God. Primate Wyszyński probably did more than anyone to propagate the Marian cult in postwar Poland, but even he

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backed away from some of the doctrinally slippery implications of the Hetmanka metaphor. Shortly after his elevation to the primacy he issued a pastoral letter in which he called Poland “the chosen nation of the Mother of God.” He elaborated, however: “The Lord, through Mary, has often brought shame to our enemies. The history of the Nation has recorded a whole series of grand victories that are attributed to her intercession. . . . Not with their own strength did our kings and hetmans conquer, but with the strength of God, who awoke in their hearts a living respect for Mary.”43 In this presentation Mary did not possess her own autonomous power over earthly affairs; the actual agency belonged with God, and the Virgin appeared as Mediatrix. In 1991 Archbishop Stanisław Nowak went a step further and even suggested that the whole notion of Mary as “queen” was problematic if not clearly understood. During a ceremony at which an icon of the Virgin in the town of Łowicz was crowned, the archbishop told the assembled faithful, “As we place the diadem on the temple of Jesus and Mary, we want to indicate a particular kind of reign of Mary [swoisty rodzaj królowania Maryji].” Without in any way questioning her majesty, Nowak said, it was important to remember that Mary’s primary function was as “the Servant of the Lord,” and within God’s Kingdom she acted as “our intercessor and our comfort.”44 Nowak’s reference to “comfort” leads us to the second major visage of Mary: in addition to being the Hetmanka, she is also the Exemplar. This depiction of the Virgin was more intimate, more personal, and above all more feminine. Mary the Exemplar did not reign mightily on a grand historical stage; instead she established a tight maternal bond with individual believers and showed them the path to virtue. During the interwar years Father Ireneusz Kmiecik traveled to parishes all over Poland delivering his dramatic sermons at parish retreats, and in one of these he offered an interesting twist on the Marian story. He began with a familiar narrative that enumerated all of the Virgin’s victories on behalf of the nation, culminating as usual with her recent aid during the Polish-Bolshevik War. Then, demonstrating his oratorical virtuosity, he smoothly brought all these grand historical stories down to the level of each individual believer. The whole point of Mary’s ongoing patronage, he said, was to remind the faithful of her presence and inspire them to lead better lives by following her example. “Our obligation as children of Mary,” he said, “is to copy her virtues, examples of which she so wonderfully provided during her life. . . . In particular, we must copy her in humility, silence, modesty, and above all in purity and in the love of God and humanity.”45 From inspiring tales of victory on the battlefield, Kmiecik brought his audience down to a set of individual virtues that were more maternal than martial. In the nineteenth century there was a tendency all over Europe to paint Mary in softer tones, focusing on her role as feminine exemplar and pushing to the

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background her royal status and power. This shift eventually took place in Poland as well, albeit a bit later than elsewhere. A wave of Marian apparitions, most famously at La Salette (1846), Lourdes (1858), Marpingen (1876), and Fatima (1917), all exemplify this trend. On these occasions Mary appeared as a compassionate young mother rather than a mighty queen, offering a message of comfort and hope as well as a level of intimacy that worshippers were less likely to feel when revering their queen.46 Częstochowa, with its imagery of Marian might, continued to dominate Polish pilgrimages (about 200,000 people were visiting Jasna Góra every year by the turn of the century), but a compelling alternative emerged in 1877, when the Virgin appeared to Justyna Szafryńska, age thirteen, and Barbara Samulowska, age twelve, in the village of Gietrzwałd, Warmia (perhaps not coincidentally a region with a large Protestant population at the time). The girls reported that the Virgin spoke to them in Polish and that she foretold an end to the persecution of the Polish Church, so there was obviously a political element to this event, but its main impact was devotional. An estimated 300,000 people visited the site while the apparitions were occurring ( June 27 to September 16), and thousands would arrive every Sunday for decades to come in order to pray the rosary and take water from a well that had been blessed by Mary during one of her appearances. And Gietrzwałd was not unique; by 1910 Father Franciszek Walczyński could list four hundred locations in Poland that had become local Marian pilgrimage sites.47 As Polish priests tried to give meaning to this explosion of popular Marianism, they usually downplayed the supernatural events associated with these shrines. Most priests were made nervous by the sight of thousands of pilgrims, often with no clerical supervision, engaging in unsanctioned devotional activities—the possibilities for heterodoxy and public disorder were too great. Instead of focusing on the healings or the prophesies, sermons at the time tended to highlight Mary’s role as an exemplar for good Catholic behavior. The Mary of the nineteenth-century apparitions was held up as a model and as an inspiration for personal devotion, with her professed fondness for the rosary, her choice of children as recipients of her revelations, her use of local rather than state languages (Polish rather than German at Gietrzwałd, Bigourdan rather than French at Lourdes), and above all her own humble and welcoming appearance. Though Mary remained Queen of Heaven and of Poland, the clergy also began propagating a more personal Marian cult with a humanized and more intimate mother. This Mary corresponded to the stereotypical femininity of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth—not the distant, powerful, sometimes vengeful queen, but the long-suffering, patient, and emotional mother. The particular virtues exemplified by Mary varied, but several common themes emerged. Father Józef Krukowski listed the “Seven Virtues of Mary” in 1882: humility, generosity, purity, patience, temperance, fervor in the service of

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God, and love.48 Father Walczyński’s 1910 Marian textbook devoted a separate chapter to each of the virtues he believed the Virgin exemplified: humility (pokora), meekness (łagodność), obedience, suffering (umartwienia), a love of prayer, modesty, good intentions, and persistence in virtue.49 A mid-twentiethcentury sermon offered an expansion of this list, starting with a misquotation that is very common in Marian sermons. John 13:15 actually relates the words of Jesus, but in many sermons they are associated with his mother: Speak to us, Dearest Mother. “I have given you an example, so that what I have done, so might you do” ( John 13:15). I have given you an example by my humility, so that you too will cast away all pride and have a humble heart. I gave you an example, so that you young men and women, by my immaculate virginity and innocence, will value above all else that pearl of all virtue, and guard your body and soul against all imaginable sins. I gave you an example, you Christian married couples, by faithfully carrying out all the duties of my position, so that as a wife and husband, you too will observe the duties of your positions and with a faithful conscience carry out all their heavy obligations. I gave you all an example by entirely subordinating myself to the will of God, so that you too will always patiently carry your crosses, and through all of life’s capricious turns of fate obey God and persist in service to the Most High.50 The most obvious virtue embodied by Mary was chastity, insofar as Church doctrine affirms that Mary was not only pure when she conceived Jesus, but remained so throughout her life. (Galatians 1:19 refers to “James, the brother of the Lord,” but in Catholic exegesis this familial relationship is described as a metaphor.)51 Twentieth-century homiletic literature tended to favor natalism rather than lifelong virginity, so Mary’s chastity is often discussed as a representation of the more general virtues of humility and simplicity. One midcentury sermon made this point by offering a fanciful description of Mary’s personal life: [Mary’s] clothing and household appliances were always clean and orderly, and moreover they were extremely simple. Whatever she had to do, she did on time, never hastily or feverishly, and what she had to do today, she never put off until tomorrow. When she set to work, she focused all her undivided attention on her work, and even then she did not cease to live entirely through God. She was incapable of absentmindedness and never overlooked anything.52 As Prior Paweł Kosiak of Jasna Góra taught, “[Mary] represents the cluster of ‘small’ but indispensable virtues in social life: hard work, frugality, contentiousness,

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justice, patience, humility, persistence, and trustworthiness.”53 This message was captured visually in a postwar edition of Rycerz Niepokalanej showing Mary carrying a bucket of water while Joseph and Jesus were laboring at their carpentry business. The caption read, “The Holy Family at Work.”54 All of these presentations offered a domestic (and domesticated) picture of Mary that encouraged modesty and humility. Mary was also held up as a model of obedience. When confronted in Luke 1:38 by the Archangel Gabriel with the prospect of bearing a child who would be the Son of God, Mary’s response was submissive: “Behold, I am the handmaiden of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” Priests often presented this short passage as evidence that Mary consented to her place in God’s plan, because within a Catholic theology it is important to emphasize that she had free will and was not just a victim of fate. Her act of acquiescence in this particular case is depicted as momentous; as Father Stagraczyński put it in 1908, “Without that word [of assent] we would be, to this very hour, like the pagans sitting in the darkness and the shadow of death. Without that word we would still be, to this moment, the slaves of hell. . . . The Son of Mary would not have become an offering for the sins of the world if the Mother had not permitted that her Son be voluntarily sacrificed.”55 Even as she demonstrated her free will, however, she was simultaneously showing obedience to God’s command, and that made her an excellent example. As the lay author Maria Friedrich-Brzozowska wrote in 1939, the Virgin’s acceptance of God’s will exemplified the most “noble” form of obedience: the absolute acceptance of a command, “knowing neither negation nor the question ‘why.’”56 Stagraczyński used this point to bring the grand story of Mary’s salvific role down to an individual level (with his typical loving tone): “The whole life of Mary . . . is one chain of humble obedience. . . . Certainly none of you Christian mothers will ever manage to be known for such a demonstration of humility.”57 Though the virtue of obedience was usually cast as applicable to both men and women, it was hard to avoid the gendered implications of Mary’s story. Father Paweł Kosiak made this point in 1980 when he said that because Mary “follows faithfully the will of God in all things,” she is “for women of all times the ideal model of a maiden [dziewica], a fiancée, a wife, and a mother.”58 In Catholic writing it has long been common to contrast the obedience of Mary with the defiance of Eve; in fact Mary is often depicted as the anti-Eve, the woman without sin who negated the actions of the woman who virtually invented sin.59 This gave a Catholic spin on two familiar models of femininity: the rebellious object of desire and the submissive wife or mother. Writing in 1919 Father Nikodem Cieszyński described the “horrible anger of the Creator” at Eve’s monstrous transgression, and then explained, “As a woman sinned, so must a woman cooperate in the conquest of sinful guilt. As a sinful maternal ancestor [pramatka]

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erred in desiring pleasure and delight, the Most Holy Daughter had to do penance for her with the greatest pain and suffering.”60 Primate Wyszyński identified the woman of desire as a failed first draft of femininity, and Mary as the perfected revision. In his prison diary in 1954 he wrote, “God started the first act of bringing happiness to humanity with a man, from whose side he brought forth a woman. Everything was ruined by sin. The second time He started with a woman, from whom he brought forth a new Adam. This time things went well. The first Adam was defeated through a woman; the second Adam was victorious through a woman: Eve and Mary.”61 The continued resonance of this dichotomy was even reflected in a 1995 hit song by the Polish pop star Edyta Górniak entitled “To nie ja” (It Wasn’t Me). The lyrics insist, “It wasn’t me who was Eve; It wasn’t me who stole heaven. . . . Don’t blame me, it wasn’t me.”62 The whole range of Mary’s example of femininity was captured by Stagraczyński: “As a pure and immaculate Virgin, she served the equally pure Joseph. In humility she accepted motherhood according to the Word of God. With faith she accepted everything according to the will of God. As a faithful handmaiden she gave service to the Divine Infant, fed him, nursed him, cared for him.”63 This was a long way from the Hetmanka; this was a thoroughly domesticated Mary who showed obedience to her husband and was nurturing to her child. Motherhood, not surprisingly, is probably the most essential aspect of the Marian example. By stressing the Virgin’s maternal role, preachers could bring her most fully into the intimacy of personal life, making her intercession seem more likely and her example more relevant. In Redemptoris Mater John Paul II wrote, “Mary’s mediation is intimately linked with her motherhood. It possesses a specifically maternal character.”64 A century earlier the same point was made by Father Walczyński, who explained that God was too frightening and distant to most Christians, so He granted us a less intimidating mediator, a way to approach Him through “that which is weakest and sweetest on earth, that is, a woman-mother.”65 A 1933 essay in Rycerz Niepokalanej cast this in individual terms by explaining the author’s own journey to Mary: I did not have the courage to ask the Lord Jesus for a particular absolution that I needed. The idea that I had sinned and I would bear the just punishment took from me all confidence in the possible results of a request. But the natural instinct of a child guided me to the Most Holy Mother. “After all, she is my Mother,” I thought, “A mother will certainly listen to her child. . . . If you were not my Mother, but only a Lady [Pani] and a Queen, I would not ask you for absolution, because I do not deserve it. But one can ask a mother everything. . . . You should not look at my merits, as Jesus would; He is the Judge, but you are our Mother!”66

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The 1925 platform of the Christian Democratic Party stated that the goal of every Polish woman should be to “fulfill the lofty role of Mother-Citizen.”67 The Virgin’s maternal model was used to discuss the four S’s of the feminine ideal: service, sacrifice, suffering, and selflessness. Primate Wyszyński summarized this perspective succinctly when he said that Mary “reminds all the centuries that the task of a mother is to become a servant of man [stać na służbie człowieka, in the sense of ‘humanity’].”68 The concept of maternal service was given particular emphasis in the sermons of Karol Wojtyła, who said in a sermon in 1978, just before his election to the papacy: A woman in a marriage is the handmaiden of life, just as Mary was. . . . A woman is the handmaiden of life, that is her calling. That’s what femininity leads to. And that service, expressed in the whole structure of femininity, that service to which femininity develops, must find support in service. If nowadays there is so much talk about the problem of responsibility for life, particularly for conceived life, unborn life, we must seek the roots of this problem in the crisis of masculinity, in the crumbling of masculinity. Masculinity, which has its natural tendency toward domination, must be balanced by a willingness to serve. If those two tendencies are not joined, if they are not balanced in man, if the man does not want to be a servant, he will destroy femininity, destroy the handmaiden—the handmaiden of the Lord, the handmaiden of life.”69 In this passage he seemed to be urging everyone to balance the masculinity and femininity that was within every person, but in other texts he more clearly correlated gender and sex by advocating a social model that granted men and women distinct functions. In Redemptoris Mater he wrote, “Women, by looking to Mary, find in her the secret of living their femininity with dignity and of achieving their own true advancement.” They could achieve this, he continued, by cultivating their greatest virtues: “the self-offering totality of love; the strength that is capable of bearing the greatest sorrows; limitless fidelity and tireless devotion to work; the ability to combine penetrating intuition with words of support and encouragement.”70 Wojtyła’s image of the long-suffering, infinitely patient and faithful mother points us toward a label used since at least the nineteenth century to describe the Polish feminine ideal: the Matka-Polka (Mother-Pole).71 This cultural figure was characterized by her ability to stand astride the public and private realms: she had a powerful and sometimes domineering nature, but was defined by her service to others; she played a vital role in the life of the nation, but she remained entirely within the domestic sphere. The Matka-Polka stayed behind while her

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husband and sons went off to fight for Poland, but she nonetheless helped to preserve the nation by educating the young in a patriotic spirit and by sustaining home and hearth for the fatherland’s warriors. She was characterized by a limitless ability to endure suffering, as she gave up her own pleasures and dreams so that the nation might survive. In times of peace the Matka-Polka would carry on alone (the absent, presumably dead father was the corresponding cultural trope), and it was only because of her that the nation endured. In nineteenthcentury Western Europe we see the emergence of the bourgeois housewife as an ideal; her Polish counterpart was equally domestic but much more entangled in both nationalist and religious meaning. The Matka-Polka model reminds us that Catholic femininity is more complicated than a focus on chastity, modesty, and obedience would suggest. Many observers have noted that Poles today—men and women alike—seem to be more attached to a sharp division of gender roles than their peers in Western Europe or the United States. Even today feminism remains marginal in Poland, and the slogans of women’s emancipation resonate weakly.72 There are many reasons for this, but one piece of the puzzle is that Matka-Polka Marianism has long provided a framework (albeit an awkward and limiting one) for expressing a sort of female empowerment, and surrendering this for the uncertain promise of feminism is not easy. Perhaps the first person to clearly exemplify both the constraints and the possibilities of the Matka-Polka model was Eleonora Ziemięcka, the nineteenth-century editor and philosopher we have encountered many times in this book. She was simultaneously an early advocate for women’s rights (perhaps the first in Poland) and a proponent of a strict dualism of genders. She accepted the conventional idea that men dominated the spheres of “action” and “thought,” but she considered women to be endowed by God with the “mystery of love” in a way that made them vital to humanity’s salvation.73 On one level this mandate was in keeping with a strictly domestic femininity. In 1842 Ziemięcka published a collection of aphorisms about women, all of which stressed the need for women to cultivate their spiritual, emotional, and compassionate side. One such saying affirmed, “Woman has a mission to be an angel on earth, and she ought to always be aware of that mission; all the rays of society’s moral life have their origin in her heart; their effectiveness depends on her.”74 Ziemięcka was relegating women to the home, but at the same time she was endowing them with a profound spiritual purpose, one with ramifications that far transcended the domestic sphere. The ambiguous consequences of this move were evident in her 1846 book, Thoughts on Women: One half of society is in mortal danger; the other is not. God in his infinite wisdom wanted women to restore that which men tore asunder. . . . Women have retained that fortitude which does not belong exclusively

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to any sex but which men have lost because of their decadence and their doubting minds. Women have over their husbands the same sort of rule that a strong soul always has over a weak mind. . . . Men have abandoned the path they were assigned. It is up to women to accept this duty and carry it out within the domestic hearth with the divine sobriety of a wife and mother. . . . Providence has called forth women to save society.75 Even as she enclosed women within “the domestic hearth” she was charging them with the mission of “saving society.” Moreover, she believed that women should be able to “act in the fields of knowledge and fine arts” on an equal basis with men. “Why should she confine the divine spirit within herself,” Ziemięcka asked, “and with self-deprecating humility burrow into a domestic shelter, exclusively between the kitchen and the children?” Because women “stand closer to the cradle of national memory” they should feel entitled to “raise their voices on social issues.”76 Ziemięcka herself was hardly confined to the home—she was, after all, the founder and editor of the most important Polish-language Catholic periodical of her day—so both by her personal example and in her writing she was setting a standard for female public engagement, even as she insisted that women must leave the public sphere to men. In this regard Ziemięcka was a representative figure at a time when the public realm was increasingly imagined as both a liberal and a distinctly masculine space, and when religion was being relegated to a private, domestic, feminine space.77 As Catholics struggled to resist the Church’s expulsion from public affairs, this gendered bifurcation painted women as the natural defenders of the faith. As a priest from Kraków put it in 1883, “[Women] will never be apathetic about the cause of the Church and the cause of the Nation; they are better than men, because they will never separate the Church from the nation.”78 One thing that liberal and conservative writers of the nineteenth century agreed on was that women could be relied upon to be devout.79 With faith and femininity on one side of the barricade, and liberalism and masculinity on the other, the Church appeared to have a natural constituency. But there was a problem here: even as ultramontane Catholics called upon women to support Christianity against the onslaught of a secular, liberal, and masculine modernity, there was no space in Catholicism for challenging the norms of familial obedience and hierarchy. To be sure, the Church did offer some unique opportunities for women in the religious orders, and these expanded dramatically in the nineteenth century (in Poland just as in the rest of Europe). In 1800 women constituted only 20 percent of those in religious orders in the Polish territories; a century later nuns made up 80 percent of the total. During the second half of the nineteenth century the population of the Kingdom doubled, while the number of women in

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religious orders increased twenty-fold. Further south, in Galicia, there was one nun for every 3,200 Catholics in 1860, but one for every 1,050 by 1905. In contrast, during the same period the density of male religious declined from 1:1,200 to 1:2,600.80 Despite this growth, however, only a small minority of Catholic women would take religious vows; for the rest the challenge was to formulate a type of female public engagement (on behalf of the Church, of course) that kept women safely subordinated to a husband or father figure. The Matka-Polka provided just such a resolution because she kept the nation and the faith alive without ever leaving the manor house. Like Ziemięcka, she defended and even sustained the nation without in any way undermining her proper place as a dutiful wife and mother. The ambiguities and tensions seen in Ziemięcka’s work were shaped by the political and cultural context of the mid-nineteenth century, but similar themes have persisted in Polish Catholicism to this day. As late as the 1960s a young Karol Wojtyła could still express reservations about granting legal equality to women. In theory he considered emancipation to be “fundamentally justified, as long as it is based on the inner maturity and autonomy of women. . . . Without this, the external emancipation of women will be destructive, not constructive.” Rather than a hasty and superficial legal affirmation of equality, Wojtyła preferred to delineate a properly feminine place for women in the public realm, and this, he believed, had to be based on the “specific inner structure” that made each woman “a person of the heart, a person of intuition.” More specifically it had to be grounded in their divinely established role as mothers: Now we come to the deepest function of every woman, namely: motherhood. Mother—that means she who gives birth; and to give birth, that means to educate. She educates from intuition, she educates from the heart. Those are great means for education. She educates children, and not only children, she educates man above all. That is a basic task. She educates man. It is not without meaning that Christ, the son of God—God, a man—gave himself for education to a woman-mother. Like Ziemięcka more than a century earlier, Wojtyła was simultaneously confining women to domesticity and granting that role increased public significance. In his mind this involved no contradiction at all, though he did recognize that many men had a very low opinion of a mother’s duties. His frustration over this inspired him to assume the voice of a woman: “It is necessary to train [man] to understand that I am a person. It is necessary to train him to understand that I can be a mother. And it is necessary to train him to understand that motherhood is greatness.” Even though Wojtyła did admit that a woman was a person—a

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claim he believed still needed to be defended in 1962—he nonetheless concluded that “she needs support, greater maturity and inner autonomy” before she could manage the extraordinary demands of full legal emancipation.81 By focusing on the special contribution that women supposedly made to the salvation of men, it was possible to carve out a space for women in the public sphere that did not challenge the existing models of domesticity. In a 1970 memo from the Warsaw Archdiocese, priests were told to instruct their parishioners that “the divine fate of a woman goes far beyond her purely natural function as a wife and a mother,” but that as women left the domestic realm they needed to remember that they were still fulfilling “the role of helper.” They were needed in that capacity because “men are not self-sufficient in realizing God’s tasks. Only the help of a woman allows him, together with her, to realize those tasks.” Christian women should look to Mary’s example, this author concluded, in order to “defend men against themselves, against their weakness.”82 This sexual division of spiritual labor took on special meaning when juxtaposed against the Catholic critique of modernity. The Episcopate issued a pastoral letter in 1971 in which they offered Marian femininity as an antidote to the hypermasculinity of the modern world: The modern world needs mothers. Humanity today longs for mothers more than ever. In the era of technical “miracles,” cosmic voyages, and trips to the moon, a miracle of the heart is needed. Steel machines are not enough for living people; the living have had enough of clenched fists, hatred, and war, and they long for a maternal heart, for love, for gentle kindness, and mutual respect. We have all begun to long for a “humane” person [“ludzki” człowiek] and a “humane” culture. We want humanity to count for more than machines and production, so that everyone will recognize that the most important thing is man himself. . . . When the values of the feminine spirit are lacking in the family, in the nation, in the world, “humanity” becomes “inhumane.” . . . The modern world, which is increasingly pagan, casts the shadow of its thought on women too. [The world] does not want to see in her the mother of life; it is enough that she is a woman. . . . The danger of the de-naturalization of woman is arising. . . . Therefore, it is necessary today to return the dignity of the mother and motherhood. Women everywhere, in every aspect of life—in the family, in professional, social, and public work—should act in a manner appropriate to themselves, in a maternal manner [po macierzyńsku]. We need to give mothers back to the children, who have a right to existence, to a home, to love. We need to restore to the Nation, to the Church, to the human family the recognition that they have a mother. Perhaps then this inhuman world of steel

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will be transformed into a truly humane world, governed by love, not threats and fear.83 The metaphor of steel was repeated often in pastoral letters by the Episcopate, as a symbol not merely of technology, but of a whole range of (masculine) modern sins. The role of women was to soften that steel. As Wyszyński put it, what the world needed was “an understanding heart, a delicate will, a truly maternal embrace for the frightened children of God. The world needs today more sensitive hearts than hard steel.”84 Nearly all these texts glorified motherhood in an attempt to counter any suggestion that the Church was restraining or belittling women. That argument was made more difficult, however, by the fact that these appeals to service were generally paired with another keyword: sacrifice. The Mater Dolorosa was a powerful motif in twentieth-century Polish Catholicism, in part because portraits of the grieving Matka-Polka so easily echoed pietas of an earlier time. As we saw in chapter 2, Polish Catholicism in the nineteenth century and early twentieth was marked by the conviction that earthly existence was a vale of tears that we had to endure until we attained eternal life. This style of bleak, otherworldly religiosity provided the context for many discussions of Mary. Speaking in Poznań Cathedral during the Lenten season of 1917, Father Nikodem Cieszyński told the assembled faithful, “It would be no exaggeration to say that Mary, together with her Son, was co-crucified [współukrzyżowana została].” This metaphor was appropriate not merely because Mary had to watch her son die, he clarified, but because she fully understood that God was being crucified. Yet despite all this anguish, Mary stood patiently by. Cieszyński used this story to shame the women in his audience: “Look upon mount Golgotha! Mary is a better mother than you are, yet she suffers; Jesus is a better son than your sons, yet he suffers and dies. For in suffering, in pain, in blood and tears is woven the omniscient judgment of God, is laid the foundation under the glorious future of the nation, under the radiant fate of society.”85 Father Kmiecik brought the Mater Dolorosa even closer to the women in his audience, chastising them for complaining about the cruelty and brutality of men: You cry about your bitter fate, but who is responsible for that, if not you yourselves? You have bad husbands because you got married thoughtlessly, as quickly as you could, and then, instead of trying to win over the heart of your husband with kindness and politeness, you repelled him (and perhaps continue to repel him) from you and from the home. Why do so many husbands escape from the home to the tavern? They were not drunks when they got married; they only became drunks later. Why? Listen, women! Because when they return home after work from

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the shop, the office, or the field, instead of meeting with your lovely smile, your kind words, they only hear shouts, bangs, and crashes, and often receive undeserved mockery or sulking and grimaces. Many of you—admit it—have a special gift for extinguishing even the most fervent love in your husbands.86 The sermons by Cieszyński and Kmiecik were not artifacts of a previous era; the idea that women were meant to suffer, and that feminine virtue (modeled by Mary) entailed bearing that pain gracefully and without complaint, remains typical in the homiletic literature in Poland. A sermon entitled “For Mothers,” distributed by the Warsaw Archdiocese to local priests in 1951, said, “The image of the Divine Suffering Mother [Matka Boża Bolesna] gives us strength to carry the crosses that penetrate most deeply into the hearts of an orphaned widow [osierocona wdowa] or an unhappy wife! Teach us to suffer, but in silence; teach us to love, even in suffering!”87 Another sermon, this one from 1959, blamed the suffering of abused women on the women themselves by linking spousal brutality to the use of birth control and the avoidance of large families. In a tortured bit of reasoning, this anonymous author claimed that a man has a moral duty to his wife and children, “but if the woman agrees to artificially avoid or abort the fruits of intercourse, she frees the husband from all duties, increases his egoism and rapaciousness, to which she herself is sacrificed.”88 Biblioteka Kaznodziejska published a sermon by Father Kazimierz Pielatowski in 1962 in which he told the story of a self-sacrificing mother who was committed to her family above all else. The biggest challenge to this family, tragically, was her alcoholic husband. The heroic woman did not break under pressure, but a) managed to pull herself together and mobilize all her strength in the battle with misfortune. It would have been easier to leave her drunkard-husband. But she understood that he needed her and she was responsible for him. b) She understood that her powers were too weak to carry this yoke. Therefore she sought help in God with frequent, fervent prayer. . . . Thanks to such an attitude, this honorable mother did not accept the disorganization of family life. She saved the atmosphere of peace in the family and preserved mutual goodwill.89 The Matka-Polka and the Mater Dolorosa combined in discussions of abortion. The clergy in Poland was merely following Rome’s lead in prohibiting the termination of pregnancy regardless of the circumstances, but the way they defended this position was inflected by the cult of the suffering mother. In 1952 the Episcopate issued a joint letter on the feast day of the Divine Motherhood of the Most Holy Virgin Mary. Given the context of high Stalinism, the bishops’

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uncompromising denunciation of what they called the state’s “war against the child” was surprisingly bold, but in this text the primary message was directed against Polish women. The bishops explained why they rejected the idea that an exception to the ban on abortion was appropriate when the mother’s life was at stake: A mother giving birth is great in her sacrifice and devotion, just like a soldier who, at the price of his shed blood, gives birth to victory and peace, just like the wheat that, falling on the ground, “if it does not die, remains alone, yet if it dies, brings great fruit” ( John 12:24). . . . And can one take seriously to heart the “instruction” that one must save the life of a mother at the cost of the child, since her life is more valuable? What mother can guarantee that her child will not be a great man? How many simple, honest women gave life to great scholars, inventors, geniuses, heroes, saints? . . . Just as the entire human race is obliged by God vis-àvis the entire world, so the Polish Nation is obliged by God vis-à-vis its fatherland to fill it up with people. . . . Families that are devoted and obedient to God give their nation numerous healthy descendents— those who will build the might of the nation, those who will live and work for the fatherland, who will defend its borders.90 A stereotype has emerged in recent decades among some Catholic intellectuals that characterizes Marianism as a “backward” devotion, one tied to peasant superstitions, a thinly disguised polytheism, extreme right-wing politics, and elderly women with mohair berets.91 With Father Tadeusz Rydzyk calling his station Radio Maryja and using mass pilgrimages to Częstochowa as a primary form of mobilization, it has become somewhat harder for those with more liberal or progressive views to participate in this aspect of the Catholic religious tradition. It would be all too easy to blame Radio Maryja for this development, but in fact it has much deeper origins. As early as 1962 a contributor to the Catholic monthly Więź, Juliusz Eska, launched a major debate by reporting that reformers in the West were criticizing Marianism based on the mistaken idea that it did not fit well with the modern world. He considered such people to be “religiously uncultivated and theologically unprepared,” but he did recognize that the Church had to find a way to reach them and bring them back into the fold. This could be accomplished, he argued, by dropping some of the metaphors that belonged to an earlier historical era—in particular, the idea that Mary was Queen of Poland. As Eska wrote, “I fear that, particularly for the younger generation, this title either contains no concrete religious content, and in this regard is rather empty, or mainly generates a certain feeling of distance, an impenetrable ‘otherness’ of Mary in relation to ‘ordinary people.’ Moreover,

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because of its entirely secular connotation, it evokes a feeling of something historically anachronistic, distant, and traditional.”92 Father Jan Popiel responded to Eska in the pages of Tygodnik Powszechny. He accepted that there were problems with Marian devotion as practiced in contemporary Poland: it was marked by “devout exaggerations and theological imprecision . . . superficial sentimentalism, a distinctive maudlin language, syrupy songs, ugly figurines and pictures.” Reform was necessary lest “the Mother of God and Man become for many people in Poland, particularly for intellectuals and young people, harder to understand, more distant and alien.” This would be a tragedy, he wrote, because “there is no true Catholicism without a sincere Marian cult” and, even more important, because the Virgin represents the principle of femininity within Christianity. Popiel made explicit the often unstated parallel: “Christ, being a real person, was also a man in the fullest sense of that term, and Mary is a woman with all her physical and psychological characteristics.” As such Popiel considered her the best vehicle for accessing the mystical nature of Catholicism, because “a woman is by nature more sentimental than men, and at the same time she engages and bonds more fully with other people. A religious experience of the Mother of God protects the modern Catholic from over-intellectualizing, from becoming internally frigid or arid.” So, concluded Popiel, as Catholics worked to “fight the distortions” in Marianism, they needed to respect the “real value that penetrates throughout [Poland’s] national culture.”93 This launched an exchange of polemical articles that continued for the rest of the year. Jerzy Narbutt reminded readers that the correct slogan was “Through Mary to Jesus,” and he chastised those who seemed to forget about this, “emphasizing rather the first part of that sentence (through Mary) and forgetting about the second, which has had the result that their religiosity is exclusively Marian.” He worried about an emerging divisive trend that was pushing the formal rituals of the Church toward an exclusively Christological perspective, while popular and unsanctioned devotion was becoming increasingly Marian.94 In another article Bohdan Cywiński lamented, “The young generation of the Catholic intelligentsia has become isolated from [Marianism], has pushed it to the side.” This was dangerous, because “Catholicism without the cult of the Mother of God is something incomplete, orphaned.” Cywiński advocated a renewed focus on the “humanity of Mary,” on “all that unites her, the Queen of the World, with all people.” This would allow people to look upon her as a “model” without being “frightened by her grandeur.”95 There were some attempts to put these suggestions into practice. Prior Paweł Kosiak of Jasna Góra wrote a sermon in 1963 in which he acknowledged, “[Mary] lived in entirely different conditions than we do, in a different society with entirely different ideals, views, and interests.” Accepting these differences,

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he said, should allow us to cut through the purely contextual aspects of Mary’s life and realize that she was “the Mother of all generations, present to everyone, contemporary to all times and a model of Christian manners.” Just like Jesus, Mary “is always new, fresh, and up-to-date; she ‘fits’ all times.”96 Perhaps the most eloquent attempt to modernize Mary came from Karol Wojtyła, then a young bishop in Kraków. In a 1966 sermon he used the familiar image of the Mater Dolorosa to transform Mary into the mother of the modern world. He began by asking his audience to imagine “Mary in tears . . . Mary suffering in maternal pain.” This might have seemed like an evocation of the familiar pieta, but in fact he was referring not to Mary’s grief over her son’s death, but to her labor pains at her son’s birth. This, he said, was an allegory for the current moment in history: We see that today’s world is also being born in pain similar to those births. Amidst labor pains, amidst the pains of its maternity, the contemporary Church is being born. There is a similarity between the one and the other. When we look upon that Mother, who became our Mother amidst the labor pains of Calvary, of the birth of humanity, of our birth, the birth of our Church—then we are reminded of all the suffering that comes with the birth of our new, modern world. . . . We, the Church in Poland, we bishops in Poland, we Christians in Poland feel acutely our participation in those labor pains of the new world, in which the Church must be born again as a Mother, similar to Mary beneath the cross.97 It was typical of Wojtyła to blend his imagery as he did here, sliding from labor pains to grief, from birth to death, and it is never entirely clear whether these mixed metaphors were just artifacts of a spoken sermon (Wojtyła rarely used notes in those days) or deliberate efforts at poetic association. In either case he deserves to be counted among the advocates for a new Polish Marianism because he probably did more than anyone else to bring the Virgin down to earth, to speak about her in a language that young people of the postwar generation could understand. He did so, however, not by merely updating her image; his Mary had become the patron saint of modernity. To be sure, Wojtyła did not go nearly as far as Pope Paul VI did in Marialis Cultus (1974), in which he held up the Virgin as a model of social activism and empowered femininity. The pope’s Mary appeared “not as a Mother exclusively concerned with her own divine Son, but rather as a woman whose action helped to strengthen the apostolic community’s faith in Christ (cf. John 2:1–12), and whose maternal role was extended and became universal on Calvary.”98 Nonetheless, in a Polish context Wojtyła’s more subtle revision of the Marian image was significant.

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It is significant that Marialis Cultus passed without any significant commentary in Poland. Most of the bishops there believed, as they wrote in a pastoral letter in 1965, that the Polish style of Marianism was entirely in keeping with the “proper, modern trends,” and that there was an “amazing parallel between the spirit and the teachings of the Council” and the existing forms of Marian devotion.99 Bishop Ignacy Tokarczuk was more direct in attacking “those intellectuals and theoreticians” who said that concentrating on Mary distracted people from the worship of Christ.100 Perhaps buoyed by the election of John Paul II, the Polish Episcopate expressed a sense of vindication in 1978 because of their traditional models of Marian femininity. “There was a time,” the bishops wrote, “when our religiosity was accused of being backward, not in the spirit of the Council [niesoborowa], traditional, too emotional, too Marian.” But now, they continued with pride, the Western world was plagued with secularization and moral decay, whereas in Poland the Church remained strong, and that was proof that “our Marianism” had been right all along.101 When focusing on Mary’s status as a model for proper Polish Catholic femininity, it would seem that we have come a long way from the mighty Hetmanka who leads armies into battle to smite Poland’s foes. In practice, however, these two visages of the Virgin often overlapped, held together by the ideology of apocalyptic, conspiratorial struggle described in the previous three chapters. Even as Marianism in most other Catholic countries moved steadily away from militancy and toward domesticity, in Poland the Virgin remained on the battlefield. In part this was due to the way the country’s primary pilgrimage site (Częstochowa) underscored the Virgin’s militant side, in contrast to France’s Lourdes, Mexico’s Guadalupe, or Portugal’s Fatima. More important, the broader ideology of apocalyptic struggle proved to be much more resilient in Poland, in part because the Polish Church was indeed engaged in a battle with an oppressive communist state, and in part because the Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic-Liberal phantasm had extraordinarily deep roots along the Vistula. As Stagraczyński explained a century ago, the Queen of Poland participates in battles on many fronts: It is the privilege of a queen to declare war. And Mary takes advantage of that privilege. And she is fighting a war. Against whom? Against the devil . . . against our greed, which she helps us fight; against temptation, which she teaches us to resist; against sin, which is her implacable enemy. She is fighting a war. Against whom? Against death, which strangles us; against sickness, which is visited upon us, against pestilence, which plagues us. She is fighting a war. Against whom? Against the infidels, who have no faith; against the heretics, who have lost their faith; against the enemies of God and the Church. . . . She fought with

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Kordecki at Jasna Góra against the Swedish invasion, she fought with Sobieski at Vienna against the Turkish incursion—that invisible knight [rycerka, an odd feminization along the lines of Hetmanka] took part in bloody assaults, in order to bring victory to the side of those who called upon her name, and she scattered the Muslim pagans, breaking them forever.102 Stagraczyński’s Mary was undeniably militant, but she slid easily back and forth between actual military campaigns and metaphorical ones. This rhetorical flexibility can be found in countless Marian texts throughout the twentieth century, particularly during the communist era. Perhaps the most momentous occasion in the history of modern Polish Marianism came on August 26, 1956, when tens of thousands of the faithful gathered in Częstochowa to commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of King Jan Kazimierz’s oath of allegiance to the Virgin. Wyszyński was closely involved in planning this event, even though he was still in prison (he would be released later that year). He had written in his diary the previous December, “The defense of Jasna Góra today is the defense of the Christian spirit of the Nation, a defense of family culture, a defense of the union between the human heart and the Divine Heart, a defense of the free breath of the person who wants to believe more in God than in men.”103 To propagate this reconceptualization of Mary’s leadership in a way that was both militant and focused on personal morality, Wyszyński composed a new oath that would update the seventeenth-century pledge for the modern era. It was first recited on that August day in 1956, and even now it serves as the culmination of many Częstochowa pilgrimages.104 Those taking the new pledge affirmed their dedication to the “lofty mission of the Nation, cleansed in the waters of Holy Baptism,” and recognized Mary as their “Patron and as the Queen of the Polish nation.” Keen not to make the mistake that had led to Poland’s eighteenthcentury collapse—the alleged abandonment of Mary by prepartition Poles— the faithful promised, “[We will] do everything in our power to ensure that Poland will truly be Your and Your Son’s Kingdom, entirely subordinate to Your rule in our personal, family, national, and social life.” More specifically, Wyszyński’s pledge promised to oppose abortion and divorce, to “stand on guard before the domestic hearth,” to defend children “against godlessness and corruption,” and to struggle against hatred, injustice, violence, exploitation, hunger, homelessness, laziness, waste, and drunkenness.105 Here was Wyszyński’s theology of the nation spun together with the tradition of Polish Marianism. The fate of the baptized nation was presented here as the central value, and Poland was described as a vehicle for both collective and individual salvation. Mary “rules” over this nation in order to protect it from harm and to uphold its moral righteousness and religious fidelity. As Father Franciszek Blachnicki of Katowice

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put it in 1957, “Mary must become the genuine Queen of our Nation, but she wants to start her reign with the family.”106 A few years later, when celebrating the millennium of Polish Christianity in 1966, the bishops prepared a special ceremony for May 3, Poland’s national day prior to 1939 and after 1989. In every parish the faithful were instructed to pray: We wish today, together, to secure the holy Church for its second Millennium [in Poland], and to transmit the intact treasury of the faith to the young generations of Poland. We will place ourselves in the unfailing hands of the Most Holy Mary, whose protection and aid we have experienced throughout history. . . . From this moment, Our most wonderful Mother and Queen of Poland, consider us Poles, as a Nation, to be entirely your property, to be a tool in your hands on behalf of the holy Church, to which we are indebted for the light of faith, the strength of the cross, spiritual unity and the peace of God. Do with us as you wish.107 Cardinal Wyszyński characterized this act of submission as an expression of “the will of the entire baptized Nation” (not, that is, a commitment by particular individuals).108 The imagery here was undeniably that of the Hetmanka, though once again the homiletic use of the pledge turned back to personal morality. As explained a few years later in a pastoral letter, virtue and national defense could be depicted as two sides of the same coin, with Mary holding everything together: There are many [moral dangers], and it is enough to recall the danger posed to our faith by the imposition of atheism and secularism by force, as well as by an increasing religious apathy; the danger to social love caused by the spreading of hatred in everyday life; the danger to the purity of customs and Christian morality by the spreading of demoralization; the danger to sobriety and frugality by the plague of alcoholism and smoking. . . . In this ever-stronger sea of faithlessness, hatred, debauchery, and drunkenness, God’s gift of freedom might drown, if we place the chains of slavery upon ourselves, made powerless as we are by moral weakness and a lack of will [bezwola]. After all, a decline in morality was once one of the causes of the lack of political freedom. Thus we cannot be silent! We must cry out, remind, and warn, so that the Nation will resist faithlessness, hatred, immorality, and drunkenness [tym czterem “nie”—niewiara, nienawiść, niemoralność, nietrzeźwość] with a strong faith, social love, pure customs and watchful sobriety. . . .

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Giving ourselves up to Her maternal slavery of love, we are obliged to persist in the active love of our neighbor and in attaining that which is necessary to preserve moral order in our Fatherland.109 The political and moral spheres thus overlapped, and it was precisely this linkage that gave Polish Marianism its power. By working so smoothly on two different registers, Marianism provided a vocabulary for Polish Catholics to conflate the political struggle against communism and the moral struggle against the decadence of modern life. This is what the Episcopate meant when they wrote in 1976, “The defense of Jasna Góra had for the Fatherland, then, not only a military, but above all a spiritual significance.”110 Establishing this link between a military victory and a spiritual accomplishment facilitated comparison between the Church leaders of the seventeenth century and those of the twentieth, as in a 1973 letter in which the bishops compared themselves to the famous prior of Jasna Góra. “Prior Kordecki bravely undertook the victorious defense of Jasna Góra in order to save the Church and the Fatherland,” they wrote. “[Likewise,] the Polish bishops undertook the defense of the ‘Jasna Góra spirit of the Nation,’ that which is most holy for us: faith, morality, the union with the Church of Christ and Mary.”111 Later that same year the bishops acknowledged that some might be skeptical about comparing the near collapse of the country in the 1650s and the drudgery of the mid-1970s: You might say, “but, after all, no ‘deluge’ is pouring in on us today.” Yet what is the collapse of the family and the conspiracy against unborn life, the plague of alcoholism and demoralization? What is our addiction to luxury and our social discord? Is all that not a “deluge” a hundred times more dangerous than the one from Sweden was? Is not the enemy this time rampaging even more, insofar as it lies within ourselves? . . . Prior Kordecki and the Jasna Góra garrison fought in defense of the faith, and they were ready to defend it to their last breath. Today, however, sometimes without even much resistance from us, the faith is disappearing in our hearts, in our family homes, in our social and public relations. . . . The secularized style of life, the secular family, education and schooling, secular art and culture, press, books, film and television—everything is already secular! It all points to a vision of a Nation without a soul, without ideas, without strength, without moral restraints—in other words, without a future.112 The reference to a “conspiracy” in this passage points to an undercurrent that is barely visible in these texts. As we have seen, the interwar stories about plots against God and the fatherland remained persuasive to many Catholics throughout

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the communist era. And Mary’s role as Hetmanka was vital in this context, as when the bishops offered the following prayer to the Virgin in 1976: Immaculate Virgin Mary, the Victorious Lady of Jasna Góra, and the Queen of Poland! Urged on by the call of our bishops to a defense of the Nation, and particularly of the young generation of Poles, against the destructive influence of demoralization, we stand before You and Your Son, begging for the necessary strength and grace.  .  .  . We are weighted down by enough guilt and inequity, but we still sense some sort of secret plan for the moral destruction of our Nation. That perverse plan, which utilizes the schools and various forms of propaganda, has as its objective the uprooting of healthy moral principles in the entire young generation of Poles. Mary of Jasna Góra, just as we did six hundred years ago, so now we look for aid in You. Help us defend ourselves, the youth, and the entire Nation against demoralization. Help us vanquish sin.113 To be sure, it is entirely possible to advocate a Marianism that breaks entirely from this worldview of militancy and conspiracy theories. Nonetheless, what links virtually all Polish Marian devotion, even when articulated by such diametrically opposed figures as Pope John Paul II and Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, is the way both men approach the Virgin through the nation and the nation through the Virgin. Whether focused on the militant Mary who vanquishes Poland’s foes and protects her chosen people, or the more nurturing Virgin Mother who provides an example for personal behavior and an intercessor for intimate problems, Marian worship is almost invariably perceived in Poland as a national devotion. Even the model of femininity she exemplifies is remarkably similar to the MatkaPolka, with her emphasis on service, selflessness, sacrifice, and suffering. Mary remains the mighty Hetmanka of Poland, even as she is deployed to encourage conservative forms of femininity, and conversely, challenges to those norms are seen as attacks on the nation. Even today Mary is called upon to save Poland from its foes, be they Swedes, Turks, Russians, or the temptations of modernity.

Conclusion

To allow a bad thought about a neighbor to enter our minds without certainty is called a false suspicion. Suspicion is usually a venial sin; it becomes a mortal sin if the evil that we suspect is great. —Father Józef Krukowski, Nauki katechizmowe, 1880 Dialogue is more than just a conversation, than a mere exchange of words, than a mere exchange of ideas; dialogue is a certain attitude, a human attitude, which flows from the fact that man is a person, and simultaneously a being called to co-existence with other social beings. Dialogue is an ability not only to speak, but also to listen, it is an ability to speak in a way that will enable others to listen and understand, it is an ability to listen so that one can understand others. . . . One might say that the principle of dialogue is the opposite of the principle of struggle. —Archbishop Karol Cardinal Wojtyła, “Kościół epoki dialogu” (Kraków, December 25, 1965), in Kazania, 1965

In early 2002 the mass-market weekly Wprost ran a article entitled “A Schism in the Church,” in which the author described a growing gap separating the Roman Catholic Church from what the author called “the Toruń Catholic Church,” referring to the city where Radio Maryja is based. The magazine’s cover captured the tone of the piece with an illustration showing Father Tadeusz Rydzyk strangling Primate Józef Glemp with a microphone cable. In good tabloid fashion the editors included a quiz to help readers determine which Church they belonged to (see table on page 392).1 This provocative article elicited just what the editors must have intended: denunciations and controversy. One right-wing politician said that the piece “has all the characteristics of an anti-Catholic campaign, slandering both Radio Maryja and Father Rydzyk, and in general all Catholics in Poland.”2 Archbishop Tadeusz Gocłowski called the article “brutal” and said, “It is not permitted to behave in that way [tak nie wolno]. It is not permitted to write that the Church is divided into the Toruń Church and some other sort of Church.” Gocłowski defended this stance, however, by arguing that Rydzyk’s group was merely a 391

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The Toruń Catholic Church

The Roman Catholic Church

How do you greet each other?

May Jesus Christ and Mary, May Jesus Christ be Praised! Forever Virgin, be praised!

To whom, primarily, do you pray?

Mary

Jesus Christ, the Holy Trinity, the Saints and the Blessed

Who is an authority figure for you?

The pope, Father Rydzyk

The pope, the bishops, the priests

With whom do you have contact in your parish?

The office of Radio Maryja The Parish Council

Which Catholic periodicals Nasz Dziennik, Niedziela do you read?

Tygodnik Powszechny, Gość Niedzielny

How do you treat other faiths?

Only Catholicism is a true faith.

God speaks through various faiths.

With which organization do you identify

The Radio Maryja Family

Catholic Action

Who and what causes the most harm to Poland?

Jews, global capitalism, people of other faiths, secularization

Those who do not follow the Ten Commandments and the law

Do you support EU integration

No

Yes

What should serve as the guide for state and administrative institutions?

Religious commandments

The law, the Constitution

“pathological phenomenon on the organism of the Church,” and not a breakaway sect.3 Unfortunately for Gocłowski the pathology seems to have metastasized. No matter how much the Church leaders talk about unity, the animosity between supporters and opponents of Radio Maryja has grown stronger and stronger. In 2007 a prominent center-right politician, Jan Rokita, gave a speech at the Sanctuary of Divine Mercy in Łagiewniki (near Kraków) during which he proclaimed, “Let the Church of Łagiewniki defeat the Church of Toruń!” Again there were protests (including one from the mayor of Toruń, who considered it an insult for his city to be equated with Radio Maryja), but Rokita succeeded in coining the term Łagiewniki Church to characterize those Catholics opposed to Rydzyk.4

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If there are indeed two branches of Polish Catholicism today, which better exemplifies the traditions of the Church, and which is in a better position to determine the Church’s future? There is no doubt that Radio Maryja represents a minority of Poland’s practicing Catholics, and an even smaller minority of the overall population. Only 17 percent of Poles surveyed in mid-2008 said that they ever listened to Radio Maryja, and of these 33 percent said that they did not like what they heard. Of all Poles, 46 percent had a negative opinion of the station and only 18 percent praised it.5 In another poll only 14 percent considered Father Rydzyk trustworthy and 66 percent said he was untrustworthy—figures suggesting that he is the most unpopular public figure in postcommunist Poland.6 On the other hand, as one moves away from the fringes of the Catholic population (those who identify as Catholic but attend mass sporadically) and toward the most devout, support for the “Toruń Church” increases steadily. Among priests, about 50 percent listen to Radio Maryja and read Nasz Dziennik regularly, though this figure has been declining in recent years. In contrast, only 14 percent read Tygodnik Powszechny.7 The Episcopate is divided: there are enough bishops in Rydzyk’s corner to ensure that he is not effectively restrained, but also enough opponents to generate occasional official rebukes of his extremism. If we move from survey data to history, it is hard to deny that Rydzyk embodies several trends with deep roots in Polish Catholicism. His emphatic Marianism is probably more in line with the Polish homiletic tradition than is the Christological approach of the Catholic intelligentsia. On the devotional level Rydzyk promotes frequent recitation of the rosary, just as the Virgin herself commanded during her nineteenth-century apparitions. The conspiracy theories and conflict-centered worldview propagated on Radio Maryja would have been standard fare for any interwar Catholic periodical, and the anti-Semitic commentators on the station would have found a reasonably large audience among Polish Catholics throughout most of the twentieth century (though perhaps not in the nineteenth or twenty-first). The political parties endorsed or sponsored by Rydzyk are the heirs of either the Christian Democrats or the National Democrats, and his desire for a close bond between Church and state would have been welcomed by Primates Hlond and Wyszyński. So we are left with a dilemma: a large majority of Polish Catholics find Radio Maryja distasteful or even repugnant, yet it has at least as much claim on the Catholic tradition as its opponents. How, then, do we adjudicate the purported rivalry between the Toruń Church and the Łagiewniki Church? As the alert reader will have already guessed, that question is a red herring. It is profoundly misleading to even pose a question like “Which group most accurately represents Polish Catholicism?” or “Does Polish Catholicism necessarily generate xenophobic nationalism?” Underneath questions of that sort is a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between ideas and ideologies on

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the one hand, and social groups and individuals on the other. This confusion inspires people to ask how a religion of peace could lead a person to commit an act of violence, how a progressive ideology could draw people to authoritarian politics, how conservative beliefs could coexist with transgressive personal behavior, and so on. Each of these pseudo-problems is based on the same mistake: the tendency to speak about intellectual formations (theologies, ideologies, schools of thought, etc.) as if they were coherent, cohesive, and above all capable of agency. Once we recognize that people participate in ideological formations, appropriate theological concepts, and utilize doctrinal claims, we realize that every large ism is a vehicle for thought and action, but never a cause. Instead of pursuing quixotic quests to determine the relationship between Christianity and imperialism, Islam and terrorism, Protestantism and capitalism, we should ask how the broad cluster of ideas, terms, concepts, and assertions that constitute each religious formation has been deployed in such a way as to justify each outcome (as well as, in most cases, their opposites). The act of will and agency comes from the person doing the deploying, not the religion being deployed. The statement “Islam promotes terrorism” is not merely factually wrong, but based on an all too common form of muddled thinking. The theological, intellectual, and cultural formation called Islam cannot cause anything, because it is not a historical agent in its own right. Instead, it is a way of structuring one’s understanding of the world, one that makes certain ideas and actions more difficult to formulate and others easier, but not one that can independently compel any particular views or behaviors. Understanding this point allows us to comprehend the role played by Catholicism in Poland’s past and present. If Jerzy Robert Nowak or Henryk Jankowski want to spread anti-Semitic vitriol, they can find the building blocks to do so within a Polish Catholic framework, but that does not mean that Catholicism caused their hatreds and fears. We cannot say that Nowak and Jankowski represent Catholicism, but by the same token, neither can we say that they are distorting Catholicism.8 Both claims are not so much wrong as meaningless, because each presumes that Catholicism is a fixed object with one and only one authentic form, one and only one set of behavioral and ideological consequences. To be sure, most devout Catholics would say that their religion does in fact have only one correct form, but the scholar seeking understanding rather than normative prescriptions must recognize that this is not the case. Both the Łagiewniki Church and the Toruń Church are possible within the boundaries of Polish Catholicism as constituted today. Neither is more genuinely Catholic than the other because both participate in legacies developed over the past couple of centuries. Countless individuals have drawn upon the terms and concepts of the Catholic repertoire in order to characterize the modern world and propose responses to it, but those ideas and suppositions are more like the chord progressions of a jazz standard than the

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note-by-note score of a classical symphony. Words like God, love, sin, evil, Church, and person can be combined and recombined in a multitude of ways, and though the possibilities are not limitless, they are numerous enough to include an extraordinarily wide variety of viewpoints. To stick with the musical metaphor, some jazz improvisations might sound a bit discordant, and others might be so far off as to be entirely atonal. Or, to use a very different formulation, if X is a religion and Y is either an action or belief, then X → Y is usually false, but Y → ~X is often true. It is rare to identify an action or belief that every self-described Catholic performs or accepts, but it is possible to do something or believe something that would lead one to shed the label Catholic. To assert that any ideological or theological formation can be appropriated in many different ways is not the same as saying that there are no constraints whatsoever. As we have seen repeatedly in this book, there are definite boundaries surrounding Polish Catholicism. Denying the sacred nature of the Church, advocating a congregationalist model of ecclesiastical authority, removing religion entirely from the public sphere, refusing to grant the nation some sort of theological significance, explicitly scorning the universal duty to love one’s neighbor and enemy—all these things would be hard to sustain within a Polish Catholic frame of reference. Some have pushed against these limits (particularly the last one), but to do so leads to a creative tension, an incongruity or inconsistency that more thoughtful Catholics usually try to resolve, resulting in an expansion or reformulation of the overall framework. Studying Catholic intellectual history consists of tracking these shifts in the limits of the possible and the imaginable. In this book I have explored several instances of these pressures and tensions. In chapter 7 I observed that many interwar Catholics made sense of modern politics and economics by imagining an apocalyptic struggle between the Kingdom of God and the Masonic-Bolshevik-Jewish-Liberal conspiracy. This, however, drew them perilously close to a violation of the “Love your neighbor and enemy” commandment. Some Catholics at the time resorted to rhetorical gymnastics in order to retain a commitment to love, while others erected a notional wall between themselves and secular anti-Semites, who faced no such restraints. Interwar Catholicism undeniably had space for racialist anti-Semitism, but racialist anti-Semitism did not derive from Catholicism. Moreover, combining the two was always awkward and unstable. Along similar lines, we saw in chapter 10 that it was possible to build an aggressive misogyny out of Polish Marianism, one so extreme as to demand that women entirely subordinate themselves to men, endure the abuse of violent husbands, and be willing to sacrifice their own lives in childbirth. At the same time, however, we have also seen that these views were not a natural or inevitable consequence of Polish Marianism, which in other hands and in other contexts could be used to construct relatively empowering models of femininity.

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If we look again at Wprost’s table dividing Catholicism into two camps, we see that all the items listed in both columns fall within the complex and multifaceted traditions of Polish Catholicism. Some might wish for a Catholicism that would, once postulated, generate one and only one set of predictable beliefs among all believers, but that will never be. At the same time, though homogeneity is unattainable, it is possible to close off some options, to push some ideas and actions outside the bounds of acceptable belief and behavior. Several such closures have been noted in this book. For example, a mere century ago one could still find many Catholics in Poland who would insist that democracy was incompatible with their faith; now almost two-thirds of the Polish clergy identify democracy as the best of all possible political systems, and slightly more than half are satisfied with the form of liberal parliamentary democracy now existing in their country—figures that are actually higher than among the general population.9 Among those who remain skeptical about democratic politics, few indeed would openly argue that it is irreconcilable with Catholicism. What some might label political correctness (poprawność polityczna; the phrase is popular in Poland too) is really just the common practice of establishing that something is incompatible with a particular ideology or identity. This form of cultural realignment is usually glacially slow, but it is nonetheless omnipresent and inexorable. Historians can rarely pinpoint a precise moment when a particular idea slides into the realm of the unspeakable, but that does not mean that such transformations happen only on a macrocosmic scale that is impervious to human intervention. Those Catholics in Poland today who argue that xenophobia should be recognized as a violation of the commandment to love one’s neighbor are attempting to generate just such a reconfiguration of the limits of the acceptable. That a significant minority of Catholics still find it quite easy to state that the Bolshevik-Masonic-JewishLiberal conspiracy is plotting Poland’s demise indicates that this reconfiguration has not yet been completed. That a solid majority considers such claims outrageous indicates that the process is well under way.

NOTES

Introduction 1. When recited by girls, the reference to the eagle was changed to “a white lily.” 2. Quoted in Kubik, The Power of Symbols, 113. 3. Borowik and Doktór, Pluralizm religijny i moralny w Polsce, 23. For more on the demography and sociology of religion in contemporary Poland, see Borowik, Procesy; Borowik and Doktór, Pluralizm religijny i moralny w Polsce; Ciupak, Katolicyzm ludowy w Polsce; Koseła, Polak i katolik; Piotrowski, Na przełomie stuleci; Zdaniewicz and Zembrzuski, Kościół i religijność Polaków; Zdaniewicz and Adamczuk, Praktyki; Zdaniewicz, Religijność. 4. Quoted in Kubik, The Power of Symbols, 252. 5. On the many pitfalls of reflexively equating “Polish” and “Catholic,” see Bjork, “Beyond the Polak-Katolik”; Neither German nor Pole. 6. Kłoczowski, A History of Polish Christianity, 108; Krasicki, Zarys dziejów powstania, 137. 7. Kłoczowski, A History of Polish Christianity, 100. 8. The full text of the Warsaw Confederation of 1573 is reprinted in Olszer, For Your Freedom and Ours, 131–33. On the seventeenth century, see Maag, The Reformation; Tazbir, Historia Kościoła katolickiego; Tazbir, Reformacja w Polsce; Tazbir, Reformacja, Kontrreformacja: Teter, Jews and Heretics. 9. Cywiński, Ogniem próbowane, 47–48. 10. Tazbir, Reformacja w Polsce; Tazbir, Szlachta i teologowie. 11. Kłoczowski, Chrześcijaństwo w Polsce, 88. 12. Jerzy Skowronek, “Adam Jerzy Czartoryski: Od indyferentyzmu do etyczno-pragmatycznej religijności arystokraty w pierwszej połowie XIX w.,” in Piotrowski, Na przełomie stuleci, 117. 13. Hanna Dylągowa, “Na przełomie oświecenia i romantyzmu (1795–1831),” in Chrześcijaństwo w Polsce, Kłoczowski, 649–50. 14. Vincent Chrypiński, “The Catholic Church in Poland, 1944–1989,” in Ramet, Catholicism and Politics, 125. 15. Hayes, Nationalism, 164–76. For a more recent example of this approach, see Santiago, “From ‘Civil Religion’ to Nationalism.” 16. Mosse, Confronting the Nation, 1–2. 17. Jabłońska-Deptuła, Czyż może historia popłynąć, 84. 18. Bernhard, The Origins of Democratization in Poland, 136. For a slightly different presentation of this argument, see Benyskiewicz, Naród bez państwa, 210. 19. Jan Paweł Woronicz, “Odezwa przy objęciu administracyi biskupstwa i dyecezyi krakowskiej” (Kraków, June 29, 1815), in Kazania, 341–43. 20. On Potocki, and on religious affairs during the era of the Congress Kingdom more generally, see Barańska, Między Warszawą, Petersburgiem i Rzymem; Dylągowa, Duchowieństwo 397

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21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

Note s to Pag e s 8 – 1 3 katolickie, 72–75; Dylągowa, “Duchowieństwo przed powstaniem listopadowym,” 13–27; Kipa, Studia i Szkice Historyczne, 123–33; Ewa Jabłońska-Deptuła and Piotr Skarbek, “W dobie między powstaniami (1832–1864),” in Kłoczowski, Chrześcijaństwo w Polsce, 200– 203; Jan Ziółek, “Stosunki kościelno-państwowe w konstytucyjnym Królestwie Polskim,” in Piotrowski, Na przełomie stuleci, 107–16. On the period immediately preceding this, see Walachowicz, Kościół katolicki. Gregory XVI, Cum Primum, paragraph 3. Jabłońska-Deptuła and Skarbek, “W dobie między powstaniami,” 441, 445. Józef Glemp, “Stajemy dziś w prawdzie przed Bogiem,” May 20, 2000, www.spp.episkopat. pl/kazania/000520.htm. Szajkowski, Next to God, Poland, 2. Some examples of communist-era anticlerical historiography include Królik, Hierarchia Kościelna; Markiewicz, Państwo i Kościół w Polsce; Mysłek, Kościół katolicki. Marian Krzaklewski, Speech before the National Assembly of Poland, February 25, 1997, www.niedziela.pl/zaw/archiwalne_strony_www/n10/n10_krza.htm. As quoted in M. Ł., “Pytania o wiarę,” Rzeczpospolita, January 17, 1998, http://new-arch. rp.pl/artykul/154752_Pytania_o_wiare.html. Adam Lepa, “Katolickie mass media w społeczeństwie posttotalitarnym,” in Piotrowski, Na przełomie stuleci, 557–74. Tadeusz Doktór, “Postawy moralne: Ochrona ludzkiego życia, podatki i pomoc bliźniemu,” in Borowik and Doktór, Pluralizm religijny i moralny w Polsce, 256; “Polacy mniej krwiożerczy,” Gazeta Wyborcza, March 23, 2007, 5. Tadeusz Doktór, “Moralne konsekwencje religijności: Polska na tle innych krajów,” in Borowik and Doktór, Pluralizm religijny i moralny w Polsce, 317. For further evidence of gaps between Polish behavior and Catholic teachings, see Jaroslaw Osowski “Stolica wierzy wybiórczo,” Gazeta Stołeczna, March 31, 2007. Szczepańska, O wychowaniu seksualnym młodzieży, 5. Wenzel, Osobista znajomość, 3. Szymon Hołownia, “Gorzkie żale,” Newsweek Polska, April 1, 2007, 26. Zdaniewicz and Adamczuk, Praktyki. See also Borowik and Doktór, Pluralizm religijny i moralny w Polsce, 135; Janusz Mariański, “Niedzielne i Wielkanocne praktyki religijne,” in Zdaniewicz, Religijność Polaków, 86–88. Studies based on self-reporting show figures that are 10 to 15 percent higher than the annual count. Zbigniew Nosowski, “Czy Polska jest (jeszcze) krajem katolickim?,” Więź 5 (May 2003), www.wiez.com.pl/index.php?s=miesiecznik_opis&;id=71&t=750. Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz, 162. Semeneńko, O miłości ojczyzny, 15. Katechizm dla dorosłych, 23. The original argument is in Durkheim, Elementary Forms. Several excellent books on that topic exist already. In English, see Kłoczowski, A History of Polish Christianity, which is a revised and extended translation of Kłoczowski’s Dzieje Chrześcijaństwa Polskiego. Among the many broad Polish-language surveys of Catholic institutional history, see Dudek, Państwo i Kościół; Górski, Zarys dziejów katolicyzmu polskiego; Kłoczowski, Müllerowa, and Skarbek, Zarys dziejów Kościoła katolickiego w Polsce; Kumor, Ustrój i organizacja Kościoła polskiego; Tazbir, Historia Kościoła katolickiego; Wilk, Episkopat Kościoła katolickiego; Żaryn, Dzieje Kościoła. For an approach oriented more toward the study of popular religious culture, see Olszewski, Polska kultura religijna; Olszewski, “Stan i perspektywy badań.” In recent years many scholars have problematized the very concept of religion by approaching it as a constantly shifting site of practice rather than an ontologically independent object of study. The same skepticism and historicization can be usefully applied in the case of particular religious traditions. See Asad, Genealogies of Religion; Campany, “On the Very Idea of Religions”; Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions.

Note s to Pag e s 1 4 – 1 9

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42. The approach here is akin to what the Germans call Begriffsgeschichte. Reinhart Koselleck, the founder of this approach, expressed his ideas in Futures Past and The Practice of Conceptual History. For more on Begriffsgeschichte, see Hampsher-Monk, Tilmans, and Van Vree, History of Concepts; H. Lehmann and Richter, The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts; Richter, The History of Political and Social Concepts. The classic example of Begriffsgeschichte in practice is Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. 43. Wharman, “God and the Enlightenment,” 7. 44. One of the earliest examples of the secularization thesis came in Nichols, The History of Christianity. More systematic articulations of the narrative can be found in Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind; Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World; Gilbert, Religion and Society; D. Martin, General Theory of Secularization. 45. For Britain the questioning began as early as McLeod, Class and Religion, and culminated in Gill, The Myth of the Empty Church. More recently Callum Brown has stressed that in Britain there was no long-term or inevitable process of secularization, but rather a highly contingent and rapid cultural change in the 1960s. Brown also emphasizes that this recent development has been sharply gendered. See Brown, “Secularization,” 393–418. In other European contexts, see M. L. Anderson, “The Limits of Secularization”; Blackbourn, Marpingen; Davie, Religion in Modern Europe; Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred; Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion; Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution; Sperber, Popular Catholicism. For some attempts to take this story beyond Europe, see Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Hadden and Shupe, Secularization and Fundamentalism Reconsidered; Hanson, Religion and Politics; Jenkins, The Next Christendom; Peterson and Walhof, The Invention of Religion; Van der Veer, Conversion to Modernities; van der Veer and Lehmann, Nation and Religion. On some of the broader implications of this argument for scholars, see the essays by Cox, “Provincializing Christendom”; Kselman, “Challenging Dechristianization”; Williamson, “A Religious Sonderweg?”; Howard, “A ‘Religious Turn’ in Modern European Historiography?”: Thayer, “What’s New in the History of Christianity?” For an attempt to revive (and revise) the secularization thesis, see Casanova, Public Religions. For a critical assessment of secularization in Poland, see Pomian-Srzednicki, Religious Change in Contemporary Poland. 46. The dichotomy between “Eastern” and “Western” nationalism can be seen in Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood; Greenfeld, Nationalism; Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism; Plamenatz, “Two Types of Nationalism.”

Chapter 1 1. Krukowski, Nauki katechizmowe, 141. 2. J. K. S., “Synteza,” Pielgrzym 4 (February 1845): 120, emphasis in the original. 3. Stefan Wyszyński, “Wezwanie do pracy wielkopostnej w duchu Ślubowań Jasnogórskich” (Gniezno-Warsaw, Easter 1958), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 300. 4. Rajmund Koperski (Warsaw), “Jaki Kościół założył Chrystus?,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 77, no. 5 (1966): 265. 5. “Stenogram kazania bpa. I. Tokarczuka wygłoszonego w dniu 20.10.1974 r. w miejscowości Hoczew pow. Bieszczadzki podczas wizytacji kanonicznej,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/255, pp. 96–97. 6. Catechism of 1992, 541–42, 763. The internal quotations in this passage are from Lumen gentium. 7. Jan Janiszewski, “Znaczenie i ważność mszy świętej,” Pielgrzym 2 (November 1843): 162–63. 8. “Pojęcie katolickie o kościele widzialnym,” Pielgrzym 4 ( July 1845): 36, 55. 9. Michał Rutkowski, “Kościół święty katolicki,” Posiew 3, no. 38 (1908): 595–96. 10. Catechism of 1992, 35.

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11. Krukowski, Nauki katechizmowe, 137. 12. Jan Puzyna, “List Pasterski” (February 17, 1895), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, Listy biskupów polskich z lat 1728–1927 (uncatalogued). 13. Wałęga, List pasterski w sprawie ludowej, 5–9. 14. Wałęga, Przemowa na zakończenie kongresu, 19. 15. Tomasz Dąbrowski, “Kazanie na niedzielę II po Wielkiejnocy,” in Kazania, 156. 16. On Stojałowski, see Kudłaszyk, Katolicka myśl społeczno-polityczna, 89–150; Kudłaszyk, Ksiądz Stanisław Stojałowski; Pałach, Ksiądz Stanisław Stojałowski; Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village, 117–24; Turowski, Historia Ruchu Chrześcijańsko-Demokratycznego w Polsce, 29–61. 17. Stojałowski, Nasze stosunki, 36–38, emphasis in the original. 18. Stojałowski, Liberalna blaga, 4, 19. 19. Chotkowski, Wiec katolicki, 545–50, 558. 20. [Stojałowski], Słowo chłopskie, iv–v, 14–15, 23, emphasis in the original. 21. Stojałowski, “Duchowieństwo i lud,” Dzwon 4, no. 1 (1895), in Kudłaszyk, Katolicka myśl, 99. 22. Stojałowski, Nie pójdziemy do Kanossy (1896), in Kudłaszyk, Katolicka myśl, 99. 23. See, for example, his election pamphlet from 1907: Stojałowski, W obronie prawdy, 15–16. 24. On Szech, see Gajewski, Wysłouch; Zygmunt Poniatowski, “Antoni Szech (I. Wysłouch) i modernizm katolicki w Polsce,” in Keller and Poniatowski, Studia o modernistach katolickich, 169–236. 25. Szech claimed that he left on his own accord; his superiors insisted that he was expelled. See Szech, Dlaczego? 26. Szech, Przyjdź Królestwo Twoje, 6, 17, 28. 27. Szech, O pracy katolickiej, 52. 28. Szech, Religia ludzkości, 11, 24. See also Szech, Wyjaśnienia, 33. 29. Szech, Wyjaśnienia, 5–6. 30. Gnatowski, Trochę o Szechu, 6. For a similar critique (one receiving the imprimatur), see Sokołowski, Czy Antoni Szech jest heretykiem? 31. On the Mariavites, see Blobaum, Rewolucja, 247–49; Krawczak, “Rewolucja 1905–1907”; Mazur, Mariawityzm w Polsce; Peterkiewicz, The Third Adam; Rybak, Mariawityzm. 32. As quoted in Peterkiewicz, The Third Adam, 10. 33. As quoted in ibid., 17. 34. Bogdalski, Wspomnienia, 385. 35. On the current activities of the Mariavites, see their website at www.mariawita.pl. On the Old Catholic Church, see Moss, The Old Catholic Movement; Pruter, History of the Old Catholic Church; Pruter and Melton, The Old Catholic Sourcebook. 36. Pius X, Tribus Circiter, paragraph 3. 37. “Dodatek do Paragraphus 13, caput II, Titulus I z statutów Synodu przemyskiego z r. 1902,” in Akta i Statuta, 37. 38. “Ewangelia na niedzielę siódmą po świątkach,” Posiew 3, no. 28 (1908): 433–34. 39. Oath against Modernism. 40. On the modernist crisis, see Marvin O’Connell, Critics on Trial; Keller and Poniatowski, Studia o modernistach katolickich. For an example of modernism in Western Europe, see Loisy, The Gospel and the Church. 41. Truszkowska was given the same honor in 1993. For more on Koźmiński, see Werner, O. Honorat Koźmiński. 42. Koźmiński, Prawda o “Maryawitach,” 13, 22. 43. Catechism of Trent, 108. 44. Wałęga, Przemowa na zakończenie kongresu maryańskiego, 20. 45. Wałęga, List pasterski o antyklerykalizmie, 10. 46. Wałęga, Przemowa na zakończenie kongresu maryańskiego, 22. 47. Krukowski, Nauki katechizmowe, 255–56.

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48. Raczkowski, List otwarty, 8. 49. Fijałkowski, List pasterski, 20. 50. Wojtyła, “Kościół a świat: Szacunek dla życia ludzkiego: Przemówienie do lekarzy na rozpoczęcie rekolekcji” (Kraków, March 22, 1964), in Kazania, 284. 51. “Stenogram kazania wygłoszonego w dn. 15.06.1980 r. o godz. 11,30 w parafii Tomaszów Lubelski przez biskupa Z. Kamińskiego,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu Spraw Wyznań, Stenogramy Kazań 1978–80, sygn. 125/214, p. 75. 52. Walczyński, Podręcznik do kazań, 15. This work bore an imprimatur from Bishop Leon Wałęga. 53. Catholics are required to take communion at least once a year, typically at Easter. Before the reforms of Vatican II this was a significant obligation, because one could receive the sacrament only after fasting and going to confession. Those requirements were relaxed after the 1960s, and weekly communion became much more common in most countries. 54. Aleksander Kakowski, “List pasterski do kapłanów archidiecezji warszawskiej” (April 12, 1936), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 502, teka I.4.3. 55. August Hlond, “O życiu parafjalnym. List pasterski” (Poznań, March 1, 1933), in Na straży sumienia narodu, 84, 91, 92. 56. Pius XI, Non Abbiamo Bisogno, paragraph 5. 57. Aleksander Kakowski, “List pasterski do kapłanów archidiecezji warszawskiej” (April 12, 1936), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne, sygn. 502, teka I.4.3, p. 15. 58. Hlond, “O życiu parafialnym” (Poznań, March 1, 1933), in Na straży sumienia narodu, 84, 91, 92. 59. J. K. “Monarchja Chrystusowa,” Przewodnik Katolicki 28, no. 19 (1922): 2. 60. See Kłoczowski and Müllerowa, “W dwudziestym stuleciu (1918–1980),” in Kłoczowski, Müllerowa, and Skarbek, Zarys dziejów Kościoła katolickiego w Polsce, 324–25. 61. Szymański, Akcja Katolicka, 8, 19, 42. 62. The lower figure comes from Kłoczowski, A History of Polish Christianity, 301. Kłoczowski himself offered an even lower number in an earlier work, identifying 1,847 clerical casualties (17.7 percent of the prewar total). Kłoczowski and Müllerowa, “Lata wojny i okupacji (1939– 1945),” in Chrześcijaństwo w Polsce, 569. The higher figure comes from Anna and Andrzej Anusz, Samotnie wśród wiernych. On the persecution of the Church during World War II, see Fijałkowski, List pasterski; Śmigiel, Kościół katolicki; Zieliński, Życie religijne pod okupacją. 63. Cywiński, Ogniem próbowane, 77. On clerical casualties during World War II, see also Dudek, Państwo i Kościół, 7; Kłoczowski and Müllerowa, “Lata wojny i okupacji (1939– 1945),” in Kłoczowski, Chrześcijaństwo w Polsce, 560–63. 64. Kersten, The Establishment of Communist Rule, 166. 65. See, particularly, Kenney, Rebuilding Poland. 66. On the Vatican’s response to the occupation of Poland during World War II, see Ćwikliński, “Misja nuncjusza Cortesiego”; Jelonek, Pius XII; Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 24–26; Waszkiewicz, Polityka Watykanu; Żaryn, Stolica Apostolska. 67. “Watykan a Polska VII: Przemówienia i listy: Ojciec Święty do Polaków IV,” Tygodnik Powszechny 2, no. 36 (1946): 6. This was from an eight-part series in Tygodnik Powszechny stretching from April 28 to June 30, 1946, in which the editors of the magazine defended the pope against the charge of passivity and apathy during World War II. 68. For a defense of Hlond’s stay abroad between 1939 and 1945, see Malej, Kardynał August Hlond, 26. On Sapieha’s experiences during the war, see Dobrzanowski, “Archidiecezja krakowska podczas okupacji niemieckiej.” 69. Wyszyński, “Do duchowieństwa diecezji na pierwszą niedzielę Adwentu” (Lublin, 1948), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 86–95, emphasis in the original. For more on Wyszyński, see Jasiński, Kardynał Stefan Wyszyński; Raina, Wyszyński; Romaniuk, Prymas; Romaniuk, Życie. 70. Wyszyński, “Przypomnienia duszpasterskie na rok 1951,” Wskazania Duszpasterskie 5 (1951), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 33.20, teka T.2.33, p. 3.

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71. “Ksiądz: Jaki?,” Tygodnik Powszechny 20, no. 50 (1966): 1–2. 72. Wyszyński, “Duchowieństwo polskie w obliczu potrzeb współczesnych” (1949), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 110. 73. “List Episkopatu Polski do kapłanów o społecznej kulturze kapłańskiej” (Warsaw, 1962), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 246, 248. 74. “Słowo pasterskie do kapłanów o niebezpieczeństwie zeświecczenia życia kapłańskiego” ( Jasna Góra, September 12, 1962), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 271–72. The bishops repeated all these concerns a few years later in “List Episkopatu Polski do kapłanów” (Wrocław, May 5, 1970), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 603. 75. Zdzisław Pijewski, “Informacja na temat świątecznych imprez kościelnych i wystąpień biskupów warszawskich oraz komentarzy dotyczących pobytu kardynała Wyszyńskiego na Synodzie Biskupów w Rzymie” (Warsaw, December 29, 1969), Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/106, p. 32. 76. Edmund Kędzierski, “Informacja dot. arcybiskupa Antoniego Baraniaka, ordynariusza Archidiecezji Poznańskiej” (Poznań, January 25, 1973), Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/185, 25. The communist authorities also suspected that international travel would undermine the conservatism of the Polish clergy, and starting in the 1960s they began to issue travel permits to priests in much greater numbers. Tischner discusses this policy change in Michnik, Tischner, and Żakowski, Między panem a plebanem, 220. 77. Jan Piwowarczyk, “Wierność wobec Kościoła,” Tygodnik Powszechny 3, no. 4 (1947): 1. 78. “Zmiany w katolicyzmie polskim (wyniki ankiety ‘Dlaczego wierzę, wątpię, odchodzę?’),” Tygodnik Powszechny 16, no. 27 (1962): 1, 6. 79. On the Second Vatican Council, see Alberigo and Komonchak, History of Vatican II; Bull, Vatican Politics; Greeley, The Catholic Revolution; Hastings, Modern Catholicism; Latourelle, Vatican II; McCarthy, The Catholic Tradition; Matthew O’Connell, Jossua, and Komonchak, The Reception of Vatican II; O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II; and Rynne, Vatican Council II. 80. “List Episkopatu Polski do duchowieństwa i wiernych przed wyjazdem na Sobór Watykański Drugi” (September 30, 1962), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 275. 81. “List pasterski Episkopatu Polski do wiernych po pierwszej sesji Soboru Watykańskiego Drugiego” (Warsaw, January 1963), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 283. Some scholars have argued—incorrectly, in my opinion—that Vatican II had little (if any) impact in Eastern Europe. Paul Blum, for example, writes that the Church in the communist bloc “was cut off from all developments in society and Church for some 40 years. It never lived through an aggiornamento, nor through any engagement of the laity, nor through any subsequent delusions. During all that time it had just two patterns: the procommunist Church and the persecuted/corrupted Church.” Blum, “The Catholic Church in Hungary,” 316. 82. Andrzej Bardecki, “W Rzymie przed soborem,” Tygodnik Powszechny 15, no. 4 (1961): 3. 83. Stefan Wilkanowicz, “Polscy katolicy o soborze,” Tygodnik Powszechny 15, no. 51 (1961): 3. 84. Ignacy Jeż, “Kościół został zreformowany przez ‘ducha Soboru,’” Katolicka Agencja Informacyjna, October 10, 2002, http://system.ekai.pl/kair/?screen=depesza&_scr_depesza_ id_depeszy=99008&_tw_DepeszeKlientaTable_0__search_plainfulltext=%22Ko%C5% 9Bci%C3%B3%C5%82+zosta%C5%82+zreformowany%22. 85. A. B., “‘II Sobór Watykański’ na KUL-u,” Tygodnik Powszechny 15, no. 37 (1961): 3. 86. Biskup Bolesław Kominek, “Postawa katolików wobec braci odłączonych,” Tygodnik Powszechny 15, no. 40 (1961): 1; Wyszyński, “List pasterski o społecznej krucjacie miłości” (Warsaw, 1967), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 541. 87. Aleksander Bystry (Poznań), “Odnowa posoborowa,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 77, no. 5 (1966): 261–64. 88. Julian Michalec (Wrocław), “Posłannictwo świeckich w Kościele,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 78 ( January 1967): 9, 14.

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89. Bohdan Cywiński and Stefan Wilkanowicz, “Czego oczekujemy od Soboru, i od samych siebie,” Tygodnik Powszechny 16, no. 17 (1962): 1. 90. “Ankieta Trwa,” Tygodnik Powszechny 15, no. 52 (1961): 2. 91. Jerzy Turowicz, “Być Chrześcijaninem,” Tygodnik Powszechny 16, no. 16 (1962): 1. 92. Turowicz, “Bilans pierwszej sesji,” Tygodnik Powszechny 16, no. 52 (1962): 4. 93. Turowicz, “Wstępny bilans Soboru,” Tygodnik Powszechny 20, no. 1 (1966): 2. 94. Turowicz, “Bilans pierwszej sesji,” Tygodnik Powszechny 16, no. 52 (1962): 1, 4. 95. Turowicz, “Być Chrześcijaninem,” 1, 2. 96. Turowicz, “Wstępny bilans Soboru,” Tygodnik Powszechny 20, 1 (1966): 1. 97. “Stenogram kazania wygłoszonego przez bpa. I Tokarczuka w czasie nabożeństwa w Siedleczce pow. Przeworsk w dniu 23.IV.73 r. o godz. 11:00,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/255, p. 65. 98. Lumen Gentium, chapter 2, paragraphs 9–17. 99. “Modlitwa do ducha św. w intencji Soboru,” Tygodnik Powszechny 16, no. 41 (1962): 1. 100. See, for example, Cornwell, The Pope in Winter. For a rare example of a critical portrayal of John Paul II within Poland, see Obirek, Przed Bogiem. More sympathetic biographies include Bujak and Rożek, Wojtyła; Skwarnicki, Jan Paweł II; Szulc, Pope John Paul II. For the pope’s own account of his life up to 1958, see John Paul II, Dar i tajemnica. For the period after 1958, see John Paul II, Wstańcie, chodźmy! 101. For Wojtyła, the Council itself appeared to be transformative. As late as 1961 he still argued that “the clergy have a different, more active role in the priesthood of Christ, because they are by the nature of their office called above all to perform the holy sacraments and particularly the Most Holy Sacrament, whereas the laity have in the priesthood of Christ a more passive role: they only receive the holy sacraments.” Wojtyła, “Myśli o laikacie,” Tygodnik Powszechny 15, no. 44 (1961): 1. 102. Wojtyła, “Do młodzieży akademickiej (1)” (Kraków, April 1962), in Kazania, 217. 103. Wojtyła, “Ingres Kardynała” (Kraków, July 9, 1967), in Kazania, 19–22. 104. Wojtyła, “Wielki Czwartek” (Kraków, March 23, 1978), in Kazania, 41. 105. Karol Wojtyła, “Uroczystość Chrystusa Króla” (Kraków, September 29, 1967), in Kazania, 131. 106. “List pasterski biskupów polskich po zakończeniu trzeciej sesji Soboru Watykańskiego Drugiego” (Warsaw, December 16, 1964), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 368–69. 107. Zdaniewicz and Adamczuk, Praktyki. The figure hit 15.4 percent in 1995 and has remained roughly steady since then. 108. The editors of these collections repeatedly chastised priests for copying sermons verbatim. For an early example see Redakcji, “O korzystaniu ze źródeł,” Nowa Bibljoteka Kaznodziejska 33, no. 18 (1927): inside front cover. The Warsaw Archdiocese sent out a less public reprimand in 1975: “Program duszpasterski,” Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, teka T.5. These complaints even made international news in 2008; see United Press International News Track, “Polish Priests Warned on Plagiarism,” www.upi.com/NewsTrack/ Top_News/2008/04/26/polish_priests_warned_on_plagiarism/4750. 109. On the size of the clergy throughout the postwar era, see Zbigniew Adamowicz and Alicja Wójcik, “Ludność Polski według wyznań,” in Jachmyk, Religia i kościół rzymskokatolicki, 25–26. 110. Mieczysław Pohl (Zbąszyń), “Posłuszeństwo: więź społeczna,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 71, no. 3 (1963): 100–101. 111. Henryk Zimny (Inowrocław), “Władza w Kościele,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 71, no. 1 (1963): 8. 112. Józef Anczarski (Gorzów), “Odpowiedzialność za losy Kościoła,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 71, no. 1 (1963): 10. 113. Waldemar Wojdecki (Warsaw), “Wprowadzenie do programu homiletycznego na rok 1980/81,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 105, no. 5 (1980): 261. 114. Tadeusz Jabłoński (Poznań) “Społeczna struktura Kościoła,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 71, no. 1 (1963): 12–14.

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115. Wyszyński, “Właściwy duch Soboru,” Tygodnik Powszechny 19, no. 17 (1965): 1–2. 116. “List Episkopatu Polski po zakończeniu IV synodu biskupów w Rzymie” (Warsaw, November 25, 1974), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 821–25. 117. “Słowo arcypasterskie na Boże Narodzenie 1969 r.,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/185, p. 66. 118. “Informacja MSW 20 VI 1968,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/185, p. 81. Such reports should always be taken with a grain of salt, because informants often told their handlers what they wanted to hear, and handlers very frequently manipulated reports to please their superiors. 119. “List Episkopatu Polski do duchowieństwa i wiernych z okazji piątej rocznicy zakończenia Soboru Watykańskiego Drugiego” (November 26, 1970), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 612. 120. “Słowo Episkopatu Polski do duchowieństwa w związku z adhortacją apostolską Pawła VI” (Warsaw, April 1, 1971), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 637–38. 121. “List Episkopatu Polski do kapłanów” (Wrocław, May 5, 1970), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 605. 122. Franciszek Jop, “Wielkopostny list pasterski, 1970,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/106, pp. 124–27. This text was listed as Bishop Jop’s own pastoral letter, but in fact it is identical to a text attributed to Cardinal Wyszyński and delivered to the congregations of the Warsaw-Gniezno Archdiocese on Ash Wednesday of that same year. See Wyszyński, “List wielkopostny do duchowieństwa i wiernych archidiecezji gnieźnieńskiej i warszawskiej” (Warsaw, Ash Wednesday 1970), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 613–19. 123. “Choć oczy słabną, nie słabnie miłość Kościoła,” Tygodnik Powszechny 56, no. 41 (2002), www.tygodnik.com.pl/numer/277941/swiezaw.html. This letter is dated November 1, 1991. 124. www.opoka.org.pl/zycie_kosciola/forum/glos/2002-12.html (accessed May 7, 2010). 125. Zbigniew Nosowski, “Sobór Watykański II po 40 latach: Właściwa droga na wczoraj i na jutro,” Katolicka Agencja Informacyjna, October 10, 2002, http://system.ekai.pl/ kair/?screen=depesza&_scr_depesza_id_depeszy=99028&_tw_DepeszeKlientaTable_0__search_plainfulltext=Zbigniew+Nosowski. 126. Rajmund Koperski (Warsaw), “Jaki Kościół założył Chrystus?” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 77, no. 5 (1966): 266.

Chapter 2 1. Mętlewicz, “List o wierze,” Pielgrzym 2 (April 1843): 27–28. 2. Catechism of 1992, 195, emphasis added. 3. On the homiletic collections and guidebooks of the nineteenth century and early twentieth, see Olszewski, Polska kultura religijna, 89–91, 118, 229–30. 4. On Stagraczyński and the origins of Biblioteka Kaznodziejska, see Maciej Kubiak, “Sto lat w służbie Kościoła w Polsce,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska, January–February 2007, www.bkaznodziejska.pl/nr/forum_homiletyczne/sto_lat_w_sluzbie.html. 5. Krukowski, Nauki katechizmowe, 485, 529. 6. “Rodzina,” Przewodnik Katolicki 1, no. 44 (1895): 358. 7. Kuligowski, “O szukaniu szczęścia: kazanie na uroczystość Przemienienia Pańskiego,” Nowa Bibljoteka Kaznodziejska 33, nos. 14–15 (1927): 50. 8. Kmiecik, Misje Ludowe, 32. 9. “Kazanie pasyjne: Cyrenejczyk pomagający,” in Pokłosie słowa Bożego, 111, 113. 10. Woronicz, “Nauka na nowy rok,” in Kazania, 14. 11. Stagraczyński, “Trzy postanowienia,” in Wybór kazań, 1:14–15. 12. “Ewangelja na niedzielę pierwszą postu,” Życie i Praca 6, no. 7 (1929): 3.

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13. Kmiecik, Misje Ludowe, 10, 63. 14. Stagraczyński, “Co lepiej, umierać czy żyć?,” in Wybór kazań, 2:123–52. 15. Zygmunt Golian, “Na uroczystość znalezienia krzyża świętego. Jako mamy przyjmować krzyże tego życia,” in Kazania, 229. 16. Ziemięcka, Michał Ciemniewski, 8. 17. Fijałkowski, “List Pasterski” (September 13, 1855), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 516, teka I.4.3. This is a handwritten text. 18. Stagraczyński, “Adwentu: Miłosierdzie Boskie,” in Wybór kazań, 2:398. 19. S. z G., “Sąd ostateczny: Wyrok potępienia,” Nowa Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 27, no. 1 (1919): 21. 20. D. W., “O skutkach grzechu śmiertelnego,” Nowa Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 26, no. 4 (1919): 109. 21. Kmiecik, Misje Ludowe, 356–58. 22. Stagraczyński, “Dwie prawdy o piekle,” in Wybór kazań, 1:490–94. 23. Krukowski, Nauki katechizmowe, 183. 24. Beisert, “Grzech śmiertelny,” 160. 25. Kmiecik, Misje Ludowe, 88. 26. Dąbrowski, “Kazanie na niedzielę I Adwentu,” in Kazania, 8. Later in the volume he used almost the same words in another sermon: “Kazanie na niedzielę XIX po Świątkach,” 314. 27. Krukowski, Nauki katechizmowe, 7. 28. Kmiecik, Misje Ludowe, 132, 158. 29. Zenonim Ludwik Ancyporowicz, “Rys powinności chrześcijanina,” Pielgrzym 4 (September 1845): 298, 300. 30. Golian, “O pogróżkach i karach któremi grzeszników przywodzi Bóg do upamiętania,” in Kazania niedzielne, 3, 7. 31. Golian, “O dobrem wyrozumieniu chłosty Bożej i o zbawiennem z niej korzystaniu,” in Kazania niedzielne, 14–24. 32. Floryan Stablewski, “List Pasterski,” Przewodnik Katolicki 2, no. 7 (1896): 50–51. 33. Stablewski, “List Pasterski (dokończenie),” Przewodnik Katolicki 2, no. 8 (1896): 57–60. 34. Wojciech Kowalik, “O cierpieniu,” Nowa Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 44, no. 6 (1939): 414. 35. Walczyński, Podręcznik do kazań, 72. 36. Szech, Katolicyzm a polskość, 23. 37. Stagraczyński, “Uciechy światowe,” in Wybór kazań, 1:174–79. 38. Stagraczyński, “O tańcach,” in Wybór kazań, 1:162–68. 39. The stereotype of a raucous Polish wedding has not changed much over the past century. Consider, for example, the depiction in Wyspiański’s Wesele. 40. Walczyński, Podręcznik do kazań, 164. 41. Kakowski, “List pasterski do kapłanów archidiecezji warszawskiej” (April 12, 1936), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 502, teka I.4.3, p. 15. 42. Kmiecik, Misje Ludowe, 149, 151–52, 253, 255–58. 43. Dąbrowski, “Kazanie na niedzielę II po 3 Królach,” in Kazania, 56. 44. Krukowski, Nowe nauki majowe, 48. 45. “Protokół posiedzeń Komitetu Biskupów” (September 27–29, 1921), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawy, sygn. 2642/A II 1.1. 46. “Ewangelja na niedzielę drugą po św. Trzech Królach zapisana u św. Jana w rozdz. II, w. 1–11,” Życie i Praca 6, no. 3 (1929): 3. This injunction to celebrate as if Jesus were a guest at the party would endure in the homiletic tradition. It reappears, for example, a half century later in Leonard Poloch, “Zabawy w życiu człowieka,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 106, no. 2 (1981): 112–15. 47. Walenty Majdański, “To co złe w zabawach i obyczajach zmieniać na dobre!,” Rycerz Niepokalanej 18, no. 7 (1939): 196–98, 210–12. 48. “Ewangelja na niedzielę szóstą po Wielkanocy, zapisana u św. Jana w rozdziale XV w. 26–27 i w rozdziale XVI w. 1–4,” Życie i Praca 11, no. 19 (1934): 2.

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49. Krukowski, Nowe nauki majowe, 58. 50. In the past few years several of Semeneńko’s book have been reprinted: Autobiografia (2002); O modlitwie (2006); O Najświętszym Sakramencie (2005): O pokusach (2001). 51. Semeneńko, The Interior Life, 17, 20, 42, 108, 110. 52. Feliński, “Konferencya XII: O pysze rozumu,” in Konferencye Duchowne, 157–74. 53. Krukowski, Nauki katechizmowe, 473. Krukowski repeated this passage almost verbatim in a sermon he wrote a few years later: Krukowski, Nowe nauki majowe, 12. 54. Ziemięcka, Myśli o wychowaniu kobiet, 81, 83, 90, 110. On Ziemięcka’s role in blending the women’s movement with ultramontane Catholicism, see Jabłońska-Deptuła and Gawrysiakowa, “Z zagadnień religijno-społecznego ruchu kobiet w Królestwie Polskim połowy XIX w. 55. Bronisław Trentowski, “Listy naukowe: list drugi o Floryanie Bochwicu, Antonim Bukatym, i Eleonorze Ziemęckiej,” Orędownik Naukowy 3 ( January 16, 1843): 17–21. 56. Ziemięcka, Myśli o wychowaniu kobiet, 283. 57. ibid., 277–78, 311–12. 58. “Trudności religijne,” Rycerz Niepokalanej 18, no. 7 (1939): 215–16, emphasis in the original. 59. Gaudium et Spes, paragraph 17. 60. Catechism of 1992, 292–93. 61. See, for example, Marjan Morawski, “Dogmat piekła,” Przegląd Powszechny 44, no. 175 (1927): 3–25 and 44, no. 176 (1927): 252–69; Stanisław Podoleński, “Problem demoralizacji przez literaturę i sztukę,” Przegląd Powszechny 44, no. 173 (1927): 40–56; Podoleński, “W kwestji nowego prawa małżeńskiego w Polsce,” Przegląd Powszechny 44, no. 174 (1927): 186–06. See also the consideration of this question at the diocesan synod in Przemyśl of 1916: Antoni Kwolek, “O zadaniach Księży Katechetów w naszych czasach,” in Akta Kongregacyi, 33. 62. “List pasterski Episkopatu Polski o rodzinie” ( Jasna Góra, 1956), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 161. 63. Kazimierz Pielatowski, “Bojaźń Boża podstawą życia religijnego męża,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 58, no. 2 (1957): 152. 64. “O grzechu, jego istocie i rodzajach: Kazanie na IV-tą niedzielę W. Postu,” Kazania katechizmowe 3 (March 4, 1951), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn 32.1, teka T.I.32, p. 20. This was not actually a publication, but a set of texts issued periodically from the Archdiocese, printed on onion paper. It was stamped “Printed according to the laws governing manuscripts [rękopisy],” which indicated that it had such a small circulation that it was not subject to state censorship. 65. Wojtyła, “Kościół a świat: Szacunek dla życia ludzkiego: Przemówienie do lekarzy na rozpoczęcie rekolekcji” (Kraków, March 22, 1964), in Kazania, 290. 66. Wojtyła, “Do młodzieży akademickiej (1)” (Kraków, April 1962), in Kazania, 208. 67. John Paul II, “General Audience,” July 28, 1999, www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ ii/audiences/1999/documents/hf_jp-ii_aud_28071999_en.html. 68. “List pasterski Episkopatu Polski na uroczystość Świętej Rodziny” (Warsaw, October 1, 1969), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 572–75. 69. “Słowo biskupów polskich na rozpoczynający się rok święty w Rzymie” (Warsaw, November 25, 1974), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 819. 70. “List pasterski biskupów polskich na uroczystość Świętej Rodziny, w ósmym roku Wielkiej Nowenny, o polskiej rodzinie katolickiej” (Warsaw, December 18, 1964), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 374–80. 71. Wyszyński, “List wielkopostny do duchowieństwa i wiernych o zagrożeniu moralności Narodu” (Gniezno-Warsaw, February 2, 1968), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 574. 72. ibid., 575–76. Wyszyński always capitalized the word Naród (nation), though this is not a standard spelling rule in Polish. 73. Wyszyński, “Słowo pasterskie na XXXIV tydzień miłosierdzia: Ratujmy życie w rodzinie” (Warsaw, July 26, 1978), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa oraz Episkopatu, 99–105.

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74. “Odnawiamy i wypełniamy jasnogórskie śluby Narodu” (Warsaw, February 10, 1977), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa oraz Episkopatu, 288. 75. “List Episkopatu Polski o poszanowaniu ładu moralnego w życiu Narodu” (Warsaw, June 16, 1977), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa oraz Episkopatu, 307–9. 76. “Stenogram kazania biskupa I. Tokarczuka wygłoszonego w dniu 10.VII.71 r. o godz. 19.00, w czasie uroczystości nawiedzenia MB w parafii Jarosław-Fara,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/255, p. 10. 77. “Słowo pasterskie do kapłanów o niebezpieczeństwie zeświecczenia życia kapłańskiego” ( Jasna Góra, September 12, 1962), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 272. 78. “Materiały do kazań na uroczystość Chrystusa Króla” (1976), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 32.15, teka T. I. 32, p. 4. 79. Katechizm dla dorosłych, 45. 80. “Nawróćcie się do Pana, otwórzcie drzwi serc Chrystusowi” (Warsaw, March 11, 1981), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa oraz Episkopatu, 486. 81. Janusz Tereszczuk, “Wierzę w Boga dawcę wszelkich dóbr,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 109, no. 1 (1982): 34–36. 82. Ireneusz Skubiś and Teofil Siudy, “Nowa Ewangelizacja rodziny i przez rodzinę: Wprowadzenie do programu homiletycznego na rok 1989–1990,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 123, no. 5 (1989): 257–59. 83. Jacek Pulikowski, “O co naprawdę chodzi w antykoncepcji?,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 125, nos. 1–2 (1990): 26–30. 84. Holc, “Liberalism and the Construction of the Democratic Subject in Postcommunism,” 401–27. 85. The quotation comes from John Paul II’s 1997 sermon in Kalisz, Poland. The text is available at www.info.kalisz.pl/pope. 86. Edyta Mętel, “Polaków portret religijny,” Tygodnik Powszechny 56, no. 35 (2002). This was part of a longitudinal survey, so we can see that belief in hell has fluctuated considerably, from 47 percent in 1991 to 62 percent in 1998, back to 41 percent in 2002. It is unclear whether the peak in the late 1990s indicated an actual change in public opinion or a methodological flaw. For earlier figures, see Piotr Taras, “Życie przyszłe człowieka,” in Zdaniewicz, Religijność Polaków, 44, 48, 52. 87. The distinction between the Chuch of the People and the Chuch of Choice comes from Borowik and Zdaniewicz, Od Kościoła ludu do Kościoła wyboru. 88. Katechizm dla dorosłych, 24.

Chapter 3 1. “‘Choć oczy słabną, nie słabnie miłość Kościoła’: Korespondencja między prof. Stefanem Swieżawskim a papieżem Janem Pawłem II,” Tygodnik Powszechny 56, no. 41 (2002), www. tygodnik.com.pl/numer/277941/swiezaw.html. This letter is dated June 1, 1994. 2. On the Kingdom, see Kumor, Ustrój i organizacja Kościoła polskiego, 690–91. These figures encompass the dioceses of Warsaw, Włocławek, Płock, Lublin, Sandomierz, Sejny, Janów, and Kielce. See also Olszewski, “Okres wzrastającego ucisku i głębokich przemian społecznych (1864–1914),” in Kłoczowski, Chrześcijaństwo w Polsce, 481. The same figures are provided in Olszewski, Polska kultura religijna, 42. 3. Kłoczowski, A History of Polish Christianity, 234; Olszewski, Polska kultura religijna, 481; Olszewski, “Okres wzrastającego ucisku i głębokich przemian społecznych (1864–1914),” in Kłoczowski, Chrześcijaństwo w Polsce, 481–82. For more statistics on the huge parishes of early twentieth-century Poland, see Kumor, Ustrój i organizacja Kościoła polskiego, 692–700. 4. For comparative statistics on urban parish sizes, see Olszewski, Polska kultura religijna, 65–66. 5. Adam Stanowski, “Diecezje i parafie polskie w XIX i XX wieku,” Znak 17 (1965): 1635, 1637. 6. Fijałkowski, List pasterski (1857), 22.

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7. Kościół i Postępowość, 47–48. 8. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 31. See also Spiegel, “Memory and History.” 9. I have argued elsewhere that the intellectual origins of radical-right nationalism and antiSemitism in modern Poland can be traced to just such a crisis of faith in historical time. See Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate. For a good summary of historicism more generally, see Wolfart, “The Rise of Historical Consciousness.” 10. Quoted in Król, Konserwatyści a niepodległość, 172–73. 11. Andrzej Walicki has written extensively on this topic, in English as well as Polish. See particularly Między filozofią, religią, i polityką and Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism. For general background on messianic millenarianism in the nineteenth century, see Reeves and Gould, Joachim of Fiore; Talmon, Political Messianism. 12. On Towiański’s life, see Gabryl, Polska filozofia religijna, 2:296–325; Adam Sikora, “Antypody romantycznego mesjanizmu: ‘Filozofia absolutna’ Hoene-Wrońskiego i mistyka Towiańskiego,” in Walicki, Polska myśl filozoficzna, 186–211. 13. On Cieszkowski, see Liebich, Between Ideology and Utopia; Walicki, “August Cieszkowski,” in Walicki, Polska myśl, 395–442. 14. Cieszkowski, Prolegomena do historiozofii, 6–8. 15. ibid., 100. 16. Cieszkowski, Ojcze nasz, in Walicki, Filozofia i myśl społeczna, 311, 323. 17. On the acknowledged importance of Cieszkowski to Krasiński, see Kowalczykowa, “Poglądy filozoficzne Zygmunta Krasińskiego,” in Walicki, Polska myśl filozoficzna, 318–26. 18. Cited in Walicki, “Polska myśl filozoficzna epoki międzypowstaniowej,” in Filozofia i myśl społeczna, 56. See also Kowalczykowa, “Poglądy filozoficzne Zygmunta Krasińskiego,” 308. 19. Krasiński, “O Trójcy w czasie i przestrzeni,” in Walicki, Filozofia i myśl społeczna, 617–18, 628, 636. 20. The book went through two printings in less than a month, and within a year had been translated into French (with an introduction by Montalembert), English, and German. Its first (illegal) printing in occupied Poland came in 1833, in Lwów. See Maria Grabowska, “Katechizm Mickiewicza,” in Mickiewicz, Księgi, 7–8. 21. Mickiewicz, Księgi, 33, 35, 45, 47, 49. 22. Mickiewicz, Les Slaves, 204. On the differences between Księgi and Les Slaves, see Walicki, “Adama Mickiewicza prelekcje paryskie,” in Polska myśl filozoficzna, 216–72. 23. On the popularity of messianism, see Walicki, “Millenaryzm i mesjanizm religijny a romantyczny mesjanizm polski,” in Między filozofią, religia, i polityką, 8–44. 24. See the account of a speech by Mickiewicz during the revolutions of 1848 in Margaret Fuller, “Things and Thoughts in Europe. No. XXIV,” New-York Daily Tribune, June 15, 1848, 1–5. Although only Mickiewicz’s L’Église et le Messie (1848) was actually banned (for reasons related to the ecclesiological issues discussed in chapter 1), Księgi and Les Slaves were also subjected to harsh criticism from Catholic theologians. See Index Librorum Prohibitorum, www.cvm.qc.ca/gconti/905/BABEL/Index%20Librorum%20Prohibitorum-1948.htm. 25. Maurer, “Z matki obcej.” 26. For an example of the harsh coverage of the messianists found in late nineteenth-century Catholic texts, see Gabryl, Polska filozofia religijna. 27. Krukowski, Nauki katechizmowe, 31. 28. Kościół i Postępowość, 18. 29. Benedict XVI, “History and the Plan of Salvation.” 30. Catechism of 1992, 193. 31. Maksymilian Jakubowicz, Chrześcijańska filozofia życia w porównaniu z filozofią naszego wieku panteistyczną (Wilno, 1853), in Gabryl, Polska filozofia religijna, 2:78, 85. 32. On the Zmartwychwstańcy, see Cywiński, Rodowody Niepokornych, 257; Król, Konserwatyści a niepodległość, 164–76; Królik, Hierarchia Kościelna, 16–19, 159–61; Skarbek, “W dobie rozbiorów,” 214–15. On Semeneńko, see Gabryl, Polska filozofia religijna, 205–34. Though created in 1842, the Resurrectionist charter was not formally approved by Pius IX until 1850.

Note s to Pag e s 9 0 – 1 0 0 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

409

Semeneńko, O miłości ojczyzny: Nauka druga, 5–7, 15. Chotkowski, O ideale politycznym Krasińskiego, 42. Gnatowski, Trochę o Szechu, 7. Feliński, Konferencye duchowne, 1:174–91. ibid., 2:209. Untitled, Głos Kapłana Polskiego, June 1862, in Kieniewicz and Miller, Prasa tajna, 204–11. The Polish term kapłan is a generic term for any parish priest; the closely related word kapelan corresponds to the English chaplain. Catechism of Trent, 22. The Catechism of Pius X, Questions 15–18. Catechism of 1992, 49. Ziemięcka, “Recenzya,” Pielgrzym 2 (November 1843): 97–198. The book under review was Wojnarowska, Do matek Polskich słów kilka. Ziemięcka, Myśli o wychowaniu kobiet, 40, 83. ibid., 210. Ziemięcka, Zarysy filozofii katolickiej, 92, 202, 207, emphasis in the original. E. Ziemięcka, “Rzut oka na filozofię nauk. Służący za wstęp do niniejszego pisma,” Pielgrzym 1 (February 1842): 7, 24. For a general discussion of how Polish Catholics discussed science in the late nineteenth century, see Poniatowski, Problematyka nauki. J. K. S., “Przygotowawcze uwagi do filozoficznej polemiki w czasopismach polskich,” Pielgrzym 2 ( June 1842): 241; “Niektóre pomysły o nauce chrześcijańskiej filozofii,” Pielgrzym 2 (April 1842): 20. Zenonim Ancyporowicz, “Przegląd rozumu i wiary,” Pielgrzym 6 (February 1846): 119, 123, 124. “O układzie nieograniczonej doskonalności” Pielgrzym 1 (October 1842): 5, 9, 15. Erich Wasmann, “Catholics and Evolution,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909), www.newadvent.org/cathen/05654a.htm. Ziemięcka, “Myśli o filozofii,” Biblioteka Warszawska 2 (May 1841): 401. Ziemięcka, “Rozbiór kursów Adama Mickiewicza, poświęcony Wincentemu Polowi,” in Studia, 9, 12, emphasis in the original. Eugeniusz Miłosz, “Czy Kościół jest przeciwny cywilizacyi nowożytnej?,” Pamiętnik Religijno-Moralny 9, no. 5 (1862): 556, 561. Leo XIII, Æterni Patris. Kolski, “Zachowawczość i Postęp,” Przegląd Katolicki 40, no. 22 (1902): 347–49. Kolski, “Zachowawczość i Postęp,” Przegląd Katolicki 40, no. 23 (1902): 361–64. Dębicki, Wielkie Bankructwo Umysłowe, 125. ibid., 20, 118, 126. Milewski, Zdobycze i illuzye, 10, 22. This book began as a public lecture to the Society for Popular Education (Towarzystwo Oświaty Ludowej) in February 1901, then was published in the magazine Przegląd Polski before being issued separately as a short book. Marvin O’Connell, Critics on Trial, 343; see also Butler, The Vatican Council; Hennesey, The First Council of the Vatican. Tyrrell, Essays on Faith and Immortality, 158–71. The Oath against Modernism (1910). “Dodatek to paragraphus 13, caput II, titulus I z statutów Synodu przemyskiego z r. 1902,” in Akta i Statuta Kongregacyi Synodalnej, 35. Pelczar, Wezwanie, 9. St. Siedlarek z Czyżewa, “Z listów do ‘Posiewu,’” Posiew 3, no. 1 (1908): 12. One of his most famous books, In the Footsteps of Pythagoras: Mathematical Games, was released in 1995 (its ninth edition) for use as a school textbook. See Śladami Pitagorasa: Rozrywki matematyczne (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, 1995). This author is not to be confused with Jan Jeleński, editor of the anti-Semitic magazine Rola.

410

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68. Jeleński, Prąd Nowy, 10, 12, 29, 22, emphasis in the original. 69. Kopyciński, Dokąd dążymy?, 163. This book is inspired by (and quotes heavily from) a work by Bishop Emile Bougaud, Le christianisme et les temps présents (Paris: C. Poussielgue, 1902–7). Kopyciński was best known as the author of a work entitled O sakramencie pokuty (On the Sacrament of Confession), which first appeared in 1884 and became a classic, enjoying rerelease in a new edition as late as 1905. 70. Morawski, in Dzisiejsze zadania katolicyzmu, 73–75. For more on Przegląd Powszechny, see Jagiełło, Trwałość i zmiana. 71. Kazimierz Łyskowski, in Dzisiejsze zadania katolicyzmu, 185–86. 72. Kaczmarczyk, Religia katolicka, 5. 73. Bilczewski, Archeologia. 74. Bilczewski, Eucharystia. 75. “Przemówienie rektorskie przy otwarciu nowego roku szkolnego 1900/1901” (October 11, 1900), in Bilczewski, in Listy pasterskie, 528–29, 531, 533–34. 76. See the contrasting portraits of Teodorowicz in the magazine of the Society for Pius X, Zawsze Wierni 24 (September–October 1998), www.piusx.org.pl/zawsze_wierni/ artykul/142; Stefan Moysa, “Wielki Erespochan: W 40-lecie śmierci arcybiskupa Józefa Teodorowicza,” Tygodnik Powszechny 32, no. 49 (1978): 5. 77. Teodorowicz, List Pasterski do Duchowieństwa Archidiecezyi (n.p., 1901), no pagination. 78. Jan Kracik, “Antymodernistyczna kampania,” Znak 565 ( June 2002), www.miesiecznik. znak.com.pl/kracik566.html. 79. Teodorowicz, “O modernizmie,” Zawsze Wierni 5, no. 24 (1998), www.piusx.org.pl/ zawsze_wierni/artykul/143. This text was originally published in 1907. 80. Teodorowicz, Katolicyzm a cywilizacya, 23–24, 26, 66. 81. Wałęga, List Pasterski o Antyklerykalizmie, 18. 82. Stagraczyński, “Błogosławieństwo słowa Bożego,” in Wybór kazań, 1:143. 83. Stagraczyński, “Wieczór w sercu człowieczem,” in Wybór kazań, 1:293–94. 84. Stagraczyński, “Wierz i dziękuj,” in Wybór kazań, 1:438. 85. Teodorowicz, Dzisiejszy stosunek, 20. 86. Ildefons Bobicz, “Katolik wobec kryzysu,” Nowa Bibljoteka Kaznodziejska 44, no. 4 (1933): 263, 267. 87. Pamiątka 550-letniego Jubileuszu, 5–6. 88. Żegota Buczkowski, “Tworzenie nowego człowieka,” Rycerz Niepokalanej 18, no. 5 (1939): 132. The author offered three manifestations of this approaching death: the use of technology for destruction and death, the spread of birth control, and “sins against nature—the so-called sins of Sodom.” 89. Wojciech Korfanty, “Kościół a polityka: Zadania Związku Katolickiego Towarzystwa Polek,” in Naród, Państwo, Kościół, 339–54. 90. Korfanty, “Veni Creator,” Polonia, May 24, 1931, in Naród, Państwo, Kościół, 117; Korfanty, “U progu Nowego Roku,” Polonia, January 1, 1930, in Naród, Państwo, Kościół, 102, emphasis mine. 91. Korfanty, “Człowiek i dzieje,” Polonia, September 9, 1934, in Naród, Państwo, Kościół, 210–12. 92. Hlond, “O życie katolickie na Śląsku” (Katowice, March 1, 1924), in Na straży sumienia narodu, 17–18. 93. Hlond, “O zadaniach Katolicyzmu wobec walki z Bogiem” (Poznań, Ash Wednesday, 1932), in Na straży sumienia narodu, 42–43. 94. Hlond, “O Chrześcijańskie zasady życia państwowego” (Gniezno, April 23, 1932), in Na straży sumienia narodu, 74. 95. Hlond, “Z życia Kościoła Chrystusowego” (Poznań, March 12, 1935), in Na straży sumienia narodu, 137. 96. “List pasterski episkopatu Polski o ducha chrześcijańskiego w Polsce” (Warsaw, February 21, 1934), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, Listy pasterskie Episkopatu Polskiego,

Note s to Pag e s 1 0 8 – 1 1 5

97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

110. 111. 112. 113.

114.

115.

116.

117. 118. 119.

120. 121.

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1918–39 (uncatalogued). For published versions of this text, see “List Pasterski Biskupów Polski,” Życie i Praca 11, no. 10 (1934): 3–5; Episkopat Polski, “O ducha chrześcijańskiego w Polsce” (February 21, 1934) in Hlond, Na straży sumienia narodu, 103–17. Kubik, The Power of Symbols, 231. Piwowarczyk, “Chrześcijaństwo i współczesność,” Tygodnik Powszechny 3, no. 43 (1947): 1. Antoni Gołubiew, “Mity XIX wieku i chrześcijańska kultura,” Tygodnik Powszechny 2, no. 1 (1946): 1–2. Turowicz, “Wstępny bilans Soboru,” Tygodnik Powszechny 20, no. 1 (1966): 1–2. Marek Rucz, “Ludzie z barokowego kościoła,” Tygodnik Powszechny 20, no. 35 (1966): 1. Marek Skwarnicki, “Chrześcijanin myśli o kulturze,” Tygodnik Powszechny 32, no. 23 (1978): 1–2. Zofia Starowieyska-Morstinowa, “Współczesne kierunki myśli religijnej,” Tygodnik Powszechny 2, no. 38 (1946): 3–4. Jacek Woźniakowski, “Postęp?,” Tygodnik Powszechny 2, no. 23 (1946): 4. Między panem a plebanem, 76. Hlond, “Polska na przełomie dziejów” (October 28, 1945), in Na straży sumienia narodu, 264–65. “Wielkopostny list pasterski Episkopatu Polski: O panowanie ducha Bożego w Polsce” (February 18, 1946), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 32. “Do duchowieństwa diecezji na pierwszą niedzielę Adwentu” (Lublin, First Sunday of Adwent, 1948), in Wyszyński, in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 93. “List Episkopatu Polski do Dzieci Bożych Kościoła Chrystusowego o aktualnych niebezpieczeństwach” ( Jasna Góra, September 4, 1960), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 211. The Church was indeed accused by communist authors of underpinning the capitalist order, even though Catholicism’s deeply rooted antiliberalism might seem to make such a charge absurd. For an example, see the tendentious history text by Poniatowski, Problematyka nauki. “List Episkopatu Polski o laicyzacji” (Warsaw, March 22, 1968), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 520–24. “List pasterski o społecznej krucjacie miłości” (Warsaw, 1967), in Wyszyński, Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 539. Biskup Franciszek Jop, “Wielkopostny list pasterski, 1970,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/106, p. 127. “Stenogram kazania, wygłoszonego dnia 5.9.1971 r. o godz. 6,40 przed szczytem przez bpa Tokarczuka,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/255, p. 16. “Stenogram kazania bpa I. Tokarczuka wygłoszonego w Dębowcu w dniu 17.IX.72 r. (niedziela), o godz. 7.00,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/255, pp. 31–40. “Stenogram kazania bpa. I. Tokarczuka wygłoszonego w dniu 1.X.1972 r. podczas poświęcenia nielegalnie wybudowanej kaplicy w Milczy parafia Besko pow. Sanok,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/255, pp. 22–30. “Triduum przed świętem patronalnym kobiet katolickich w roku życia” (October 8–11, 1959), Wskazania i Pomoce Duszpasterskie (1959), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 33.25, teka T.2.33, p. 19. “Program Duszpasterski 1975/76,” Archiwum Archiedecezjalne Warszawske, teka T.5 Wojtyła, “Boże Narodzenie” (Kraków, December 25, 1968), in Kazania, 26. “Stenogram kazania kard. K. Wojtyły wygłoszonego w dniu 31 grudnia 1974 r. o godz. 18,00 w kościele parafialnym św. Szczepana w Krakowie,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/272, p. 3. Wojtyła, “Ingres Arcybiskupa-Metropolity” (Kraków, March 8, 1964), in Kazania, 11–18. Wojtyła, “Do młodzieży akademickiej (1)” (Kraków, April 9–14, 1962), in Kazania, 161.

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122. Franciszek Kryszak, “Z perspektywy Tysiąclecia,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 77, no. 4 (1966): 202. 123. Rajmund Koperski, “Jaki Kościół założył Chrystus?,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 77, no. 5 (1966): 264–69. 124. Julian Michalec, “Posłannictwo świeckich w Kościele,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 78 ( January 1967): 9. 125. “Program Duszpasterski 1977/78,” Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, teka T.6. 126. Mieczysław Brzozowski, “Wyzwolenie,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 106, no. 1 (1981): 3. 127. Brzozowski, “Wprowadzenie do programu kaznodziejskiego na rok 1982/83,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 109, no. 5 (1982): 257–60. 128. Krętosz, “Inicjatywy,” 14. 129. Stanisław Chmielewski, “Środki społecznego przekazu a rodzina,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 125, nos. 1–2 (1990): 79–82. 130. Władysław Basista, “Ewangelizacja ludzi pracy: wprowadzenie do programu homiletycznego 1990/91,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 125, nos. 5–6 (1990): 257–64. 131. Rydzyk, Tak-tak, nie-nie, 31.

Chapter 4 1. Catechism of Pius X, Tenth Commandment, Question 3. 2. Woronicz, “Głos pożegnalny do duchowieństwa i wiernych dyecezyi krakowskiej przy opuszczeniu stolicy biskupiej w Krakowie,” in Kazania, 347. 3. Krukowski, Nauki katechizmowe, 253. 4. Krukowski, Nowe nauki majowe, 21. 5. Dąbrowski, “Kazanie na niedzielę XI po Świątkach,” in Kazania, 253. 6. Feliński, Nawoływanie narodu polskiego, 20. 7. Feliński, “Konferencya XXIX: Kapłan w stosunku do społeczeństwa,” in Konferencye Duchowne, 2:190–91. 8. On the strikes of 1861, see Kieniewicz, The Emancipation of the Polish Peasantry, 156–57. 9. Fijałkowski, List Pasterski do Proboszczów i Rządców Kościołów Parafialnych w Archidyecezyi (March 1861), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 540, teka I.4.3. 10. Michał Jan Marszewski, “List pasterski” (March 27, 1861), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, Listy Biskupów Polskich z lat 1728–1927 (uncatalogued). 11. Maciej Majerczak, “List do Braciom włościanom” (April 26, 1861), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, Listy Biskupów Polskich z lat 1728–1927 (uncatalogued). 12. Kudłaszyk, Katolicka myśl, 85. 13. Feliński, Pod Wodzą Opatrzności, 72. 14. Ziemięcka, “Myśli o filozofii,” Biblioteka Warszawska 2 (May 1841): 419. 15. Krukowski, Nauki katechizmowe, 46. 16. Krukowski, Nowe nauki majowe, 21. See the almost identical argument in Krukowski, Nauki katechizmowe, 513. 17. Golian, “O dziwnem miłosierdziu Opatrzności Boskiej w samem uskąpianiu darów doczesnych,” in Kazania niedzielne, 120–33. 18. Krukowski, Nowe nauki majowe, 23. 19. On the origins of Catholicism’s modern social message, see Moody, Church and Society; Moon, The Labor Problem; Ring, Villeneuve-Bargemont. 20. Hogan, The Development of Bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler’s Interpretation of the Social Problem; Von Ketteler, The Social Teachings of Wilhelm Emmanuel Von Ketteler. 21. Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (May 15, 1891). 22. On Rerum Novarum’s reception in Poland, see Gajewski, Społeczna działalność duchowieństwa, 45–46; Kudłaszyk, Katolicka myśl społeczno-polityczna, 252; Kłoczowski, Müllerowa, and Skarbek, Zarys dziejów Kościoła katolickiego w Polsce, 243; Turowski, Historia Ruchu Chrześcijańsko-Demokratycznego w Polsce, 63–64, 163.

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23. “Mowa Najprzewielebniejszego X. Arcypasterza wygłoszona podczas obchodu rocznicy katolickiego Towarzystwa Robotników Polskich w Poznaniu,” Przewodnik Katolicki 1, no. 2 (1895): 2. 24. Floryan, [List Pasterski] Przewodnik Katolicki 1, no. 8 (1895): 57–64. 25. “Praca bez religii (1),” Przewodnik Katolicki 1, no. 12 (1895): 89–90. 26. “Praca bez religii (3),” Przewodnik Katolicki 1, no. 20 (1895): 153–54. 27. Prokop, “O zadowolnieniu ze swego stanu,” Przewodnik Katolicki 1, no. 15 (1895): 109–11. 28. Stagraczyński, “Śmierć koniec i niekoniec wszystkiego,” in Wybór kazań, 1:31. 29. Stagraczyński, “Ukryty żywot Pana Jezusa,” in Wybór kazań, 1:63. 30. Stagraczyński, “Łaska Wiary,” in Wybór kazań, 1:413. 31. Stagraczyński, “Szczęśliwość ubóstwa,” in Wybór kazań, 2:359. 32. A. Trznadel, “Encyklika ‘Rerum Novarum,” Przegląd Powszechny 56, no. 166 (1897): 97. 33. On the 1893 and 1896 conventions, see Kudłaszyk, Katolicka myśl, 219–20; Turowski, Historia Ruchu Chrześcijańsko-Demokratycznego w Polsce, 67–69. For the text of the organizers’ correspondence with the Vatican, see Chotkowski, Wiec katolicki, 8–9. 34. Chotkowski, Wiec katolicki, 11. 35. Kopyciński, “O potrzebie udziału Duchowieństwa w stowarzyszeniach przemysłowych i pracy nad podniesieniem naszego przemysłu,” in Chotkowski, Wiec katolicki, 471–73. For an example of one of the few dissenting voices, see the speech by Henryk Jordan, in Chotkowski, Wiec katolicki, 102–13. 36. Chotkowski, Wiec katolicki, 144–50. 37. Herman Czecz de Lindenwald, “Zapewnienie bytu samoistnych gospodarstw włościańskich,” in Chotkowski, Wiec katolicki, 416–21. 38. K. Czaykowski, “Glos polskiego biskupa o socyalizmie,” in Bilczewski, Listy pasterskie, 2:1. 39. Bilczewski, “List pasterski do Duchowieństwa archidyecezyi w dniu konsekracyi i intronizacyi” ( January 20, 1901), in Listy pasterskie, 11–15. 40. Bilczewski, “Instrukcya dla PW. Duchowieństwa w sprawie organizacyi związków katolicko-społecznych,” in Listy pasterskie, 369. 41. Bilczewski, “Zasługi Świętych dla narodu: Kazanie wstępne wygłoszone w kościele OO. Franciszkanów we Lwowie w pięćsetną rocznicę śmierci błogosławionego Jakóba Strepy,” in Listy pasterskie, 219. This lengthy sermon was published as a separate booklet in 1910. 42. Bilczewski, “Przemówienie na kursie katechetycznym we Lwowie (February 4, 1907),” in Listy pasterskie, 558–59. 43. Bilczewski, “List pasterski do wiernych archidyecezyi w dniu konsekracyi i intronizacyi” ( January 20, 1901), in Listy pasterskie, 36. 44. Bilczewski, “O sprawie socyalnej,” Przegląd Katolicki, nos. 13–16 (1903): 204, 216–19, 245–47. 45. Bilczewski, “O sprawie socyalnej,” Przegląd Katolicki 21 (May 21, 1903): 332. 46. Bilczewski, “O sprawie socyalnej,” Przegląd Katolicki 9, no. 11 (1903): 133–35, 166–68. 47. Jozef Milewski, “O kwestyi socyalnej,” Przegląd Powszechny 51, no. 152 (1896): 244. 48. “Słówko o konieczności i zacności różnych stanów (3),” Przewodnik Katolicki 39 (September 27, 1896): 310–11. 49. Leopold Caro, in Dzisiejsze zadania katolicyzmu, 12–13. 50. Jan Kiciński, “Bezbożny, krwawy komunizm” Nowa Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 44, no. 2 (1939): 243–45. 51. Szech, O pracy katolickiej, 12–16. 52. Szech, Do braci Kapłanów, 13. 53. ibid., 20; Szech, O pracy katolickiej, 83–84. 54. Szech, Przyjdź Królestwo Twoje, 49–50. 55. Szech, Gdzie wróg, 5; Szech, Przyjdź Królestwo Twoje, 73; Szech, Uwagi o socjalizmie, 17, 44, 101. 56. St. M., Antoni Szech. 57. Gnatowski, Trochę o Szechu, 22, 27.

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58. There were very few exceptions. The only Catholic response to Szech endorsing the economic status quo was Joachim Raczkowski, List otwarty. This village priest asked rhetorically, “Why should the Church . . . humble the rich, just because of the foolish and unjust whims of a jealous eye?” (28). 59. Józef Milewski, “O kwestyi socyalnej,” Przegląd Powszechny 51, no. 152 (1896): 244, 246. See also Milewski, Zdobycze i iluzye, 24–31. 60. Morawski, “Za głosem kraju,” Dodatek do Przeglądu Powszechnyo 63, no. 190 (1899): 6–8. 61. See Lewalski, Kościół rzymskokatolicki, 127–64. 62. Plater-Zyberkówna, O pobożności prawdziwej i fałszywej, 8–9. 63. Bilczewski, in Dzisiejsze zadania katolicyzmu, 4. 64. Teodorowicz, in Dzisiejsze zadania katolicyzmu, 9. 65. Jordan, in Dzisiejsze zadania katolicyzmu, 26. 66. Morawski, in Dzisiejsze zadania katolicyzmu, 80. 67. Krzysztof Mieroszewski, in Dzisiejsze zadania katolicyzmu, 126. 68. Rudolf Sikorski, in Dzisiejsze zadania katolicyzmu, 42. 69. Zimmermann, Kilka zdań, 11, 12, 69; Zimmermann, Znaczenie stanu robotniczego, 56. 70. “Słówko o stowarzyszeniu robotnic katolickich pod Opieką Matki Boskiej Nieustającej Pomocy w Poznaniu,” Przewodnik Katolicki 1, no. 10 (1895): 79. For more on the Catholic Society of Polish Workers, see Mysłek, Kościół katolicki, 338. 71. On the Society for Christian Workers, see Ryszard Bender, “I wojna światowa i Polska niepodległa (1914–1939),” in Kłoczowski, Chrześcijaństwo w Polsce, 509; Gajewski, Społeczna działalność duchowieństwa, 48–65; Mysłek, Kościół katolicki, 339–40; Sadkowski, Church, Nation and State, 59–60; Kłoczowski, Müllerowa, and Skarbek, Zarys dziejów Kościoła katolickiego w Polsce, 244; Turowski, Historia Ruchu ChrześcijańskoDemokratycznego w Polsce, 82–97. 72. Kudłaszyk, Katolicka myśl, 235. 73. On the Catholic Union, see ibid., 217; Mysłek, Kościół katolicki, 339; Kłoczowski, Müllerowa, and Skarbek, Zarys dziejów Kościoła katolickiego w Polsce, 240. 74. Józef Krętosz, “Inicjatywy duszpasterskie arcybiskupów lwowskich obrządku łacińskiego (1900–1939),” Śląskie Studia Historyczno-Teologiczne 36 (2003): 208–9; Kudłaszyk, Katolicka myśl, 236–41. 75. Zimmermann, Znaczenie stanu robotniczego, 32. 76. Zdziechowski and Włodzimierz Czerkawski, in Dzisiejsze zadania katolicyzmu, 145–47, 164. 77. “Dodatek o akcyi katolicko-społecznej,” in Akta i Statuta Kongregacyi Synodalnej, 122–28. 78. Teodorowicz, Z ostatnich doświadczeń, 28, 59. 79. Kakowski, “List Pasterski” (September 14, 1913), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 504/6, teka I.4.3, p. 15. 80. “Miłość i ubóstwo Pana Jezusa,” Nowa Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 27, no. 1 (1919): 24–25. 81. Kmiecik, Misje Ludowe, 17. 82. ibid., 127–28. 83. Kłoczowski, Müllerowa, and Skarbek, Zarys dziejów Kościoła katolickiego w Polsce, 322. 84. Aleksander Kakowski, “List pasterski do kapłanów archidiecezji warszawskiej” (April 12, 1936), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne, sygn. 502, teka I.4.3, p. 14. 85. Mysłek, Kościół katolicki, 351–61. 86. On the Catholic trade union movement in the interwar years, see Kłoczowski, Müllerowa, and Skarbek, Zarys dziejów Kościoła katolickiego w Polsce, 327; Mysłek, Kościół katolicki, 346–74. 87. Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio (December 23, 1922). 88. On Catholic Action in Poland, see Ryszard Bender, “I wojna światowa i Polska niepodległa (1914–1939),” in Kłoczowski, Chrześcijaństwo w Polsce, 540; Kłoczowski, Müllerowa, and Skarbek, Zarys dziejów Kościoła katolickiego w Polsce, 234–325; Mysłek, Kościół katolicki, 253–311. On Catholic organizational work among the youth, see Gajewski, Chrześcijańskie organizacje akademickie.

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89. Hlond, “O życie katolickie na Śląsku” (March 1, 1924), in Na straży sumienia narodu, 32–34. 90. Szymański, Akcja Katolicka, 7–8, 17, 42. 91. On Przewodnik Katolicki and Mały Dziennik, see Mysłek, Kościół katolicki, 202. For a contemporary account of similar publication data, see “Z bratniem wezwaniem,” Życie i Praca 11, no. 1 (1934): 1. For a general overview of the Catholic press prior to World War I, see Czesław Lechicki, “Polskie czasopiśmiennictwo katolickie w latach 1833–1914,” Kwartalnik Historii Prasy Polskiej 22 (1983): 20. 92. Bilczewski, Obowiązki powojenne, 18, emphasis in the original. 93. Aside from Szymański, the Council included Bishop Teodor Kubin (Częstochowa), Professor Leopold Caro (an economist from the University of Lwów), Professor Ludwik Górski (an economist at the Catholic University), Father Edward Kozłowski (a famous publicist), Father A. Mytkowicz (one of the leaders of Catholic Action), Father J. Piwowarczyk (a leader of the Christian Democratic Party), Father Aleksander Wóycicki (a sociologist at the Catholic University), and Father Ferdynand Machay (a theologian and publicist). See Mysłek, Kościół katolicki, 336. 94. Szymański, Akcja Katolicka, 13, 33. 95. He defined the term proletarianism in a 1937 book called The Emancipation of the Proletariat (which was in turn based on a lecture he gave during a conference of Catholic activists in Warsaw in September 1937). This volume received the imprimatur. See Antoni Szymański, Wyzwolenie proletariatu, 7. 96. Caro, Droga do odrodzenia; Caro, Problem społeczny. 97. Caro, Zasady nauki ekonomji, 530. 98. Caro, Solidaryzm, 9. 99. The text of this document is reprinted in “O uwłaszczeniu pracy,” Przewodnik Katolicki 45, no. 6 (1939), 87. 100. “Uchwały pierwszego polskiego synodu plenarnego, odbytego w Częstochowie Roku Pańskiego 1936,” Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 190, teka C.I.3.331, uchwala 74. 101. The text of this joint pastoral letter is reprinted in Katolicy a nowy ustrój, 1–2. 102. Janusz, “Kościół a doczesność,” Posiew 27, no. 29 (1933): 2–3. 103. Jehliczki, “Dla szczęścia ludzkości,” Przewodnik Katolicki 28, no. 18 (1922): 3. 104. “Proletarjusze wszystkich krajów,” Przewodnik Katolicki 41, no. 9 (1935): 130. 105. J. Cz., “Rzeczy nowych gorączka,” Życie i Praca 6, no. 21 (1929): 1; “Święto robotnicze,” Życie i Praca 6, no. 21 (1929): 1. 106. Rudolf Tomanek, “Obowiązek miłości bliźniego,” Nowa Bibljoteka Kaznodziejska 44, no. 6 (1933): 422. 107. Program Polskiego Stronnictwa Chrześcijańskiej Demokracji. 108. On Korfanty’s life, see Balawajder, Korfanty; Orzechowski, Korfanty. 109. Korfanty, “Ustrój chrześcijański,” Polonia, March 11, 1934, in Naród, Państwo, Kościół, 201. 110. Korfanty, “40-lecie encykliki ‘Rerum Novarum’, ” Polonia, May 14, 1931, in Naród, Państwo, Kościół, 113–16. 111. Korfanty, “Chrześcijaństwo a nowoczesne państwo,” Polonia, May 17, 1936, in Naród, Państwo, Kościół, 277; Korfanty, “Ustrój chrześcijański,” Polonia, March 11, 1934, in Naród, Państwo, Kościół, 202. 112. See particularly Kmiecik, Misje Ludowe, 245, 262. 113. Weryński, Katolicy Radykalni, 15, 17, 22, 34. On Father Weryński, see Karolina Deling, “By w sobie naród skrzepł,” Tygodnik Powszechny 56, no. 36 (2002), www.tygodnik.com.pl/ numer/277436/deling.html. 114. On the Catholics who cooperated with the communists, see Dominiczak, Organy bezpieczeństwa PRL; Dudek, “Sutanny w służbie Peerelu”; Grajewski, Kompleks Judasza: Kunicki, “The Polish Crusader”; Micewski, Współrządzić; Tomasz Potkaj, “W sumieniu moim byłem spokojny,” Tygodnik Powszechny 36 (September 8, 2002), www.tygodnik. com.pl/numer/277436/potkaj.html; Zieliński, Kościół w Polsce, 75–80.

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115. “Na nowy rok kościelny: O chrześcijańskim wyzwoleniu człowieka” (Lublin, First Sunday of Advent 1946), in Wyszyński, in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 38, 43. 116. List Episkopatu Polski do B. Bieruta, 1. 117. Wyszyński, Zapiski, 23–24. 118. Mounier, Personalism, xxi, 3, 20, 41, 102, 116. My thanks to Piotr Kosicki for his invaluable insight into the history of personalism. 119. Korfanty, “Sumienie jako siła rewolucyjna,” Polonia, March 8, 1936, in Naród, Państwo, Kościół, 264–67. 120. Tezy zasadnicze. 121. Among Piwowarczyk’s most important interwar works are Rola Chrześcijańskiej Demokracji; Idea chrześcijańsko-społeczna; Socjalizm i chrześcijaństwo. His work is summarized in a twovolume collection published abroad after his death: Katolicka etyka. The edition of Rerum Novarum sold in Poland today comes from Piwowarczyk’s 1931 translation. 122. Piwowarczyk, “Upaństwowienie,” Tygodnik Powszechny 2, no. 4 (1946): 1. 123. Piwowarczyk, “Chrześcijaństwo i współczesność,” Tygodnik Powszechny 3, no. 43 (1947): 1. 124. Piwowarczyk, “Wierność wobec Kościoła,” Tygodnik Powszechny 3, no. 4 (1947): 1. For more examples of Piwowarczyk’s personalism, see “Chrystus i ustroje społeczne,” Tygodnik Powszechny 3, nos. 51–52 (1947): 2: “Nasza pozycja,” Tygodnik Powszechny 3, no. 7 (1947): 1. 125. Józef Marian Święcicki, “Zahamowane idea przyszłości,” Tygodnik Powszechny 3, no. 35 (1947): 1–2. 126. Turowicz, “Człowiek, tylko człowiek,” Tygodnik Powszechny 32, no. 50 (1978): 1. 127. Jan Archita, “Społeczne znaczenie Eucharystii,” Rycerz Niepokalanej 20, no. 6 (1946): 133–34. 128. “Na nowy rok kościelny: O chrześcijańskim wyzwoleniu człowieka” (Lublin, First Sunday of Advent 1946), in Wyszyński, in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 38, 43. 129. Wyszyński, “Rodzina Apostołuje Miłosierdziem” (Warsaw, August 1980), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa oraz Episkopatu, 172–78. 130. “Pomoce homiletyczne na rok 1975/76,” Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 32.12, teka T. I. 32, p. 8; “Program duszpasterski 1975/76,” Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, teka T.5, p. 31. 131. “Projekt szczegółowego programu kaznodziejskiego na rok 1971/1972,” Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 32.10, teka T. I. 32, pp. 2–3; “Pomoce homiletyczne na rok 1976/77,” Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 32.12, teka T. I. 32, pp. 48–49. 132. “Program Duszpasterski 1977–78,” Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, teka T.6, p. 8. 133. “Stenogram z wystąpienia bpa. Zygmunta Kamińskiego w katedrze w dniu 9.III.br. o godz 17.00 nt. Potrzeby duszpasterskie kościoła,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, Stenogramy Kazań, 1978–80, sygn. 125/214, p. 50. 134. “Stenogram kazania wygłoszonego przez bpa. Z. Kamińskiego w dn. 21.05.1980 r. o godz. 12,00 w kościele parafialnym w Suścu, woj. Zamoyskie,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, Stenogramy Kazań, 1978–80, sygn. 125/214, p. 83. 135. Gaudium et Spes, paragraph 55. On the origins of Christian humanism in Poland, see Michał Jagiełło, “Humanizm chrześcijański,” in Próba Rozmowy, 2:133–66. 136. “List Episkopatu Polski o chrześcijańskim humanizmie” (Warsaw, October 23, 1968), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa oraz Episkopatu, 539–43. 137. “Projekt szczegółowego programu kaznodziejskiego na rok 1971/1972,” Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 32.10, teka T. I. 32, pp. 2–3; “Program duszpasterski 1975/76,” Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, teka T.5, p. 5. 138. Dulles, “John Paul II,” 10. 139. On John Paul II’s personalism, see Lawler, The Christian Personalism of Pope John Paul II; Wojtyła, Person and Community; Schall, The Church, the State, and Society; Woźnicki, A Christian Humanism. See also Popławski, Personalizm w Polsce. 140. Wojtyła, “Do młodzieży akademickiej (2)” (Kraków, March 21–25, 1972), in Kazania, 267–78.

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141. Wojtyła, “Ewangelizacja Współczesnego Świata” (Kraków, December 10, 1974), in Kazania, 336–48. 142. “Stenogram kazania kard. K. Wojtyły wygłoszonego w dniu 31 grudnia 1974 r. o godz. 18,00 w kościele parafialnym św. Szczepana w Krakowie,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/272, p. 4. 143. On the Medellín Conference, see Cleary, Born of the Poor. The relevant portions of the Conference’s final document are reprinted at http://personal.stthomas.edu/gwschlabach/ docs/medellin.htm. 144. Wojtyła, “Na progu nowego roku” (Kraków, December 31, 1968), in Kazania, 30. For a very similar presentation, see “Procesja Bożego Ciała” (Kraków, May 25, 1978), in Kazania, 62–66. 145. “Stenogram wystąpienia kard. Karola Wojtyły wygłoszonego w dniu 13.VI.1974 r. w czasie procesji Bożego Ciała w Krakowie,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/272, pp. 16–17. 146. Michnik, The Church and the Left, 67. 147. Andrzej Anusz, Kościół obywatelski. 148. John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis (March 4, 1979). 149. John Paul II, Dives in Misericordia (November 30, 1980). 150. John Paul II, Laborem Exercens (September 14, 1981). 151. M. Piątkowski, “Godność człowieka odczytana w Chrystusie i Ewangelii, według słów Ojca świętego,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 105, no. 4 (1980): 195–200. 152. John Paul II, Laborem Exercens. 153. Joseph Ratzinger, “Instruction on Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation’” (August 6, 1984). 154. “The Solidarity Program,” in Eastern Europe: Transformation and Revolution, 1945–1991, ed. Lyman H. Legters (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1992): 269–70. 155. Władysław Basista, “Ewangelizacja ludzi pracy: Wprowadzenie do programu homiletycznego 1990/91,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 125, nos. 5–6 (1990): 262. 156. John Paul II, Centesimus Annus (May 1, 1991), emphasis in the original. 157. Katechizm dla dorosłych, 240. For examples of personalism in the unabridged text, see Catechism of 1992, 115, 296, 511, 518, 637. 158. Włodzimierz Rędzioch, “O bankructwie amerykańskiej firmy energetycznej Enron i kryzysie amerykańskiego kapitalizmu,” Niedziela 14, no. 44 (2002). 159. Bartnik, Idea Polskości, 58, 61, 65. 160. Stanisław Kowalczyk, “Idea politycznego pluralizmu,” in Piotrowski, Na przełomie stuleci, 599–606. For a similar social critique in the same volume, see Piotr Nitecki, “Dlaczego Kościół angażuje się w życie społeczne?,” 585–94. 161. Józef Życiński, “Polityka może być czysta. List metropolity lubelskiego Józefa Życińskiego w sprawie wyborów samorządowych,” Gazeta Wyborcza, September 19, 1998, 31. 162. Józef Życiński, “Europejska brzytwa Ockhama,” Tygodnik Powszechny 53, no. 43 (1999): 10. 163. Wacław Hryniewicz, “Odkrywać nieznane oblicze Boga,” in Dupuis, Chrześcijaństwo i religie.

Chapter 5 1. Kopyciński, Dokąd dążymy?, 137. 2. On Church-state relations in Russian-occupied Poland, see Barańska, Między Warszawą, Petersburgiem i Rzymem; Lewalski, Kościół rzymskokatolicki, 31–66. For the German partition, see Bystrzycki, Duchowieństwo; Bystrzycki, Kościół na Pomorzu; Korybut-Woroniecki, Państwo Pruskie; Trzeciakowski, The Kulturkampf in Prussian Poland. 3. See, for example, Corrin, Catholic Intellectuals.

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4. Mark 12:13–17. Slightly different versions of the story appear in Matthew 22:15–22 and Luke 20:20–26. 5. Catechism of Trent, 276. 6. Gregory XVI, Cum Primum ( June 9, 1832). On Cum Primum, see Boudou, Stolica Święta a Rosja, 194–98. 7. Leo XIII, Caritatis: Encyclical on the Church in Poland (March 19, 1894). The Polish translation was published as “Encyklika Świętego Ojca Naszego Leona XIII z Boskiej Opatrzności Papieża do Biskupów Polskich,” Przegląd Katolicki 32, no. 22 (1894): 340. 8. Adam Tomasz Paszkowicz, “List pasterski do duchowieństwa świeckiego i zakonnego” (March 3, 1832), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 1305 /I.4.3. 9. Fijałkowski, List pasterski (1857), 13, 25, emphasis in the original. 10. Antoni Junosza Gałecki, “List pasterski” (December 11, 1862), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, Listy Biskupów Polskich z lat 1728–1927 (uncatalogued). 11. Feliński, “Konferencya XVIII: O posłuszeństwie,” in Konferencye Duchowne, 1:266–83. 12. “Konferencya XXIX: Kapłan w stosunku do społeczeństwa,” in Feliński, “Konferencya XXVIII: O miłości nieprzyjaciół,” in Konferencye Duchowne, 2:180. 13. Krukowski, Nauki katechizmowe, 107. 14. Walczyński, Podręcznik do kazań, 188, 192–93, emphasis in the original. 15. Wroński, Duchowieństwo i Kościół katolicki, 138–39; Żywczyński, “Sprawa Gutkowskiego,” 129–46. 16. On the Kulturkampf in the Polish lands, see Cowell-Meyers, Religion and Politics, 15–56; Kowalczuk, Kardynał Mieczysław Halka Ledóchowski; Olszewski, in Kłoczowski, Chrześcijaństwo w Polsce, 470; Olszewski, Polska kultura religijna, 102; Trzeciakowski, The Kulturkampf in Prussian Poland; Zieliński, “Wykonanie ustawy Sejmu pruskiego.” 17. On the 1901 and 1906 strikes, see Olszewski, Polska kultura religijna, 103. On the clergy and the Germanization campaign, see Michalski, Polskie duchowieństwo. 18. On the position of the Catholic Church vis-à-vis the U.S. conquest of Mexican territory in the late nineteenth century, see Mora, “Resistance and Accommodation.” 19. See Bjork, Neither German nor Pole. 20. Dylągowa, Duchowieństwo katolickie, 112; Kłoczowski, A History of Polish Christianity, 218. 21. In 1883, shortly before his death, Ściegienny was readmitted to the priesthood. This was cast as an act of mercy toward the elderly, broken man who had recently returned from his Siberian exile. On Ściegienny, see Djakow, Piotr Ściegienny; Tyrowicz, Sprawa Ks. Piotra Ściegiennego. 22. [Chotomski], Autorowi broszury, 8–9, 16. 23. “Z powodu Encykliki Papieskiej do Biskupów Polskich,” Przegląd Katolicki 27 ( June 23– July 5, 1894): 417–19. 24. For a particularly striking example, see “Najwyższy manifest,” Przegląd Katolicki 23 ( June 4, 1896): 353–64. 25. Przegląd Katolicki, nos. 48–51 (November 29–December 20, 1900). When the tsar recovered the magazine provided extensive coverage of the mass of thanksgiving celebrated by Bishop Ruszkiewicz. See Przegląd Katolicki 1 ( January 3, 1901). 26. “Przyjazd do Warszawy Ich Cesarskich Mości Najjaśniejszych Państwa,” Przegląd Katolicki 35 (September 2, 1897): 545. 27. Wroński, Duchowieństwo i Kościół katolicki, 117–18. 28. Dylągowa, Duchowieństwo katolickie, 142–45; Jabłońska-Deptuła and Skarbek, “W dobie między powstaniami (1832–1864),” in Kłoczowski, Chrześcijaństwo w Polsce, 445; Kłoczowski, A History of Polish Christianity, 221. On the distinction between approved pastoral duties and unsanctioned political engagementt, see Ewa Jabłońska-Deptuła, “Zakony męskie Królestwa wobec rzeczywistości zaborczej, 1815–1864,” Roczniki Humanistyczne 22, no. 2 (1974): 128–29. 29. “Pamiętnik Kapelana Serafina Szulca,” in Giller, Polska w walce, 68. 30. “O miłości ojczyzny,” Głos Kapłana Polskiego, November 13, 1862; Untitled, Głos Kapłana Polskiego, November 14, 1862, and Untitled, Głos Kapłana Polskiego, August 5, 1862, in Kieniewicz and Miller, Prasa tajna, 211–32.

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31. See, for example, the two untitled articles in Głos Kapłana Polskiego,January 21, 1863, and February 28, 1863, in Kieniewicz and Miller, Prasa tajna, 238–43, 245–46. 32. “List otwarty duchowieństwa Polskiego do Hieronima Kajsiewicza, brata-kapłana grzesznie gardłującego za Moskwą i schizmą,” Głos Kapłana Polskiego, February 28, 1863, in Kieniewicz and Miller, Prasa tajna, 248. 33. On Głos kapłana polskiego, see Kalembka, Powstanie Styczniowe, 224; Królik, Hierarchia Kościelna, 22, 164; Skarbek, “W dobie rozbiorów i braku państwowości (1772–1918),” in Kłoczowski, Müllerowa, and Skarbek, Zarys dziejów Kościoła katolickiego w Polsce, 232. 34. Ziemięcka, “Myśli o filozofii,” Biblioteka Warszawska 2 (May 1841): 418. 35. Ziemięcka, Myśli o wychowaniu kobiet, 223. 36. Lubelski, Nacjonalizm, 9. Lubelski wrote the expression contrat social in French. 37. Hlond, “O Chrześcijańskie zasady życia państwowego” (Gniezno, April 23, 1932), in Na straży sumienia narodu, 55–56. 38. Edmund Rosieński, “Prawa moralne w życiu człowieka,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 68, no. 1 (1962): 7–9. 39. For an summary of natural law philosophy and a testimony to its enduring impact on Catholic thought, see Cessario, Introduction to Moral Theology. See also the encyclical by John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor. 40. See Haakonssen, Natural Law. For an alternative perspective, see Zuckert, Natural Rights. 41. Kościół i Postępowość, 22, 60–67. 42. Ziemięcka, Zarysy filozofii katolickiej, 186, 190. 43. On Lamennais, see Dansette, Religious History of Modern France, 213–24; Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition, 68–99: Sparrow-Simpson, French Catholics, 10–33. 44. de Lamennais, Paroles; Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos. 45. Leo XIII, Immortale Dei. 46. “O sprawie socyalnej,” Przegląd Katolicki 41, no. 14 (1903): 185, 216. 47. Kakowski, “Wezwanie Arcybiskupa Warszawskiego do duchowieństwa i ludu o modlitwę za ojczyznę” (1917), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 503, teka I.4.3., p. 10. 48. Milewski, Zdobycze i iluzye, 41–49. 49. Maurycy Straszewski, “Czynniki rozdziału i spójni w dzisiejszym społeczeństwie,” Przegląd Powszechny 76, no. 226 (1902): 17. 50. Rostworowski, Liberalny katolicyzm, 27, emphasis in the original. 51. Pelczar, Wezwanie, 26. 52. Bilczewski, Przemowa, 5. 53. Pelczar, List otwarty, 3. The manuscript copy of this letter is available at the Biblioteka Narodowa, sygn. II.902.617. 54. Bender, “I wojna światowa i Polska niepodległa (1914–1939),” in Kłoczowski, Chrześcijaństwo w Polsce, 512; Krukowski, “Status prawny religii i Kościół rzymskokatolickiego w Polsce (1918–1993),” in Jachmyk, Religia i kościół rzymskokatolicki, 33; Markiewicz, Państwo i Kościół w Polsce, 8. 55. Pelczar, List otwarty, 4. Although this principle was occasionally violated in interwar Poland, such assurances at least made it necessary to obscure forced conversions behind a rhetorical smokescreen. On relations between Eastern-Rite and Latin-Rite Catholics in interwar Poland, see Krochmal, Konflikt czy współpraca?; Sadkowski, Church, Nation and State; Mróz, Katolicyzm na pograniczu; Sadkowski, “From Ethnic Borderland to Catholic Fatherland.” 56. Hlond, “O Chrześcijańskie zasady życia państwowego” (Gniezno, April 23, 1932), in Na straży sumienia narodu, 55–56, 69. 57. Program Polskiego Stronnictwa Chrześcijańskiej Demokracji, 13–14. 58. Teodorowicz, Dzisiejszy stosunek Episkopatu polskiego, 21, emphasis in the original. 59. “Wzajemna pomoc,” Przewodnik Katolicki 28, no. 14 (1922): 2. 60. On the ethnonational breakdown of the interwar Polish population, see Zbigniew Adamowicz and Alicja Wójcik, “Ludność Polski według wyznań,” in Jachmyk, Religia i kościół rzymskokatolicki, 15–30.

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61. Szczepan Sobałkowski, “Pomóżmy dźwigać krzyż Chrystusowi,” Nowa Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 56, no. 2 (1939): 194. 62. Rostworowski, Najważniejsze postulaty, 13. 63. These data are from Kopstein and Wittenberg, “Who Voted Communist?,” 98. According to the categories used by these authors, “the right” included the National Democrats and Christian Democrats, “the center” consisted mainly of the Polish Populist Party-Piast, and “the left” was dominated by the Polish Socialist Party and the Polish Populist Party-Liberation. 64. “Protokół Zebrania JJ. WW. Dziekanów Archidyecezyi Warszawskiej” (February 7, 1906), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 1306, I.4.3, emphasis in the original. 65. Niedziałkowski, Co myślą, 29. The PSPR (Polish Party of Realistic Politics) was a grouping of conservatives and moderate liberals. The book was primarily aimed at discrediting the National Democratic movement, which was opposed by the PSPR in the elections. 66. Kakowski, “List Pasterski” (November 12, 1918), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 75, teka I.4.3. 67. Wszystko dla Polski, 6. 68. It certainly did not help that the pope, when he served as nuncio to Poland in 1918–22, had very bad relations with Teodorowicz and Sapieha. They considered Achille Ratti to be proGerman, and he in turn opposed their affiliation with the far right. See Pease, Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter, 33–47, 64. The five priests-senators included Stanisław Adamski, Jan Albrecht, Antoni Stychel, Józef Prądzyński, and Leon Żebrowski. During that time there were also two rabbis in the senate (Lejb Kowalski and Izaak Rubinsztejn) and one Eastern Orthodox priest (Wiaczesław Bogdanowicz). For more on the political involvement of the clergy during the early years of the Second Republic, see Piela, Udział duchowieństwa. 69. Na zbliżające się wybory, 6, 24–28, emphasis in the original. 70. “Protokół posiedzenia Komitetu Biskupów” (Warsaw, November 29–30, 1920), Archiwum Archidiecezji Warszawskiej, sygn. 2642 /A II 1.1. 71. “Protokół narad Komitetu Biskupów z dniu 4 i 5 marca 1921 roku,” Archiwum Archidiecezji Warszawskiej, Protokoły z Konferencji Episkopatu Polski z lat 1920–1927, sygn. 2642 /A II 1.1. I was not able to find a copy of the 1928 pastoral letter, but it is discussed and quoted at length in “Rozstrzygająca godzina,” Przewodnik Katolicki 10 (March 4, 1928): 13. 72. “Bolesny rachunek sumienia katolickiego,” Przewodnik Katolicki 34, no. 16 (1928): 11. 73. Weryński, “Czy Józef Piłsudski był protestantem?” Piłsudski’s family was Catholic, but he was uninterested in religion and converted in 1899 in order to get married. 74. Pease, Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter, 80. 75. “Rozmowa z Piusem XI o polityce wewnętrznej, o Niemczech i Rosji: Raport do Pana Ministra Spraw Zagranicznych” (September 23, 1930), Documents from the Polish Embassy in Rome, Hoover Archive, Stanford University. For more on Pius XI’s attitude toward Piłsudski’s coup, see Pease, “Poland and the Holy See,” 524; Pease, Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter, 30–53. 76. On the rivalry between Hlond and Łukomski, see Bender, “I wojna światowa i Polska niepodległa (1914–1939),” in Kłoczowski, Chrześcijaństwo w Polsce, 542; Kłoczowski, Müllerowa, and Skarbek, Zarys dziejów Kościoła katolickiego w Polsce, 335–38; Pease, Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter, 82. 77. Łukomski, Instrukcja. 78. “Gdzie, na kogo, i jak należy głosować do Rady Miejskiej w Łomży,” Życie i Praca 11 (May 27, 1934): 7. 79. On the controversy surrounding Piłsudski’s burial under the Cathedral on Wawel, see Mysłek, Kościół katolicki, 580; Pease, Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter, 173–93. For more on the hierarchy’s attitude toward Piłsudski—and the Second Republic more generally—see Krasowski, Episkopat katolicki w II Rzeczypospolitej; Piela, Udział duchowieństwo: Wilk, Episkopat Kościoła katolickiego.

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80. A harsh polemical tone was set by Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope; Kertzer, The Popes against the Jews. Other books critical of the Roman Catholic Church’s relationship to Nazism include Coppa, The Papacy, the Jews, and the Holocaust; Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany; Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust; Spicer, Antisemitism; Spicer, Hitler’s Priests; Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows. Responses to these charges include Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War; Rychlak, Hitler, the War, and the Pope; Dalin, The Myth of Hitler’s Pope. For a comparative approach to the study of Christianity and the anti-Semitic right during the early twentieth century, see Dietrich, Christian Responses to the Holocaust, Spicer, Antisemitism. On the Christian response to the radical right in Eastern Europe more generally, see Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary; Dariusz Libionka, “Antisemitism, Anti-Judaism and the Polish Catholic Clergy during the Second World War,” in Blobaum, Rewolucja: Modras, The Catholic Church and Antisemitism. 81. Kozicki, Historia Ligi Narodowej, 453. For more on religion and the early Endecja, see Mistewicz, “Rola religii i kościoła rzymsko-katolickiego w świetle publicystyki polskiego ruchu nacjonalistycznego”; Stachowiak, Korzenie “katolicyzmu endeckiego.” 82. As reprinted in full in Pobóg-Malinowski, “Do historji Ligi Narodowej,” 109. This is a reprint of “Sprawozdanie za rok 1900–1901. Komitet Centralny Ligi Narodowej do Komisji Nadzorczej Skarbu Narodowego Polskiego” ( July 20, 1901). 83. “Duchowieństwo katolickie i rząd rosyjski,” Przegląd Wszechpolski 11 ( June 1, 1898): 163–65. 84. J. L. Jastrzębiec [Popławski], “Z całej Polski,” Przegląd Wszechpolski 1 ( January 1, 1897): 7. 85. Kujawiński, Stronnictwo Demokratyczno-Narodowe, 19–26, 29, 101. 86. Hozakowski, O katolickie podstawy narodowej demokracyi, 25, 53–57, 65. 87. “Program Stronnictwa Narodowego,” in Grott, Religia, Kościół, Etyka, 117. 88. Rostworowski, “Sprawozdanie z ruchu religijnego, naukowego i społecznego,” Przegląd Powszechny 44, no. 173 (1927): 256–57. 89. Krotoski, Nacjonalizm, 27, 29–30. 90. Dmowski, Kościół, Naród, i Państwo, 14, 27, 32. For some sympathetic biographies of Dmowski, see Fountain, Roman Dmowski; Micewski, Roman Dmowski. A somewhat more critical approach is taken in Wapiński, Roman Dmowski. On Dmowski’s views regarding the Church, see Pease, Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter, 83–84; Sawicki, Roman Dmowski. 91. On that 1927 convention, see Ewa Maj, “Religia i Kościół rzymskokatolicki w myśli politycznej Narodowej Demokracji (1918–1939),” in Jachmyk, Religia i kościół rzymskokatolicki, 56. 92. As quoted in ibid., 57. For a more extended example of how the radical right viewed the Church, see Giertych, Nacjonalizm chrześcijański. 93. Some examples of early praise for Italian fascism include Szymański, Mussolini, 9–31; Teodorowicz, O ducha narodu polskiego, 34–37; Urban, “Sprawozdanie z ruchu religijnego, naukowego i społecznego,” Przegląd Powszechny 44, no. 174 (1927): 387–92. By the 1930s explicit praise for Fascism in the Catholic press in Poland had markedly declined. 94. “Szał antypolski w Niemczech,” Posiew 27, no. 10 (1933): 3. 95. “Hitler, jego dojście do władzy i program,” Posiew 27, no. 14 (1933): 2–3. 96. “Z tygodnia: Katolicy w ogniu walk,” Przewodnik Katolicki 41, no. 31 (1935): 503. 97. “Albo pocałujesz, albo umrzesz!,” Przewodnik Katolicki 41, no. 34 (1935): 538. 98. “Młyny boże!,” Przewodnik Katolicki 45, no. 35 (1939): 560. 99. Szymański, Stanowisko Pracy, 16. 100. Hlond, “O Chrześcijańskie zasady życia państwowego” (Gniezno, April 23, 1932), in Na straży sumienia narodu, 60–61. 101. Niesiołowski, Katolicyzm a totalizm, 22. 102. W. S. P., “Nie tędy nasza droga,” Posiew 33, no. 6 (1939): 81–82. 103. Korfanty, “Chrześcijaństwo a nowoczesne państwo,” Polonia, May 17, 1936, in Naród, Państwo, Kościół, 277. 104. Korfanty, “Ustrój korporacyjny,” in Naród, Państwo, Kościół, 361. This was from a brochure that Korfanty published anonymously: Przebudowa ustroju społecznego.

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105. Korfanty, “Czy Pan Bóg jest na prawicy czy na lewicy?,” Polonia, June 16, 1936, in Naród, Państwo, Kościół, 282. 106. Korfanty, “Stronnictwo Pracy,” Polonia, October 10, 1937, in Naród, Państwo, Kościół, 304–7. 107. Korfanty, “Dwie encykliki papieskie,” Polonia, April 4, 1937, in Naród, Państwo, Kościół, 298–300. 108. Korfanty, “O chrześcijański ustrój państwa,” Polonia, October 29, 1933, in Naród, Państwo, Kościół, 185. 109. Korfanty, “Czy Pan Bóg jest na prawicy czy na lewicy?,” Polonia, June 16, 1936, in Naród, Państwo, Kościół, 285; Korfanty, “Zasada solidarności,” Polonia, October 28, 1934, in Naród, Państwo, Kościół, 220–22. 110. Korfanty, “Tworzenie i organizacja woli narodu,” Polonia, May 20, 1937, in Naród, Państwo, Kościół, 293–97. 111. Woroniecki, Kościół i Państwo, 11–17. 112. “Orędzie Episkopatu Polski w sprawie wyborów do Sejmu” ( Jasna Góra, September 10, 1946), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 43. 113. The memo was reprinted in “Katolickie postulaty konstytucyjne,” Tygodnik Powszechny 3, no. 16 (1947): 3. 114. “Instrukcja Episkopatu Polski o duchowieństwie polskim w życiu własnego Narodu” (Warsaw, February 9, 1953), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 135. 115. Stanisław Stomma, “Maksymalne i minimalne tendencje społeczne katolików,” Znak 1, no. 3 (1946): 257–75. 116. Józef Marian Święcicki, “O katolickim maksymalizmie,” Tygodnik Powszechny 3, no. 5 (1947): 1. Święcicki returned to these themes a couple months later in “Kwestia zasady, czy taktyki?,” Tygodnik Powszechny 3, no. 16 (1947): 4. 117. Stomma, “O pozornym maksymalizmie i urojonym defetyzmie,” Tygodnik Powszechny 3, no. 16 (1947): 5. 118. Piwowarczyk, “Rada nie na czasie,” Tygodnik Powszechny 3, no. 16 (1947): 5. 119. Konopka, Religia w szkołach, 291. 120. For a history of Znak, see Łętowski, Ruch i koło poselskie Znak. On the shifting policies of the communist state toward the Church, see Dudek and Gryz, Komuniści i Kościół; Jasiukiewicz, Kościół katolicki; Micewski, Kościół–państwo; Raina, Kościół. 121. Gaudium et Spes, paragraphs 27 and 76. 122. Turowicz, “Wstępny bilans Soboru,” Tygodnik Powszechny 20, no. 1 (1966): 1–2. 123. “Stenogram kazania kardynała Karola Wojtyły wygłoszonego w kościele parafialnym w Mogile w dniu 31.12.1975 r.,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/272, p. 107. 124. “Orędzie biskupów polskich do duchowieństwa diecezjalnego i zakonnego o zadaniach posoborowych Kościoła i o jego położeniu w Polsce” (Wrocław, October 17, 1966), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 453–69. 125. “Stenogram kazania wygłoszonego przez bpa. Z. Kamińskiego w Olchowcu do młodzieży w dniu 12.07.1980 r. o godz. 18.00,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, Stenogramy Kazań, 1978–80, sygn. 125/214, pp. 18–19. 126. “Stenogram wystąpienia biskupa Z. Kamińskiego w trakcie spotkania z młodzieżą w parafii Bełżyce w dniu 17.XI.1979 r. w godz. 19-20.00,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, Stenogramy Kazań, 1978–80, sygn. 125/214, p. 109. 127. “Stenogram wykładu wygłoszonego przez arcybpa. B. Kominka w dniu 18.II.72 r., o godz. 19,30 w kościele św. Piotra i Pawła we Wrocławiu,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/220, p. 104. 128. Turowicz, “Człowiek, tylko człowiek,” Tygodnik Powszechny 32, no. 50 (1978): 1. 129. “Stenogram wystąpienia biskupa Z. Kamińskiego na spotkaniu z młodzieżą pracującą w Chełmie; parafia Mariacka 7.06.1980 r. godz. 18.30,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Wyznań do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/214, pp. 57–64.

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130. “Stenogram kazania, wygłoszonego dnia 5.9.1971 r. o godz. 6,40 przed szczytem przez bsp Tokarczuka,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/255, p. 17. 131. “Kazanie o życiu w prawdzie” (Podkowa Leśna, August 31, 1982), in Kazania wojenne, 29. This particular volume contained some incendiary sermons, so most of the authors remained anonymous. 132. Tischner, Spirit of Solidarity, 41–43. 133. “Słowo biskupów polskich o listach do episkopatów na temat millenium” (Warsaw, February 10, 1966), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 435. 134. The bishops even went so far as to add, “Economic interventions by the state ought to be carried out so that they do not restrain the freedom of private persons, but on the contrary, enhance it.” “List pasterski Episkopatu Polski o encyklice Ojca świętego Jana XXIII ‘Pokój na ziemi’” (April 18, 1963), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 293. 135. “Rada Główna Episkopatu Polski do wszystkich rodaków wspólnej Ojczyzny” (Warsaw, December 29, 1970), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 615. One can find a great many recitations of this list with nearly identical wording. See, for example, Tadeusz Jabłoński, “Człowiek obywatelem państwa (na niedzielę XXII po Zielonych Świątkach,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 71, no. 4 (1963): 145–47; Wyszyński, “Słowo na doroczny dzień środków społecznego przekazu” (Przemyśl, June 12, 1976), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa oraz Episkopatu, 259. 136. Jerzy Szelmeczka, “Wolność religijna realizowana konkretnie,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 107, no. 1 (1981): 57–58. 137. “Stenogram kazania kardynała K. Wojtyły, wygłoszonego w dniu 26.12.75 r. w kościele Św. Szczepana,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/272, p. 99. 138. “Konferencja II: Rodzina, Naród, Społeczeństwo” (Warsaw, kościół Świętego Krzyża, 18.1.1976), in Wyszyński, Kazania Świętokrzyskie, 28. 139. Mieczysław Brzozowski, “Gdzie duch pański, tam wolność (kazanie patriotyczne),” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 122, no. 6 (1989): 355–58, emphasis in the original. 140. Brzozowski, “Prawo i wolność,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 122, no. 6 (1989): 359. 141. Brzozowski, “Tajemnica wolności,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 124, nos. 5–6 (1990): 329– 32. 142. Brzozowski, “Troska o państwo (kazanie patriotyczne),” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 127, nos. 1–2 (1991): 123–25. 143. John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, paragraphs 45–46. 144. Catechism of 1992, 527–28, 600. 145. Katechizm dla dorosłych, 203, 291. 146. Catechism of 1992, 609–10, 659. 147. Katechizm dla dorosłych, 249. 148. Catechism of 1992, 567. 149. Katechizm dla dorosłych, 210. 150. Krukowski, “Status prawny religii i Kościoła rzymskokatolickiego w Polsce (1918–1993),” in Jachmyk, Religia i kościół rzymskokatolicki, 39–43. See also Paweł Sobczyk, “Aksjologia konstytucji RP w postulatach episkopatu polski,” Seminare 25 (2008): 159–72. 151. The complete text of the constitution is available at the Sejm’s website: www.Sejm.gov.pl/ prawo/konst/polski/kon1.htm. 152. Kazimierz Ryczan, “Wychowanie ku wartościom,” in Piotrowski, Na przełomie stuleci, 551–56. 153. Rydzyk, Tak-tak, nie-nie, 55, 242. 154. “Kościół toruńskokatolicki.” For more on Rydzyk, see Potkaj and Piskała, W imię ojca. 155. Jarosław Kaczyński, “Wstęp,” in Polska katolicka, 7. 156. Polska katolicka, 33–34. The draft preamble goes on to give thanks for Poland’s “thousand year bond with Christianity.”

424

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157. “Wybory prezydenckie 2010: Preferencje polaków przed prawyborami w P.O.,” Komunikat z Badań, Centrum Badania Opinii Społecznej, 34 (March, 2010): 5. 158. “Lech Kaczyński spocznie na Wawelu, Kardynał Dziwisz potwierdza,” Newsweek Polski, April 13, 2010, www.newsweek.pl/artykuly/sekcje/polska/lech-kaczynski-spocznie-nawawelu—kardynal-dziwisz-potwierdza,56658,1,56658,1,56658,1. 159. “Abp Gołębiewski za ojczyzną prawą i sprawiedliwą,” Gazeta Wyborcza, May 6, 2010, 3. 160. Tomasz Kwaśniewski, “Pokrzyżowani,” Gazeta Wyborcza Duży Format, August 12, 2010, 1. 161. Jarosław Kaczyński, “Prezes PiS Jarosław Kaczyński odpowiada redaktorowi naczelnemu Rzeczypospolitej Pawłowi Lisickiemu,” Prawo i Sprawiedliwość Website (August 6, 2010), www.pis.org.pl/article.php?id=17510. 162. “Oświadczenie Prezydium Konferencji Episkopatu Polski i Arcybiskupa Metropolity Warszawskiego,” Konferencja Episkopatu Polski Website (August 12, 2010), http://www. episkopat.pl/?a=dokumentyKEP&doc=2010812_0. 163. Katarzyna Kowalczuk, “Oceny instytucji publicznych,” Komunikat z Badań, Centrum Badania Opinii Społecznej, 125 (September, 2010): 6. 164. For more on the role of the Church in the 1991 elections, see “Stanowisko Episkopatu Polski w sprawie wyborów parlamentarnych,” Tygodnik Powszechny 45, no. 39 (1991). 165. Marek Chmaj, “Inspiracje Kościoła katolickiego w myśli politycznej współczesnych polskich partii politycznych,” in Jachmyk, Religia i kościół rzymskokatolicki, 213. See also Zbigniew Nosowski, “Czy Polska jest (jeszcze) krajem katolickim?,” Więź 5 (May 2003), www. wiez.com.pl/index.php?s=miesiecznik_opis&;id=71&t=750. For more on the debates in Poland in the 1990s regarding the relationship between Church and state, see Burdziej, “Religion and Politics.” 166. “Komunikat z 319ego zebrania plenarnego Konferencji Episkopatu Polski,” Katolicka Agencja Informacyjna, October 10, 2002, http://system.ekai.pl/kair/?screen=depeszadodruku&_ scr_depesza_id_depeszy=99050. 167. “List Nuncjusza Apostolskiego przekazujący uwagi Stolicy Apostolskiej w sprawie Radia Maryja,” April 3, 2006, www.episkopat.pl/?a=dokumentyKEP&;doc=200646_0. 168. Jan Turnau, “Bp. Pieronek: Kościół nie jest jednopartyjny,” Gazeta Wyborcza, May 4, 2006, 2. 169. Katarzyna Wiśniewska, “Kościół za bardzo w polityce,” Gazeta Wyborcza, June 8, 2006, 6. 170. Turowicz, “Wiosna ludów ‘89,” Tygodnik Powszechny 44, no. 1 (1990): 1. 171. Tischner, “Wiara na wietrze,” Tygodnik Powszechny 49, no. 13 (1995). 172. Jarosław Gowin, “Zbłąkany pielgrzym,” Tygodnik Powszechny 53, no. 43 (1999): 1, 9. 173. Życiński, “Przy studni Jakuba,” Tygodnik Powszechny 49, no. 38 (1995): 1, 4. 174. Życiński, Pięć dialogów, 78. 175. Życiński, Pożegnanie z Nazaretem, 182–83. 176. Bolesław Pylak, “Wprowadzenie,” in Jachmyk, Religia i kościół rzymskokatolicki, 11–14. This was the text of the archbishop’s welcoming remarks to a conference at the Zakład Myśli Politycznej XIX i XX w., UMCS, Lublin, December 9–10, 1993. 177. Władysław Piwowarski, “Od ‘Kościoła ludu’ do ‘Kościoła wyboru,’” in Borowik and Zdaniewicz, Od Kościoła ludu, 15. 178. Janusz Mariański, “Kościół ludowy w kryzysie?,” in Piotrowski, Na przełomie stuleci, 521– 32. For a similar argument, see Zwoliński, Katolik i polityka.

Chapter 6 1. For the purposes of this chapter I use the term nationalism in the broadest sense of the word to refer to any ideological formation that prioritizes the nation above other forms of identity. The Polish language usually distinguishes between nacjonalizm and ruch narodowy (national movement), with the former term limited to the xenophobic, violent, racist, and anti-Semitic groups of the twentieth century. Some also differentiate between nationalism and patriotism, similarly denoting the former as negative and the latter as positive (or at

Note s to Pag e s 2 0 8 – 2 1 4

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

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least harmless). In English the second distinction is sometimes made, but more often an adjective must be used to differentiate between “liberal nationalism,” “anticolonial nationalism,” “right-wing nationalism,” and so on. Józef Pilawski, “Katolicy w przyszłej Dumie Państwowej,” Przegląd Katolicki 50 (December 14, 1905): 788–89. For a good discussion of the dilemmas of Catholic patriotism, see Lewalski, Kościół rzymskokatolicki, 67–126. Tazbir, A State without Stakes, 174. Jackowski, Pach, and Rudziński, Jasna Góra; Kłoczowski, Müllerowa, and Skarbek, Zarys dziejów Kościoła katolickiego w Polsce, 106; Tazbir, Historia Kościoła katolickiego, 192. Kłoczowski, Müllerowa, and Skarbek, Zarys dziejów Kościoła katolickiego w Polsce, 164. Several scholars have argued that many members of the clergy were central to the Polish Enlightenment, but in virtually every case the priests in question expressed (to put it mildly) heterodox views. See Bieńkowski, “Oświecenie i katastrofa rozbiorów (2 pół. XVIII w.),” in Kłoczowski, Chrześcijaństwo w Polsce, 312; Dylągowa, Duchowieństwo katolickie, 30; Kłoczowski, Müllerowa, and Skarbek, Zarys dziejów Kościoła katolickiego w Polsce, 135. Tazbir, Historia Kościoła katolickiego, 185. On the papal brève of July 1795, see Dylągowa, Duchowieństwo katolickie, 38; Tazbir, Historia Kościoła katolickiego, 186–87. Kłoczowski, A History of Polish Christianity, 222. Kłoczowski, Müllerowa, and Skarbek, Zarys dziejów Kościoła katolickiego w Polsce, 184; Kumor, Ustrój i organizacja Kościoła polskiego, 695. For a close look at how this transition played out in Poznań, see Alvis, Religion and the Rise of Nationalism. Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate, chapter 1. See also Walicki, Między filozofią, religią, i polityką; Walicki, Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism. Ziemięcka, “Rys piśmiennictwa naszego od 1830 roku,” in Studia, 80. For more on Pielgrzym, see Lechicki, “Polskie czasopiśmiennictwo katolickie,” 20. On the weakness of Catholicism among the emigres, see Dylągowa, Duchowieństwo katolickie,119. Wszołek, “Działalność polityczna,” 624–47. Letter to P. Gueranger (April 20, 1836), in Semeneńko, Letters, 23. On the Ressurectionists, see Dylągowa, Duchowieństwo katolickie, 120–21; Kłoczowski, Müllerowa, and Skarbek, Zarys dziejów Kościoła katolickiego w Polsce, 213–15; Królik, Hierarchia Kościelna, 15–17. Wielogłowski, Polska wobec Boga, v–viii. One of the ways the Church tried to turn the Poles away from revolutionary nationalism was through a publicity campaign against the Risorgimento. See Jurek, 254-68. Boudou, Stolica Święta a Rosja, 211–12, 229; Dylągowa, Duchowieństwo katolickie, 114; Kłoczowski, Müllerowa, and Skarbek, Zarys dziejów Kościoła katolickiego w Polsce, 259. This chart is derived from data in Wroński, Duchowieństwo i Kościół katolicki, 131. There were in fact eight dioceses in the empire, and one additional diocese serving all the LatinRite faithful outside the Polish Kingdom. These figure comes from Jabłońska-Deptuła and Skarbek, “W dobie między powstaniami (1832–1864),” in Kłoczowski, Chrześcijaństwo w Polsce, 405; Olszewski, in Kłoczowski, Chrześcijaństwo w Polsce, 472. Fijałkowski, “List Pasterski” (March 27–April 8, 1861), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 780, teka I.4.3. “Słowo Narodu Polskiego do JW. JX. Zygmunta Szczęsnego Felińskiego Arcybiskupa Metropolity Archidyecezyi Warszawskiej” (Warsaw, 1862), BN sygn. 823.590. For a defense of Feliński’s actions in 1863, see Glemp, W chwale wstawia się za nami. For details on the Church’s involvement in the demonstrations leading up to the 1863 revolt, see Bender, “Manifestacje patriotyczne i konspiracje przedpowstaniowe w Królestwie Polskim,” in Kalembka, Powstanie Styczniowe, 198–231.

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23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

Note s to Pag e s 2 1 5 – 2 2 4 Untitled, Głos Kapłana Polskiego, June 1862, in Kieniewicz and Miller, Prasa tajna, 205. Prawdziwy Patriota,May 7, 1862, in Kieniewicz and Miller, Prasa tajna, 184. Strażnica, January 25, 1862, in Kieniewicz and Miller, Prasa tajna, 35. Quoted in Jabłońska-Deptuła and Gawrysiakowa, “Z zagadnień religijno-społecznego ruchu kobiet,” 101. Strażnica, September 11, 1861, in Kieniewicz and Miller, Prasa tajna, 13. Ruch, September 17, 1862, in Kieniewicz and Miller, Prasa tajna, 348. Kosynier, August 21, 1862, in Kieniewicz and Miller, Prasa tajna, 368. Nowiny Polityczne Polskie, May 31, 1863, in Kieniewicz and Miller, Prasa tajna, 567. Nowiny Polityczne Polskie, April 13, 1863, in Kieniewicz and Miller, Prasa tajna, 550. Strażnica, September 29, 1861, and May 14, 1862, in Kieniewicz and Miller, Prasa tajna, 17, 50. Prawdziwy Patriota, May 7, 1862, in Kieniewicz and Miller, Prasa tajna, 183. In this and the previous citation, the expression used is wyznanie. This term is usually translated as “denomination,” but in these texts it included non-Christians as well. For some other examples of almost identical formulations, see Głos z Warszawy, May 20, 1862, and Ruch, July 5, 1862, in Kieniewicz and Miller, Prasa tajna, 194, 335. Kościół i Postępowość, 69–72. This statistic comes from Grott, Nacjonalizm Chrześcijański, 63–64. “Okólnik Arcybiskupa Gnieźnieńskiego i Poznańskiego,” Pamiętnik Religijno-Moralny 9, no. 1 (1862): 103. Note the reference to “our languages” (plural). Feliński, Pamiętniki, 218, 401. ibid., 477. ibid., 478. A copy of Feliński’s extraordinary letter is reprinted in ibid., 598–99. ibid., 112–13. Feliński, Pod Wodzą Opatrzności, 14. Chotkowski, O ideale politycznym, 7. Porter, “The Social Nation and Its Futures,” 1470–92; Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate, 58–74. Feliński, Pamiętniki, 113. Ziemięcka, Myśli o wychowaniu kobiet, 212–14. Ziemięcka, “Rozbiór kursów Adama Mickiewicza, poświęcony Wincentemu Polowi,” in Studia, 6. This book received the imprimatur from A. S. Krasiński, the bishop of Wilno. Ziemięcka, “O prawie moralnem, czyli o stosunku prawa naturalnego do prawa objawionego,” in Studia, 235. Ziemięcka, Zarysy filozofii katolickiej, 207, 212, 306. Henryk Stankiewicz, “Opatrzność i przeznaczenie,” Pielgrzym 5 (December 1846): 209–20. “Ewangelia na niedzielę czternastą po świątkach, zapisana u świętego Mateusza w rozdziale VI, w. 24–33,” Posiew 3, no. 35 (1908): 545–46. Wielogłowski, Polska wobec Boga, 264. Ziemięcka, “Rozbiór kursów,” 7. ibid., 23, 46. “Ewangelia na niedzielę drugą po Wielkanocy, zapisana u św. Łukasza w rozdziale X, w. 11–16,” Posiew 3, no. 18 (1908): 272–73. Feliński, Pamiętniki, 205. Feliński, Pod Wodzą Opatrzności, 27. Feliński, Trzej wieszczowie, 13–14. An almost identical argument appeared in an article in Przewodnik Katolicki decades later, in 1915. Individuals receive their rewards and punishments in heaven, this anonymous author wrote, but “nations and kingdoms take all their rewards, and all their punishments, here on earth.” The author used this reasoning to explain (in a curious parallel) both the long-suffering of the Jews and the partitions of Poland. J. D., “Bóg wodzem państw i narodów,” Przewodnik Katolicki 21, no. 28 (1915): 331–32.

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59. Kalinka, O czci świętych patronów polskich, 11–12, 32. 60. Spis, Znaczenie i kult, 10. 61. Władysław Markiewicz, “O Bractwach kościelnych i środkach ich rozwoju,” in Chotkowski, Wiec katolicki, 363. 62. S. Adamski, Mowa o miłości ojczyzny, 9, 27. 63. Semeneńko, Wyższy pogląd na historyę Polski, 87–89. 64. Semeneńko, O miłości ojczyzny: nauka druga, 21. 65. Semeneńko, Letters, 94. This is from a letter to Stanisław Zamoyski dated December 26, 1837. 66. Woronicz, “Dyspensa” (March 13, 1824), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, Listy Biskupów Polskich z lat 1728–1927 (uncatalogued). 67. Kościół i Postępowość, 69–72. 68. Feliński, Pod Wodzą Opatrzności, 28. See also Feliński, Pamiętniki, 482. 69. Feliński, Pod Wodzą Opatrzności, 85. 70. Semeneńko, O miłości ojczyzny: nauka druga, 13. 71. Feliński, Pamiętniki, 206. 72. Giller, Polska w walce, 59. Ironically, the priest delivering this sermon was Father Walenty Benwenuty, who ended up joining the partisans and dying in battle on March 22, 1863. He had previously been stripped of his right to preach in public because Archbishop Feliński deemed his patriotic sermons too inflammatory. 73. Feliński, Pamiętniki, 212–13. 74. The melody was also changed, because the original was difficult to sing and not widely known. In its place the tune from a hymn entitled “Hail to You, Blessed Virgin Mary” was adopted. For more on this hymn (and for the translation used here), see Trochimczyk, “Boże coś Polskę.” 75. Antoni Górecki, “Hymn do Boga o zachowaniu wolności,” http://members.chello.pl/j. uhma/bozecospolske.html. 76. Feliński, Pod Wodzą Opatrzności, 49. 77. Feliński, Nawoływanie narodu polskiego, 6. 78. Chotkowski, Andrzej Zamoyski, 23–24, 30. 79. Chotkowski, O ideale politycznym, 40–41. 80. For more on these ceremonies, see Dabrowski, Commemorations, 77–100. On the use of commemorations more generally to construct a Catholic understanding of Polishness, see Dabrowski, “Folk, Faith, and Fatherland.” 81. Chotkowski, Adam Mickiewicz, 8, 9–10, 16, 20. 82. Pelczar, Kazanie, 4, 6, 8, 9–11. 83. ibid., 11. 84. On pilgrimage practices in Poland, see Jackowski, Pielgrzymowanie. 85. “Bractwo Najśw. Panny Maryi Łaskawej, Królowy Konory Polskiej, zatwierdzone przez Władze świeckie i duchowne i obdarzone licznemi łaskami i przywilejami przez Ojca św. Leona XIII (Brewem z April 18, 1890),” printed as an appendix to Feliński, Nawoływanie narodu polskiego, 25–28.

Chapter 7 1. Catechism of Trent, 72. 2. Dmowski, “Podstawy polityki polskiej,” Przegląd Wszechpolski 11 ( July 1905): 339–40, 343. 3. Balicki, Egoizm, 58–60, 73. The term national egoism was first used by the German nationalist Wilhelm Jordan in 1848, though Balicki did not mention any specific source of inspiration for this idea. 4. Pochodnia 1 (May 1899): 3–4; “Z dzisiejszej doby,” Pochodnia 1 ( June 1899): 3. 5. Semeneńko, O miłości ojczyzny: Nauka druga, 5, 7.

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6. Maryan Morawski, “Po skierniewickim zjeździe,” Przegląd Powszechny 1, no. 4 (1884), xii–xvi. 7. Feliński, Pamiętniki, 212. 8. S. Adamski, Mowa o miłości ojczyzny, 14–16. For an expanded version of the same argument, see J. S. Adamski, Patryotyzm. 9. Maurycy Straszewski, “Czynniki rozdziału i spójni w dzisiejszem społeczeństwie,” Przegląd Powszechny 76, no. 226 (1902): 8. 10. Miłości ojczyzny, 8, 16, 30, 36, 41. 11. M. Ciemniewski, “Signum Temporis,” Przegląd Katolicki 24 ( June 15, 1904): 373–75. 12. Niedziałkowski, Co myślą, 22. 13. Pelczar, Kazanie, 12. 14. Leviticus 19:18; Zechariah 8:17; Matthew 19:19, 22:36–39; Mark 29–31, 12:33; Luke 10:27; Romans 13:9; Galatians 5:14; James 2:8. 15. Kmiecik, Misje Ludowe, 304–13. 16. T. Portych, “O miłości bliźniego,” Nowa Bibljoteka Kaznodziejska 33, nos. 14–15 (1927): 87. 17. Mały słownik języka polskiego (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1968), 48; Słownik języka Polskiego, CD ed. (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 2000). 18. Catechism of Trent, 302. 19. See also Matthew 5:38–44. 20. Zenonim Ludwik Ancyporowicz, “Rys powinności chrześcijanina,” Pielgrzym 4 (September 1845): 303, 306, 308. 21. Krukowski, Nauki katechizmowe, 198–99. 22. Stagraczyński, “Czem jest praca?,” in Wybór kazań, 1:495, 499. 23. Floryan [Stablewski], no title, Przewodnik Katolicki 1, no. 8 (1895): 57, 59. 24. Szeptycki, List Pasterski do Polaków, 6. He used similar terms in an earlier pastoral letter condemning class hatred and struggle: Szeptycki, List Pasterski do duchowieństwa, 3. 25. “Sprawa Wrzesińska,” Przegląd Powszechny 73, no. 217 (1902): 3. 26. Quoted in Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia, 239. 27. Henryk Przeździecki, “Mowy synodalne J. E. Ordynariusza” (August 28–30, 1923), in Synod diecezjalny podlaski, 83. 28. Dąbrowski, “Kazanie na niedzielę V po 3 Królach,” in Kazania, 75–79. 29. Letter to Bogdan Jański (April 1, 1838), in Semeneńko, Letters, 138; Semeneńko, Wyższy pogląd na historyę Polski, 6. 30. Semeneńko, O miłości ojczyzny, nauka druga, 6. 31. Karol Wincenty Saryusz Skorkowski, “List pasterski” (February 20, 1831), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, Listy Biskupów Polskich z lat 1728–1927 (uncatalogued). 32. Stagraczyński, “Skąd tylu nieprzyjaciół Kościoła?,” in Wybór kazań, 1:104. See the almost identical message in “Jaki koniec prześladowania P. Jezusa i Kościoła?,” 1:34; “O władzy Pana Jezusa,” 1:384–91. The italicized passage is from Matthew 16:18. 33. Stagraczyński, “Wielkość Kościoła, gdy cierpi,” in Wybór kazań, 1:376–77. 34. Ujejski, Nacyonalizm, 37, 48–49, 77–78. 35. J. K., “Wszystko dla ojczyzny,” Przewodnik Katolicki 28, no. 51 (1922): 1–2. 36. Bilczewski, O miłości ojczyzny, 12, 23–25. 37. Zygmunt Wasilewski, “Rozbrajanie ducha narodu,” Myśl Narodowa 11 (February 9, 1924): 6. 38. Dmowski, Kościół, Naród, i Państwo, 14, 19–20, 27, 32. 39. Nowosad, “Walka i twórczość narodowa,” in Nowosad, W walce o katolickie państwo, 41. On the attempts by the extreme right to claim the mantel of Catholicism, see Lipski, Katolickie państwo narodu polskiego; Paszko, O katolickie państwo narodu polskiego. 40. Jan Urban, “Ku uzdrowieniu polskiego nacjonalizmu,” Przegląd Powszechny 44, no. 175 (1927): 209–24. See also Urban, “Sprawozdanie z ruchu religijnego, naukowego i społecznego,” Przegląd Powszechny 44, no. 174 (1927): 131–39. 41. Aleksander Kakowski, “List pasterski do kapłanów archidiecezji warszawskiej” (April 12, 1936), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne, sygn. 502, teka I.4.3, pp. 7, 18. On Kakowski’s support for Piłsudski, see Pease, Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter, 34.

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42. Nikodem Cieszyński, “Głos przestrogi i pociechy wśród wielkiej wojny: Kazanie wygłoszone na nabożeństwie ekspiacyjnem” (Poznań, February 7, 1915), in Lud jako lew, 13–15. This book received the imprimatur. 43. “Powstanie naród przeciw narodowi.” The sermons included in this volume are Władysław Hozakowski, “Wojna jako dopust Boży,” 1–14; Edmund Gryglewicz, “Wojna jako chłosta Boża,” 15–27; Kamil Kantak, “Wojna a miłość nieprzyjaciół,” 28–53; Stanisław Łukomski, “Dom i rodzina w czasie wojennym,” 54–63; Stanisław Okoniewski, “Wojna a odrodzenie społeczeństwa,” 64–69; Edmund Gryglewicz, “Wojna czas pokuty i poprawy,” 70–91; Cieszyński, “Głos przestrogi i pociechy,” 92–105; Józef Kłos, “Wojna w świetle nauki chrześcijańskiej,” 106–20. 44. Pelczar, Wezwanie, 1, 25. For more on the Polish Church’s response to World War I, see Lewalski, Kościół rzymskokatolicki, 305–46; Piela, Udział duchowieństwa. 45. Bandurski, Droga krzyżowa Polski, 32. 46. “Mowa poświęcona pamięci Henryka Dąbrowskiego w setną rocznicę jego zgonu” (Poznań, June 9, 1918), in Cieszyński, Lud jako lew, 76. 47. Kakowski, “List Pasterski” (November 12, 1918), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 75, teka I.4.3. 48. Stanisław Gall, “List pasterski” (August 8, 1920), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, Listy Biskupów Polskich z lat 1728–1927 (uncatalogued). 49. Ildefons Bobicz, “Katolik wobec kryzysu,” Nowa Bibljoteka Kaznodziejska 44, no. 4 (1933): 263, 267. 50. Kakowski, “List pasterski z okazji świąt Bożego Narodzenia 1922 roku,” Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 1296, teka I.4.3, p. 6. 51. Kmiecik, Misje Ludowe, 49. 52. Bilczewski, Obowiązki powojenne, 16–17. 53. S. Konstantynowicz, “Trzeci maj,” Życie i Praca 6, no. 18 (1929): 1. 54. “Kara Boża,” Życie i Praca 11, no. 33 (1934): 1–2. 55. On the phenomenon on conspiratorial thinking, see Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories; Fenster, Conspiracy Theories; Goldberg, Enemies Within; Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style; Knight, Conspiracy Nation; Knight, Conspiracy Culture; Melley, Empire of Conspiracy; West and Sanders, Transparency and Conspiracy. 56. Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, paragraph 39. 57. K. Pogłódek, “Wiara i czyn: Przemowa wypowiedziana przy poświęceniu sztandaru Kongregacji Pań i Panien,” Nowa Bibljoteka Kaznodziejska 33, nos. 14–15 (1927): 108. 58. Redakcja, “Abyśmy byli jedno,” Przewodnik Katolicki 1, no. 1 (1895): 2. 59. “Słówko o Bractwie Matek chrześcijańskich,” Przewodnik Katolicki 1, no. 2 (1895): 18–19. 60. “Zesłanie Ducha św.,” Przewodnik Katolicki 1, no. 22 (1895): 170. 61. Bilczewski, “Uczyć, uczyć, uczyć! List pasterski do kapłanów i wiernych” (Lwów, December 17, 1911), in Listy pasterskie, 127, 139, 142, emphasis in the original. 62. Pelczar, “Przemowa,” Akta i Statuta Kongregacyi Synodalnej, 12–13, 14. 63. Kakowski, “List Pasterski” (September 14, 1913), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 504/6, teka I.4.3, pp. 4, 5, 10. 64. Feliks Bodzianowski, “Fałszywi prorocy chwili obecnej,” Nowa Bibljoteka Kaznodziejska 33, nos. 14–15 (1927): 38. 65. Graszyński, “Kazanie na urocz. Matki Boskiej Szkaplerznej,” Nowa Bibljoteka Kaznodziejska 33, nos. 14–15 (1927): 16–20. 66. “Ewangelja na niedzielę szóstą po Wielkanocy, zapisana u św. Jana w rozdziale XV w. 26–27 i w rozdziale XVI w. 1–4,” Życie i Praca 11, no. 19 (1934): 2. 67. Teodorowicz, Państwo Chrześcijańskie, 18. 68. “Nabożeństwo majowe, i majowy, rycerski czyn,” Rycerz Niepokalanej 12, no. 5 (1933): 131. 69. “Potęga prasy,” Przewodnik Katolicki, 28, no. 25 (1922): 10. 70. “List Pasterski Biskupów Polskich Duchowieństwu i Wiernym” (Warsaw, March 5, 1926), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie (uncatalogued), p. 9.

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71. J. K., “Szkoła,” Przewodnik Katolicki 28, no. 23 (1922): 2. 72. Mieczysław Skonieczny, “Kazanie o akcji katolickiej na święto Jezusa Chrystusa Króla,” Nowa Bibljoteka Kaznodziejska 33, no. 18 (1927): 303. 73. Teodorowicz, Chrystus w walce, 13. 74. A. Ski [Antoni Szymański], Religja a Polityka, 51. 75. “Czego rolnikom trzeba,” Życie i Praca 11, no. 28 (1934): 1–2. 76. On the usage of the phrase culture wars in the United States, see Hunter, Culture Wars; Jensen, “The Culture Wars.” 77. St. Durzyński, “Tęsknota za Bogiem, za religją Prawdy,” Nowa Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 33, no. 17 (1927): 293–98. 78. “O rolę-żywicielkę,” Przewodnik Katolicki 41, no. 44 (1935): 698. 79. “Wróg atakuje,” Życie i Praca 6, no. 38 (1929): 1. This particular issue of Życie i Praca was initially blocked by the censors, and the surviving copy is marked as the “second edition after confiscation,” with a large blank space remaining on p. 2. I was unable to obtain an original transcript of Cardinal Hlond’s speech. 80. Hlond, “O zadaniach Katolicyzmu wobec walki z Bogiem,” in Na straży sumienia narodu, 44. 81. Aleksander Kakowski, “List pasterski do kapłanów archidiecezji warszawskiej” (April 12, 1936), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne, sygn. 502, teka I.4.3, p. 15. 82. Kmiecik, Misje Ludowe, 449. 83. Mieczysław Skonieczny, “Kazanie o akcji katolickiej na święto Jezusa Chrystusa Króla,” Nowa Bibljoteka Kaznodziejska 33, no. 18 (1927): 316–17. 84. Biblia Tysiąclecia, footnote to Genesis 3:15. 85. Quanta Cura, paragraph 11. 86. “Program Milicji Niepokalanej,” Rycerz Niepokalanej 6, no. 1 (1927): 30–31, emphasis in the original. 87. “Nabożeństwo majowe, i majowy, rycerski czyn,” Rycerz Niepokalanej 12, no. 5 (1933): 132. 88. Władysław Śpikowski, “Trzy Kazania na tle encykliki Piusa XI, ‘Przynagleni miłością Chrystusową,’” Nowa Bibljoteka Kaznodziejska 44, no. 2 (1933): 88. 89. Józef Hetnał, “Duch świata a Kościół,” Nowa Bibljoteka Kaznodziejska 44, no. 6 (1933): 432. 90. Bernard Hołownia, “Książę ciemności zwalcza Kościół,” Nowa Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 44, no. 5 (1939): 381. The biblical reference is to John 16:33. 91. Teodorowicz, Państwo Chrześcijańskie a Państwo Pogańskie, 6–8, 21. 92. Kazimierz Lutosławski, “Nasz program (3),” Polak=Katolik 1, no. 4 (1917): 4. 93. Hlond, “O życie katolickie na Śląsku,” in Na straży sumienia narodu, 23–25. 94. Teodorowicz, Chrystus w walce, 4, 10–11. 95. On the persecution of the Church during the Stalinist years, see Gryz, Kościół i państwo; Krasowski, Państwo i Kościoł; Noszczak, Polityka państwa; Żaryn, Kościół w latach przełomu; Żaryn, Kościół a władza. 96. Hlond, “Na 950-lecie śmierci męczeńskiej Św. Wojciecha” (Warsaw, March 10, 1947), in Na straży sumienia narodu, 178–80. The reference to Belial is from 2 Corinthians 6:15. Mieszko and Bolesław were the medieval Polish rulers responsible for bringing Christianity to the country. 97. W. J., “Program Niepokalanej naszym programem,” Rycerz Niepokalanej 19, no. 1 (1945): 2–3. 98. “Wielkopostny list pasterski Episkopatu Polski: O panowanie ducha Bożego w Polsce” (February 18, 1946), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 31, 37. 99. Wyszyński, “Duchowieństwo polskie w obliczu potrzeb współczesnych” (Holy Thursday, 1949), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 110. 100. Między panem a plebanem, 37. 101. Tischner, The Spirit of Solidarity, 3.

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102. Jerzy Zagórski, “Szukający Diabła,” Tygodnik Powszechny 2, no. 31 (1946): 4. 103. Piwowarczyk, “Kościół ludzkości,” Tygodnik Powszechny 2, no. 8 (1946): 1. 104. An excellent introduction to the concept of discourse is Dirks, Eley, and Ortner, Culture/ Power/History. In that volume, see particularly Pierre Bourdieu, “Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic Power,” 155–99, and Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” 200–221. My thanks to Paul Brykczyński for suggesting that we think of the relationship between experience and discourse as recursive. 105. Dudek, Państwo i Kościół, 103–5; Gryz, Pozwolić czy nie? 106. Zbigniew Adamowicz and Alicja Wójcik, “Ludność Polski według wyznań,” in Jachmyk, Religia i kościół rzymskokatolicki, 25–26; Kłoczowski and Müllerowa, “Chrześcijaństwo polskie po 1945,” in Kłoczowski, Chrześcijaństwo w Polsce, 622, 632. On the Polish Church’s institutional adaptations during the communist era, see Osa, “Resistance, Persistence, and Change.” 107. Anna and Andrzej Anusz, Samotnie wśród wiernych, 227; Irena Borowik, “Religijność w Polsce w kontekście innych krajów,” in Borowik and Doktór, Pluralizm religijny i moralny w Polsce, 149; Vincent C. Chrypiński, “The Catholic Church in 1944–1989 Poland,” in Ramet, Catholicism and Politics, 140; Paweł Bieliński, “Duchowieństwo i formacja kapłańska,” Katolicka Agencja Informacyjna, March 8, 2005, http://system.ekai.pl/ kair/?screen=depeszadodruku&_scr_depesza_id_depeszy=345662. These statistics probably overstate the actual levels of church attendance, but they do reveal the dramatic increase from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. 108. For more on the Virgin’s pilgrimage, see Dudek, Państwo i Kościół, 203. On the Churchstate conflict surrounding the millennium commemorations, see Dudek and Gryz, Komuniści i Kościół, 217–76. 109. “Biskupi polscy wzywają cały Naród do modlitwy za Ojczyznę” (Warsaw, January 27, 1970), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 619–22. 110. Markiewicz, Państwo i Kościół, 111. 111. See Anna and Andrzej Anusz, Samotnie wśród wiernych, 61. 112. Między panem a plebanem, 93. 113. Wyszyński, “List do duszpasterzy stolicy” (Warsaw, September 5, 1980), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa oraz Episkopatu, 180–81. For more on the reaction to martial law by the Episcopate (and the papacy), see Raina, Stan wojenny. 114. Anna and Andrzej Anusz, Samotnie wśród wiernych, 168. Wyszyński considered this statement to be so important that he recorded it and gave the tape to the union delegates to play to the remainder of the Solidarity leadership. On the Church’s position in 1980–81, see Dudek and Gryz, Komuniści i Kościół, 351–61. 115. Szajkowski, Next to God, Poland, 194. 116. Quoted in Berend, Central and Eastern Europe, 261. 117. Józef Glemp, “Stajemy dziś w prawdzie przed Bogiem,” May 20, 2000, www.spp.episkopat. pl/kazania/000520.htm. 118. “Modlitwa za Ojczyznę,” in Listy pasterskie Prymasa oraz Episkopatu, 472–73. 119. This is from a radio presentation given by Cardinal Glemp entitled “Czy pamiętasz stan wojenny,” broadcast by Radio Józef on December 9, 2001. It is reprinted in “Prymas Józef Glemp o stanie wojennym,” Gazeta Wyborcza, December 13, 2001, 4. 120. On Popiełuszko, see Czaczkowski and Wiścicki, Ksiądz Jerzy Popiełuszko; Fredro-Boniecki, Zwycięstwo Księdza Jerzego; Kindziuk, Ksiądz Jerzy Popiełuszko; Kotański, Ksiądz Jerzy Popiełuszko; Lewek, Ksiądz Jerzy Popiełuszko; Nitecki, Znak zwycięstwa. 121. “Pomoce homiletyczne na rok 1975/76,” Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 32.12, teka T. I. 32. 122. Paweł Kosiak, “Po drogach trudnych razem z Kościołem,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 104, no. 6 (1980): 343. 123. “List pasterski na uroczystość Chrystusa Króla” (Warsaw, October 16, 1980), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa oraz Episkopatu, 465–68.

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124. “Wezwanie Episkopatu do modlitwy za Ojca Świętego i kapłanów przed 3 maja 1970,” in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 299–305. 125. “Biskupi polscy do braci kapłanów” ( Jasna Góra, August 28, 1963), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 298–300. 126. “List Episkopatu Polski do duchowieństwa o moralnym zagrożeniu narodu” (Warsaw, January 25, 1968), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 509. 127. “Stenogram kazania wygłoszonego przez bpa. sufragana Zygmunta Kamińskiego w dn. 2 lipca 1980 r. o godz. 12,00 w Krasnobrodzie,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, Stenogramy Kazań, 1978–80, sygn. 125/214, p. 12. 128. “Stenogram z wystąpieniu bpa. Zygmunta Kamińskiego w dniu 18.XI.79 r. w parafii Bełżyce,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, Stenogramy Kazań, 1978–80, sygn. 125/214, p. 115. 129. Wojciech Sokół, “Opozycja polityczna a religia i Kościół rzymskokatolicki,” in Jachmyk, Religia i kościół rzymskokatolicki, 198. 130. Bartnik, Idea Polskości, 248. 131. Wyszyński, “O katolickiej woli życia” (Lublin, Easter 1947), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 60. 132. Wyszyński, “List Episkopatu Polski do katolickiej młodzieży polskiej” (Kraków, April 15, 1948), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 65. 133. Wyszyński, “Duchowieństwo polskie w obliczu potrzeb współczesnych” (Holy Thursday, 1949), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 112. 134. Wyszyński, “Wezwanie do kapłanów na wielki post” (Warsaw, February 2, 1953), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 246. 135. “List pasterski Episkopatu Polski na nowy rok pracy wychowawczej” ( Jasna Góra, September 3, 1959), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 188. 136. “Episkopat Polski do duchowieństwa rzymskokatolickiego w Polsce” (Warsaw, March 15, 1961), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 230. 137. Stanisław Szymański, “Miłość nie wpada w gniew,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 70, no. 1 (1963): 29–30. 138. Wyszyński, “Orędzie wielkopostne” (Gniezno-Warsaw, Ash Wednesday, 1963), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 422. 139. “Orędzie biskupów polskich do ich niemieckich braci w chrystusowym urzędzie pasterskim” (Rome, November 18, 1965), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 829–36. 140. Wojtyła, “Kościół epoki dialogu” (Kraków, December 25, 1965), in Kazania, 307. 141. “List Episkopatu Polski o chrześcijańskim patriotyzmie” (Poznań, September 5, 1972), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 706. 142. “Pomoce homiletyczne na rok 1975/76,” Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 32.12, teka T. I. 32, p. 19. 143. “Pomoce homiletyczne na rok 1976/77,” Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 32.13, teka T. I. 32., pp. 3–4. For more on the Catholic dialogue with atheists in Poland, see Obirek, Co nas łączy. 144. T. Badura, “Krzyż i wrogowie,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 104, no. 1 (1980): 52–54. 145. Mirosław Drzewiecki, “Twarze zła” (Wrocław, July 13, 1982), in Naprawdę wolni: Wybór kazań z lat 1982–1988 (Paris: Editions Spotkania, 1989), 27–28. 146. “Kazanie do rolników o przetrwanie w nadziei” (Częstochowa, September 3, 1982), in Kazania wojenne, 36. 147. “Kazanie o wolności ducha i umysłu” (Podkowa Leśna, October 13, 1982), in Kazania wojenne, 49. 148. Stanisław Iłczyk, “Groźba zagłady,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 122, no. 1 (1989): 25. 149. Rafał Pierzchała, “Groźba zagłady,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 122, no. 1 (1989): 27. 150. On Catholic attitudes toward life in postcommunist Poland, see Załęcki, Między triumfalizmem a poczuciem zagrożenia. 151. Quoted in Nowak, Walka z Kościołem, 263.

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152. Bolesław Pylak, “Radio Maryja prowadzi piękną i skuteczną ewangelizację,” Nasz Dziennik, September 12, 2002, in Rydzyk, Tak-tak, nie-nie, 270–71. 153. Bartnik, Idea Polskości, 59. 154. Rydzyk, Tak-tak, nie-nie, 31, 55, 61–63, 72–74, 88, 187. 155. ibid., 91. 156. Jerzy Bajda, “Aby Polska była Polską,” Nasz Dziennik, December 7, 2005, www.informacje. int.pl/readarticle.php?article_id=176. 157. “Oburzenie po filmie ‘Imperium Ojca Rydzyka,’” Katolicka Agencja Informacyjna, November 26, 2002, http://ekai.pl/wydarzenia/x3488/oburzenie-po-filmie-imperium-ojcarydzyka. 158. “Sterowana akcja medialna,” Nasz Dziennik, September 10, 2002, www.naszawitryna.pl/ jedwabne_816.html. 159. Sebastian Duda, “Miłość i wojowniczość: Teologia Radia Maryji,” Tygodnik Powszechny 57, no. 10 (2003), www.tygodnik.com.pl/numer/280010/duda.html. 160. Maciej Zięba, “Chrześcijaństwo ma przyszłość,” Rzeczpospolita 63 (March 15, 2003), http://new-arch.rp.pl/artykul/426380.html. 161. Mirosław Drzewiecki, “Kościół z Narodem,” www.mdrzewiecki.wroclaw.pl/index. php?site=6&;strona=15.

Chapter 8 1. Lewalski, Kościoły chrześcijańskie, 90. Many scholars have highlighted the distinctiveness of modern anti-Semitism. See, for example, Shmuel Ettinger, “The Modern Period,” in BenSasson, A History of the Jewish People, 875–79; Grott, Nacjonalizm Chrześcijański; Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction; Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism; Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism. For the Vatican’s official endorsement of this approach, see Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah. 2. Kertzer, The Popes against the Jews, 264. See also Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning. 3. Korboński, “Poland Ten Years After,” 134. 4. For some general discussions of Catholicism and anti-Semitism in interwar Poland, see Modras, The Catholic Church and Antisemitism; Oppenheim, Kościół polski wobec antysemityzmu; Pałka, Kościół katolicki. 5. Kopyciński, Dokąd dążymy?, 159. 6. “Sprawa żydowska,” Posiew 27, no. 32 (1933): 2. 7. Ruether, Faith and Fratricide; see also Isaac, Jesus and Israel. 8. Stagraczyński, “Ostatnie słowa,” in Wybór kazań, 2:268. 9. Stagraczyński, “Katolik w piekle,” in Wybór kazań, 1:77–82. 10. Dąbrowski, “Kazanie na niedzielę XXI po Świątkach,” in Kazania, 330–38. 11. Janiszewski, Do walki, 15. 12. Feliński, Pamiętniki, 486. 13. ibid., 582. 14. Periodical titles provide an exception (thus Tygodnik Katolicki and Przegląd Katolicki), but book titles do not (thus Księga pamiątkowa wiecu katolickiego and Nauki katechizmowe na całość prawd wiary św. katolickiej). 15. Kościół i Postępowość, 8, 10–11, 70–71. 16. Krukowski, Nauki katechizmowe, 254, 268–69, 359. 17. “Walka o byt,” Przegląd Katolicki 7 (February 3–15, 1883): 104–5. 18. “Objaśnienie ‘Roli,’” Przegląd Katolicki 10 (February 24–March 8, 1883): 155. 19. “Używanie krwi chrześcijańskiej przez żydów,” Przegląd Katolicki 6 ( January 27–February 8, 1883): 88; “W kwestji rytualnego używania krwi chrześcijańskiej,” Przegląd Katolicki 3 (March 17–29, 1883): 204. 20. A. Z., “W odpowiedzi ‘Roli,’” Przegląd Katolicki 44 (October 29, 1896): 702–3.

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21. In a later text Archbishop Teodorowicz contended that Lueger’s anti-Semitism was primarily a tactical move. See Teodorowicz, Nad trumną Luegera, 16. 22. Chotkowski, Wiec katolicki, 221. 23. Władysław Krasiński, “O uregulowaniu zbytu wyrobów przemysłowych i rękodzielniczych,” in Chotkowski, Wiec katolicki, 501–3. 24. Chotkowski, Wiec katolicki, 68–79. The full text is offered in “Ruthenian,” then in Polish translation. For a similar enthusiastic affirmation of Catholic unity regardless of national differences, see the speeches offered by Ukrainian pilgrims in Pamiątka pielgrzymki ludowej, 58–63. 25. See, for example, Władysław Markiewicz, “O Bractwach kościelnych i środkach ich rozwoju,” in Chotkowski, Wiec katolicki, 365. 26. Andrzej Potocki, in Chotkowski, Wiec katolicki, 54. 27. Albin Dunajewski, in Chotkowski, Wiec katolicki, 65–66. 28. Stanisław Tarnowski, in Chotkowski, Wiec katolicki, 163–64. 29. Lubelski, Nacjonalizm, 32. 30. Barruel, Mémoires. An abridged version in Polish came out in 1812 (Historya Jakobinzmu), but I have found no indication that it had much impact at the time. 31. Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, paragraphs 2, 20, 22. For a good summary of the history of Catholic conspiracy theories about the Freemasons, see Modras, The Catholic Church and Antisemitism, 45–56. For an example of the ongoing appeal of these myths, see Suchecki, Kościół a masoneria. 32. Kościół i Postępowość, 33. 33. Lekszyński, Masonerya i karbonaryzm. 34. Cam. Segr., “Masonerya i socyalizm,” Przegląd Katolicki 1–8 (7 January–February 24, 1897): 7, 36–38, 118–20. 35. Pelczar, Masonerya, 10, 12, 16, 35, 40, 51. 36. Wałęga, Przemowa, 22, 28–29. 37. Morawski, “Asemityzm,” Przegląd Powszechny 49, no. 146 (1896): 162, 168, 170, 172, 176, 178, 185. 38. J. b. P., “Cos o antysemityzmie,” Przegląd Katolicki 38, nos. 22–25 (1900): 339, 361, 375, 395–396. 39. M. J., Tajemnice żydowskie, 7–8, 73, 75, 80, emphasis in the original. 40. Włodzimierz Czerkawski, “Refleksye nad stanem kwestyi żydowskiej u nas,” Przegląd Powszechny 79, no. 236 (1903): 197. 41. Teodor Jeske-Choiński, “List z Warszawy,” Przegląd Powszechny 87, no. 259 (1905): 175, 168. On Jeske-Choiński, see Weeks, “The ‘International Jewish Conspiracy’ Reaches Poland.” 42. Pilch, Odrzucenie Mesjasza, 7, 44–45, 151, 157. 43. J. K., “Szkoła wyznaniowa,” Przewodnik Katolicki 28, no. 24 (1922): 2. The same reasoning can be seen in Kwiatkowski, Wołamy o szkołę katolicką! 44. Bogdalski, Wspomnienia, 153. 45. For a nuanced presentation of a counterargument, see Levine, Economic Origins of Antisemitism. 46. Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, 26–27 (based on figures from 1931). The chart, which also reflects the situation in 1931, is based on data in Historia Polski w liczbach, 389. For more on the economic situation of the Jews in interwar Poland, see Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland. 47. Wincenty Teofil Chościak-Popiel, “List pasterski do JJ. WW. Dziekanów Archidyecezyi Warszawskiej” (February 26, 1906), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 1307, teka I.4.3. See also “Protokół Zebrania JJ. WW. Dziekanów Archidyecezyi Warszawskiej” (February 7, 1906), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 1306, I.4.3. For more on Kłopotowski, see Lewalski, Kościoły chrześcijańskie, 114; Olszewski, Kłopotowski. 48. Handbill for Polak=Katolik (1906), Biblioteka Narodowa, sygn. kras 95114. The editors would eventually exchange the equals sign for a hyphen, thus creating Polak-Katolik.

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49. “Gawędy starego Matusia,” Posiew 3, no. 18 (1908): 278. 50. “Gawędy starego Matusia,” Posiew 3, no. 20 (1908): 310–11. 51. B. Sawicki, “Lud polski i jego wrogowie 3,” Gazeta Świąteczna 34, no. 30 (1914): 1; “Lud polski i jego wrogowie 4,” Gazeta Świąteczna 34, no. 31 (1914): 3–4. 52. Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village, 142–84. For more on this social strata, see Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals. 53. St. Siedlarek z Czyżewa, “List do ‘Posiewu,’” Posiew 3, no. 1 (1908): 11–13. 54. Czytelnik “Posiewu” z parafii Nieliskiej, “List do ‘Posiewu,’” Posiew 3, no. 1 (1908): 11–13. See also “Z listów do ‘Posiewu,’” Posiew 3, no. 26 (1908): 410–12. 55. “Z listów do ‘Posiewu,’” Posiew 3, no. 41 (1908): 649. 56. See Lewalski, Kościoły chrześcijańskie, 257–58. For an excellent ethnography of small-town Polish-Jewish relations, see R. Lehmann, Symbiosis and Ambivalence. 57. Czytelnik “Posiewu” T. Tyzik, z parafii Kraśnik, “Listów do ‘Posiewu,’” Posiew 3, no. 4 (1908): 61. 58. Jan Mar, “Młoda wieś budzi się,” Przewodnik Katolicki 41, no. 28 (1935): 446–47, 450. 59. J. Modrzejewski, “Żydowskie apetyty,” Posiew 21, no. 49 (1927): 2–3. 60. Niemcewicz did not publish this text during his lifetime; it only appeared in a posthumous edition in 1858. See Rusinowa, Pana Juliana, 253-54. 61. “Sprawa żydowska,” Posiew 27, no. 32 (1933): 23. 62. Wuj z Baranowa, “Skrzynka do listów,” Przewodnik Katolicki 41, no. 48 (1935): 775. 63. Trzeciak, Mesjanizm, 98, 117. See the almost identical arguments in Trzeciak’s Mesjanizm a kwestja żydowska; Odżydzić wytwórczość i sprzedaż dewocjonaliów; Pornografia narzędziem obcych agentur; Program Światowej polityki żydowskiej; Talmud o gojach a kwestja żydowska w Polsce: Ubój rytualny w świetle Biblii i Talmudu. 64. Konkurs, “Swój do swego!,” Przewodnik Katolicki 45, no. 7 (1939): 109. 65. “Bij Żyda, lecz tylko po kieszeni: Rozstrzygnięcie konkursu: Swój do Swego,” Przewodnik Katolicki 45, no. 15 (1939): 248. 66. The definitive exploration of this myth is Kersten, Polacy, Żydzi, Komunizm. See also Gerrits, “Anti-Semitism and Anti-Communism.” 67. On Jewish voting patterns and party membership, see Kopstein and Wittenberg, “Who Voted Communist?”; Borkowski, “O społeczeństwie Drugiej Rzeczypospolitej,” 126–30. 68. Szwagrzyk, “Żydzi,” 37–42. Other discussions of the żydokomuna myth in postwar Poland include Grabski, Działalność komunistów; Gross, Upiorna dekada: Andrzej Paczkowski, “Żydzi w UB: Próba weryfikacji stereotypu,” in Szarota, Komunizm, 192–204. 69. Dzisiejsze zadania katolicyzmu, 32–41. Józef Tretiak (136–39) offered a similar argument, concluding that the only solution was conversion. 70. ibid., 215–21. 71. Józef Kaczmarczyk, “Bolszewizm a mesjasz żydowski,” Biblioteka Spraw i Zagadnień Narodowych i Polskich 2/3 (1935): 104–12. 72. Feliks Bodzianowski, “Fałszywi prorocy chwili obecnej,” Nowa Bibljoteka Kaznodziejska 33, nos. 14–15 (1927): 38–40. 73. Dmowski, Myśli, 14. 74. Vaussard, Enquête. 75. Antoni Peretiatkowicz, “Przedmowa,” in Vaussard, Nacjonalizm a katolicyzm, vii. 76. Zdziechowski, in Vaussard, Nacjonalizm a katolicyzm, 127, 130–31. 77. “Uchwały pierwszego polskiego synodu plenarnego, odbytego w Częstochowie Roku Pańskiego 1936,” Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 190, teka C.I.3.331. 78. “O rolę-żywicielkę,” Przewodnik Katolicki 41, no. 44 (1935): 698; “Ewangelia na dwudziestą pierwszą niedzielę po Świątkach,” Przewodnik Katolicki 41, no. 44 (1935): 698. 79. K. W., “Sprawa Żydowska”; “Ewangelia na niedzielę siedemnastą po Świątkach, zapisana u św. Mateusza w rozdziale XXII, w. 35–46,” Życie i Praca 6, no. 37 (1929): 1–2. 80. “Ewangelja na niedzielę dwunastą po Świątkach, zapisana u św. Łukasza w rozdziale X, w 23–37,” Życie i Praca 6, no. 32 (1929): 2.

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81. “Czuwajcie, gdyż wróg nie śpi!,” Życie i Praca 6, no. 42 (1929): 1. See also “Niebezpieczeństwo żydowskie,” Życie i Praca 6, no. 1 (1929): 4; “Sprawa żydowska,” Życie i Praca 6, no. 3 (1929): 1; “Groźny wzrost nędzy w miastach,” Życie i Praca 6, no. 19 (1929): 1; “Jak rośnie młoda Polska?,” Życie i Praca 11, no. 38 (1934): 1–2; “Niebezpieczne objawy,” Życie i Praca 11, no. 39 (1934): 1–2; “Nie możemy ustąpić,” Życie i Praca 11, no. 40 (1934): 1–2; “Obcy nie mogą być przywódcami duchowymi narodu,” Życie i Praca 11, no. 41 (1934): 1; “Żydzi jako wychowawcy dzieci katolickich,” Życie i Praca 11, no. 41 (1934): 1; “Prawo rodziców do szkoły,” Życie i Praca 11, no. 41 (1934): 1. 82. Rostworowski, Najważniejsze postulaty, 23. 83. Pelczar, Kazanie, 15. 84. J., “Miłość bliźniego,” Posiew 27, no. 35 (1933): 2. 85. Program Stronnictwa Chrześcijańsko-Narodowego, 16. 86. Program Polskiego Stronnictwa Katolicko-Ludowego, 14. 87. Wujem z Baranowa, “Gawęda żydowska,” Przewodnik Katolicki 41, no. 42 (1935): 676–77. 88. Janiszewski, Co jest Ojczyzna, 67, emphasis in the original. 89. Ujejski, Nacyonalizm, 73–75. 90. Wuj z Baranowa, “Skrzynka do listów,” Przewodnik Katolicki 41, no. 48 (1935): 775. 91. M. K., “Wszystkie herezje Samaś zniszczyła na całym świecie,” Rycerz Niepokalanej 12, no. 10 (1933): 293. 92. “Okpieni przez żydów masoni,” Rycerz Niepokalanej 5 (1926); 258–62, reprinted in Kolbe o masonerii i żydach. 93. Rycerz Niepokalanej 5 (1926); 2-7, reprinted in Kolbe o masonerii i żydach. 94. “Katolicki ksiądz ofiaruje swoje życie za żyda,” Rycerz Niepokalanej 12, no. 4 (1933): 122. 95. St. Krokowski, “Precz ze śmieciami w Nowym Roku!,” Przewodnik Katolicki 45, no. 6 (1939): 96–97. 96. “List pasterski episkopatu Polski” (Warsaw, December 10, 1918), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, Episkopat Polski, Odezwy, 1918–39 (uncatalogued), 22. 97. Both the appeal and Kakowski’s response are reprinted in full in Modras, The Catholic Church and Antisemitism, 349–50. 98. For the complete text of this pastoral letter, see Hlond, “O katolickie zasady moralne” (Poznań, February 29, 1936), in Na straży sumienia narodu, 154–73. For an English translation of the section dealing with the Jews, see Modras, The Catholic Church and Antisemitism, 346. The translations here are my own, and the quoted passages come from 154, 163–63, 164–65, 169–71. 99. “Rozum, wiara i żydzi,” Życie i Praca 11, no. 24 (1934): 1–2. 100. Paulsson, Secret City, 36. 101. Libionka, “Antisemitism, Anti-Judaism and the Polish Catholic Clergy during the Second World War,” in Blobaum, Rewolucja; Leszek Żebrowski, “Duszpasterstwo Narodowych Sił Zbrojnych,” in Piotrowski, Na przełomie stuleci, 453–60. 102. Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, “Protest,” http://pl.wikisource.org/wiki/Protest_Zofii_KossakSzczuckiej. 103. Błoński, Biedni Polacy patrzą, 46. See also Kącki, Udział księży; Landau-Czajka, “Image of the Jew in the Catholic Press”; I. Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw. 104. For an account of one such pogrom, see Gross, Neighbors. 105. Friedrich, “Collaboration,” 737. 106. Paulsson, “Ringelblum Revisited: Polish-Jewish Relations in Occupied Warsaw, 1940– 1945,” in Zimmerman, Contested Memories, 184. 107. Hlond, “Polska na przełomie dziejów” (Poznań, October 28, 1945), in Na straży sumienia narodu, 261. 108. Wyszyński, “Na nowy rok kościelny: O chrześcijańskim wyzwoleniu człowieka” (Lublin, First Sunday of Advent 1946), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 32–33. 109. The proclamation is reprinted in Y. Gutman and Krakowski, Unequal Victims, 373–74. For more on the fate of Jewish survivors in Poland after World War II, see Cichopek-Gajraj, “Jews, Poles, and Slovaks”; Gross, Fear.

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110. “Zbrodnia kielecka,” Tygodnik Powszechny 2, no. 29 (1946): 1. 111. Stefania Skwarczyńska, “In Tenebris Lux,” Tygodnik Powszechny, 2, no. 32 (1946): 3: “Ci, którzy przyszli z daleka,” Tygodnik Powszechny 2, no. 43 (1946):, 5. 112. “Kroczyć za słońcem sprawiedliwości Chrystusem, Bogiem naszym,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 58, no. 2 (1957): 199. 113. “List Episkopatu Polski do Dzieci Bożych Kościoła Chrystusowego o aktualnych niebezpieczeństwach” ( Jasna Góra, September 4, 1960), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 209. 114. “Stenogram wykładu wygłoszonego przez arcybpa. B. Kominka w dniu 18.II.72 r., o godz. 19,30 w kościele św. Piotra i Pawła we Wrocławiu,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, Stenogramy Kazań, 1978–80, sygn. 125/220, pp. 104–12. 115. “Stenogram kazania wygłoszonego przez bpa. I. Tokarczuka w czasie nabożeństwa w Siedleczce pow. Przeworsk w dniu 23.IV.73 r. o godz. 11:00,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/255, p. 67. 116. “Słowo Episkopatu Polski o wydarzeniach marcowych” ( Jasna Góra, May 3, 1968), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 525–26. 117. Marek Wąs and Marek Sterlingów, “Prałat chce zaistnieć: Portret księdza Henryka Jankowskiego,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 14, 2004, 14. 118. Gross, Sąsiedzi, translated into English as Neighbors. 119. For an overview (in translation) of the debates surrounding the Jedwabne story, see Polonsky and Michlic, The Neighbors Respond; Thou Shalt Not Kill. On the efforts of the Church to come to terms with the legacy of anti-Semitism in Poland, see Oppenheim, Kościół polski wobec antysemityzmu. 120. Wąs and Sterlingów, “Prałat chce zaistnieć.” 121. Tomasz Strzembosz, “Covered-up Collaboration,” Rzeczpospolita ( January 27–28, 2001), in Thou Shalt Not Kill, 163–81. 122. Antoni Macierewicz, “The Revolution of Nihilism,” Głos (February 3, 2001), in Thou Shalt Not Kill, 205–15. 123. Józef Glemp, “Przeprosimy przede wszystkim Boga: Prymas Józef Glemp w rozmowie z Katolicką Agencją Informacyjną,” Rzeczpospolita, May 15, 2001, http://new-arch.rp.pl/ artykul/336566_Przeprosmy_przede_wszystkim_Boga.html. 124. Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz. 125. Bartnik, Idea Polskości, 57–61, 99–100, 262. 126. Bender, “Oświęcim do dyskusji,” Kurier Lubelski 13 ( January 17, 2000), www.ryszardbender.pl/publikacje/2000/kurier_lubelski_13.html. See also “Nauka sama się zrewiduje,” Myśl Polska 8 (February 20, 2000), www.ryszardbender.pl/publikacje/2000/ mysl_polska_8.html. 127. Nowak, Kogo muszą przeprosić. Nowak also wants the Jews to apologize to the Russians, the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Americans, and the Arabs. See also Nowak, 100 kłamstw; Czarna legenda; Czarny leksykon; Przemilczane zbrodnie; Spory o historię: Walka z Kościołem. 128. Witold Jedynak, “Chrześcijaństwo fundamentem wspólnej Europy,” Niedziela 47 (2002). 129. Quoted in Agnieszka Graff, “Gej, czyli Żyd,” Gazeta Wyborcza, June 24–25, 2006, 24. 130. For reports on antigay demonstrations, see Monika Filipowska, “Awantura zamiast marszu przeciwko dyskryminacji,” Rzeczpospolita, November 21, 2005, www.rzeczpospolita.pl/ gazeta/wydanie_051121/kraj/kraj_a_3.html: Aleksandra Przybylska and Violetta Szostak, “Demonstracja nierówności,” Gazeta Wyborcza, November 21, 2005, 2. For an excellent public debate on this matter, see the transcript of Monika Olejnik’s television show Prosto w Oczy from November 23, 2005, at http://ww2.tvp.pl/2216,20051122270817. strona. 131. Bajda, “Aby Polska była Polską.” Bajda quotes Defending a Higher Law, which was translated into Polish by a Catholic publishing house as W obronie wyższych praw. 132. Rydzyk, Tak-tak, nie-nie, 160. 133. Wojciech Szacki, “Kto słucha Radia Maryja?,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 27, 2008, 4. 134. “List pasterski Episkopatu Polski z okazji 25-lecia ogłoszenia soborowej deklaracji Nostra Aetate,” Znak 541 ( June 2000), www.znak.com.pl/znak/listpast.html.

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135. An exemplary speech by the head of the Episcopate’s Council for Religious Dialogue can be found here: Stanisław Gądecki, “Bóg zawarł z Izraelem przymierze miłosierdzia,” Magazyn Teologiczny Semper Reformanda ( January 17, 2003), www.magazyn.ekumenizm.pl/article.php?story=20030117160116578.

Chapter 9 1. “I Jego za grobem zwycięstwo,” Przewodnik Katolicki 45, no. 4 (1939): 55–56. 2. Cieszyński, “Przekujcie pługi wasze na miecze. Mowa wygłoszona na nabożeństwie wojennem” (Poznań, August 22, 1920), in Lud jako lew, 105–21. 3. Rostworowski, Najważniejsze postulaty, 9, 11, 23. 4. “List pasterski biskupów polskich zebranych u grobu św. Wojciecha,” Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, Episkopat Polski: Odezwy, 1918–39 (uncatalogued), 6–7, 11. 5. Żaryn, Dzieje Kościoła, 159. For an account of the event written by a communist-era historian, see Mysłek, Kościół katolicki, 425. For a much more sympathetic account written by some of the participants, see Ślubujemy, 5–6. 6. Odezwa akademików do narodu polskiego z okazji, “Ślubowania Jasnogórskiego” (May 24, 1936), in Ślubujemy, 7. 7. Przykazania młodzieży akademickiej po ślubowaniu Jasnogórskiem, in Ślubujemy, 68–69. 8. Quoted in Ślubujemy, 16. 9. Przedstawiciela Lwowa, “Naród polski zbuduje Katolickie Państwo,” in Ślubujemy, 46–47. 10. “Kościół, ostoją narodowości,” Posiew 3, no. 44 (1908): 690–91. 11. Pelczar, Wezwanie, 2. 12. Teodorowicz, Myśl religijna, 4, 12. 13. Kakowski, “Wezwanie Arcybiskupa Warszawskiego do duchowieństwa i ludu o modlitwę za ojczyznę” (1917), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 503, teka I.4.3, p. 3. 14. Kubicki, Bojownicy; Kubicki, Społeczna działalność Kościoła. 15. Boudou, Stolica Święta a Rosja; Handelsman and Żywczyński, Watykan i sprawa polska; Żywczyński, Geneza. 16. Chrzanowski, Studia i szkice. 17. Janiszewski, Co jest Ojczyzna, 4, 7, 13. 18. Stanisław Sroka, “Bóg i Ojczyzna,” Nowa Bibljoteka Kaznodziejska 44, no. 4 (1933): 308–9, 311. 19. Rostworowski, Nacjonalizm, 7–8, 14. 20. Teodorowicz, Państwo Chrześcijańskie, 10. 21. Bilczewski, O miłości ojczyzny, 9, 22. 22. Kwiatkowski, Wołamy o szkołę katolicką!, 74. 23. Hulka-Laskowski, Czem Ewangelicyzm dla Polski jest, 21. 24. S. Martin, Jewish Life, 24. 25. Program Stronnictwa Chrześcijańsko-Narodowego, 15. 26. Poznaniak, “Dwa światy,” Przewodnik Katolicki 41, no. 20 (1935): 314. 27. Teodorowicz, “Kazanie wygłoszone w katedrze św. Jana w Warszawie podczas uroczystości setnego jubileuszu archidiecezji warszawskiej w r. 1917 w czasie okupacji niemieckiej,” in Myśl religijna, 14. 28. Teodorowicz, Chrystus w walce, 12. 29. Teodorowicz, O ducha narodu polskiego, 29–30. 30. “List Pasterski Biskupów Polski,” Życie i Praca 11, no. 10 (1934): 3–5. 31. Pierwszy Synod Biskupów Katolickich, no pagination. 32. Janiszewski, Co jest Ojczyzna, 77. 33. J. Modrzejewski, “Kościół katolicki w Polsce i jego wrogowie,” Posiew 21, no. 47 (1927): 2. 34. “Od trosk do pracy,” Życie i Praca 6, no. 2 (1929): 1. 35. For just a sampling of these articles, see Urban, “Sprawozdanie z ruchu religijnego, naukowego i społecznego,” Przegląd Powszechny 178 ( June 1928): 380–95; “Z bohaterskiej

Note s to Pag e s 3 3 7 – 3 4 3

36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

439

walki o wiarę katolików meksykańskich,” Przewodnik Katolicki 34, no. 29 (1928): 10; “Wróg atakuje,” Życie i Praca 6, no. 38 (1929): 1; “Wpływy żydowskie w Meksyku,” Życie i Praca 11, no. 51 (1934): 5; “Z krainy krwawych mszy św. (o drodze kalwaryjskiej meksykańskich katolików,” Przewodnik Katolicki 41, no. 12 (1935): 179; “Meksykańskie Memento,” Przewodnik Katolicki 41, no. 16 (1935): 248. “Rozmowa z Piusem XI o polityce wewnętrznej, o Niemczech i Rosji: Raport do Pana Ministra Spraw Zagranicznych” (September 23, 1930), Documents from Polish Embassy in Rome, Hoover Archive. “Wróg atakuje,” Życie i Praca 6, no. 38 (1929): 1. This particular issue of Życie i Praca was initially blocked by the censors, and the surviving copy is marked as the “second edition after confiscation,” with a large blank space remaining on p. 2. Interestingly Catholics in Mexico in the 1920s were also prone to cast their own revolt not as a specifically Mexican struggle, but as a front in the global war against Masonic Bolshevism. See Quirk, The Mexican Revolution. A. K., “Nie wolno milczeć,” Rycerz Niepokalanej 6, no. 1 (1927): 10–11. Kakowski, “Do Przewielebnego Duchowieństwa Świeckiego i Zakonnego oraz Wiernych Archidiecezji Warszawskiej,” 1938, Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 505, teka I.4.3. Szczepan Sobalkowski, “Pomóżmy dźwigać krzyż Chrystusowi,” Nowa Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 56, no. 2 (1939): 163–228. “Z tygodnia: Katolicy w ogniu walk,” Przewodnik Katolicki 41, no. 31 (1935): 503. “Albo pocałujesz, albo umrzesz!,” Przewodnik Katolicki 41, no. 34 (1935): 538; “Ewangelja na czwartą niedzielę po Wielkanocy,” Przewodnik Katolicki 41, no. 20 (1935): 306. “Czy Hitlerja odczuje odwet żydów?,” Posiew 27, no. 21 (1933): 2. “Słowo Boże,” Posiew 33, no. 4 (1939): 69–70. “‘Twierdzą nam będzie każdy próg,’” Życie i Praca 6, no. 4 (1939): 1. J. B. Słoński, “Dzisiejsza choroba duszy,” Rycerz Niepokalanej 18, no. 3 (1939): 72–75. “Bij Żyda, lecz tylko po kieszeni: Rozstrzygnięcie konkursu: Swój do Swego,” Przewodnik Katolicki 45, no. 15 (1939): 248. St. Krok, “Znowu ‘oni,’” Przewodnik Katolicki 45, no. 21 (1939): 332. I. Modrzejewski, “Groźne chmury,” Posiew 21, no. 45 (1927): 2. W. S. P., “Żydzi muszą wyjść z Europy,” Posiew 33, no. 2 (1939): 18–19. W. Majdański, “Bóg czuwa nad Polską!,” Rycerz Niepokalanej 18, no. 8 (1939): 226–29. Adamowicz and Wójcik, “Ludność Polski według wyznań,” in Jachmyk, Religia i kościół rzymskokatolicki, 24–25. Today there are about 1.5 million non-Catholics in Poland, out of a population of thirty-eight million. “Komunikat z 117 sesji plenarnej konferencji Episkopatu Polski,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/106. On the alliances established on the ground between communists and nationalists after World War II, see Curp, A Clean Sweep?; Kunicki, “The Polish Crusader.” On the relationship between East European communism and nationalism more generally, see Verdery, National Ideology. “List pasterski Episkopatu Polski na uroczystość Chrystusa Króla” (Wrocław, September 23, 1948), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 71. Mieczysław Brzozowski, “Wprowadzenie do programu homiletycznego na rok 1981/82,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 107, no. 5 (1981): 257–61. “Dyspozycja główna na niedzielę IV Adwentu: Bóg wkracza w życie ludzi i ‘buduje swój dom’ na ziemi: Architektura sakralna w Polsce, co wyraża i do czego umie się przyczyniać?,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 107, no. 5 (1981): 286; “Dyspozycja główna na Boże Narodzenie: Polskie tradycje związane z obchodem świąt Bożego Narodzenia: Wyrazem wiary i nadziei,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 107, no. 5 (1981): 290; “Dyspozycja główna na uroczystość Najświętszej Bogarodzicy Maryi: Naród polski w najtrudniejszych chwilach pokładał ufność w macierzyńskiej miłości Maryi. Dzieje Jasnej Góry w XIX wieku,”

440

58.

59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

Note s to Pag e s 3 4 3 – 3 4 9 Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 107, no. 6 (1981): 321; “Dyspozycja główna na niedzielę II po Bożym Narodzeniu: Szacunek dla godności człowieka w kulturze polskiej,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 107, no. 6 (1981): 328. “Stenogram kazania bpa. I. Tokarczuka wygłoszonego dnia 21.VI.73 r. o godz. 10:00 podczas uroczystości Bożego Ciała w katedrze przemyskiej,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/255, p. 72. See also “Stenogram kazania bpa. I. Tokarczuka wygłoszonego w dniu 1.X.1972 r. podczas poświęcenia nielegalnie wybudowanej kaplicy w Milczy parafia Besko pow. Sanok,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/255, p. 23; “Stenogram kazania bpa. I. Tokarczuka wygłoszonego w dniu 21.IV.73 r. w czasie uroczystości rezurekcyjnych w parafii Rzeszów-Fara,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/255, p. 55. “Stenogram wystąpienia kard. Karola Wojtyły wygłoszonego w dniu 13.VI.1974 r. w czasie procesji Bożego Ciała w Krakowie,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/272, p. 18. See a similar claim in “Stenogram kazania kard. K. Wojtyły wygłoszonego w dniu 31 grudnia 1974 r. o godz. 18,00 w kościele parafialnym św. Szczepana w Krakowie,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/272, p. 6. List Episkopatu do Bieruta, 4. Wyszyński, “Słowo uznania dla duchowieństwa dolnego Śląska” (Warsaw, November 4, 1950), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 177. “List biskupów polskich na uroczystość Matki Boskiej Częstochowskiej” (Frombork, June 17, 1973), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 754. “List biskupów polskich o działalności Kościoła” ( Jasna Góra, September 15, 1955), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 152. “Refleksje związane z 25-tą rocznicą poświęcenia narodu polskiego Najśw. Sercu Jezusa,” Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 32.15, teka T. I. 32, p. 1. “Stenogram kazania wygłoszonego w dn. 15.06.1980 r. o godz. 11,30 w parafii Tomaszów Lubelski przez biskupa Z. Kamińskiego,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/214, p. 79. Wyszyński, “Konferencja III: Naród-Kościół-Państwo (Warszawa, January 25, 1976),” in Kazania Świętokrzyskie, 44–45. Lewandowski, Naród w dziejach zbawienia, 41. Wyszyński, “List pasterski o społecznej krucjacie miłości” (Warsaw, Easter 1967), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 545–47. “List pasterski Episkopatu Polski na tysiąclecie chrztu Polski” (Warsaw, December 16, 1965), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 423–29. Wyszyński, Kazania Świętokrzyskie, 46. Wyszyński, “Do rodaków w kraju i za granicą na wigilię Bożego Narodzenia” (Warsaw, Christmas Eve, 1956), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 266. Wyszyński, “List wielkopostny do duchowieństwa i wiernych archidiecezji Gnieźnieńskiej i warszawskiej” (Gniezno, February 2, 1965), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 470. Lewandowski, Naród w dziejach zbawienia, 60–61. “Wezwanie do braterskiej jedności i poszanowania życia ludzkiego” (Warsaw, September 4, 1970), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 608. “Odezwa biskupów polskich do wiernych w rocznicę poświęcenia narodu Niepokalanemu Sercu Maryi” ( Jasna Góra, 1947), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 53. “Refleksje związane z 25-tą rocznicą poświęcenia narodu polskiego Najśw. Sercu Jezusa,” Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 32.15, teka T. I. 32, p. 2. Mieczysław Brzozowski, “Kochać Polskę!,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 122, no. 6 (1989): 372. Brzozowski, “Wprowadzenie do programu kaznodziejskiego na rok 1982/83,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 109, no. 5 (1982): 258. Wojtyła, “Procesja Bożego Ciała” (Kraków, May 25, 1978), in Kazania, 64.

Note s to Pag e s 3 4 9 – 3 5 7

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80. Wojtyła, “Do artystów, poetów i pisarzy” (Częstochowa, January 23, 1977), in Kazania, 479. 81. Wojtyła, “Poszanowanie wolności religijnej” (Kraków, January 25, 1976), in Kazania, 398. 82. “Materiały do kazań na uroczystość Chrystusa Króla, 1976 roku: Refleksje związane z 25-tą rocznicą poświęcenia narodu polskiego Najśw. Sercu Jezusa,” Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 32.15, teka T. I. 32, p. 1. 83. “List Episkopatu Polski na trzechsetlecie śmierci Przeora Augustyna Kordeckiego” (Warsaw, January 25, 1973), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 732. 84. “Na dzień konsekracji archikatedry świętego Jana Chrzciciela w Warszawie” (Warsaw, Pentacost 1960), in Wyszyński, Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 361. 85. Baum, Nationalism, Religion, and Ethics, 8. For an overview of Christian approaches to national particularism, see Hastings, “Christianity and Nationhood.” 86. “Na obchód poświęcenia narodu sercu Zbawiciela,” Wskazania Duszpasterskie 7 (1951), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 33.20, teka T.2.33, pp. 20–26. 87. Brzozowski, “W obronie narodu,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 122, no. 6 (1989): 361. 88. Bartnik, Idea Polskości, 140–42, 155. For a more extended Catholic rumination on the 966 baptism, see Iliński, Znaczenie chrztu Polski. 89. Wyszyński, “Słowo pasterskie na tysiąclecie chrztu Polski: O przygotowaniu do odnowienia przyrzeczeń chrztu w Wielką Sobotę” (Gniezno, February 27, 1966), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 504–9; “List pasterski Episkopatu Polski na tysiąclecie chrztu Polski” (Warsaw, December 16, 1965), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 423–29. 90. Michał Kaszowski, “Zwycięzca śmierci,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 108, no. 1 (1982): 11. 91. Wyszyński, “Słowo pasterskie na tysiąclecie chrztu Polski: O przygotowaniu do odnowienia przyrzeczeń chrztu w Wielką Sobotę” (Gniezno, February 27, 1966), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 504–9. 92. Bartnik, Idea Polskości, 173. 93. “Dlaczego oddaliśmy Polskę w macierzyńską niewolę Maryi Matki Kościoła” (Warsaw, March 8, 1978), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa oraz Episkopatu, 333. 94. Lewandowski, Naród w dziejach zbawienia, 23, 59. 95. ibid., 30. 96. Wyszyński, “List pasterski w pierwszą rocznicę milenijnego aktu oddania 3 maja 1966 roku” (April 1, 1967), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 554. 97. Skorowski, Naród i państwo, 16. 98. John Paul II, Tertio Millennio Adveniente, paragraphs 27, 33, 35. On John Paul’s apologies, see Accattoli, Kiedy papież prosi o przebaczenie. 99. John Paul II, Memory and Identity, 72–76. For more examples of John Paul II’s approach to the nation, see Zwoliński, Jan Paweł II o dziejach Polski. This is a collection of excerpts from the pope’s sermons and texts. 100. Józef Anczarski, “Obowiązki rodziny katolickiej wobec ojczyzny,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 68, no. 1 (1962): 5. 101. Cegiełka, Mistyka Ojczyzny, 43. 102. Wojtyła, “Święto Matki Bożej Częstochowskiej: Częstochowa” ( Jasna Góra, August 26, 1967), in Kazania, 112. 103. “Triduum przed świętem patronalnym kobiet katolickich w roku życia” (October 8–11, 1959), Wskazania i Pomoce Duszpasterskie (1959), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 33.25, teka T.2.33, pp. 21–22. 104. Wyszyński, “List pasterski o społecznej krucjacie miłości” (Warszawa, Lent 1967), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 542, 544. 105. List Episkopatu Polski o Encyklice Ojca Świętego Pawła VI, “Humanae Vitae” (Warsaw, February 12, 1969), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 560. 106. “Głos biskupów polskich w obronie zagrożonego bytu Narodu,” in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 624, 627. 107. Wyszyński, “Zaproszenie do walki o życie w łasce Bożej” (Gniezno, January 2, 1959), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 327–31.

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108. “Stenogram kazania wygłoszonego przez bpa. sufragana Zygmunta Kamińskiego w dn. 2 lipca 1980 r. o godz. 12,00 w Krasnobrodzie,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/214, pp. 9–13. 109. Nowak, Walka z Kościołem, 161, 280–84, 305–10. 110. Rydzyk, Tak-tak, nie-nie, 31, 55, 61–63, 72–74, 88, 187. For more on Catholic nationalism in postcommunist Poland, see Strutyński, Religia i naród. 111. Życiński, Bruderszaft, 147–48. 112. Życiński, Niewidzialne światło, 153.

Chapter 10 1. The Polish version of the Litany of Loreto can be found at http://pawlowski.dk/modlitewnik/litanie/loretanska.htm. 2. On Mary and Marianism, see Carroll, The Cult of the Virgin Mary; Carroll, Madonnas That Maim; Duff y, What Catholics Believe about Mary; Graef, Mary; O’Carroll, Theotokos; Paredes, Mary and the Kingdom of God; Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries: Warner, Alone of All Her Sex. On Guadalupe, see Brading, Mexican Phoenix; Castillo, Goddess of the Americas; Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe. On Lourdes, see Harris, Lourdes. 3. See, for example, Kahl, “Globalisation, Unity, Diversity.” 4. Even the seventeenth century might not be early enough. See Maniura, Pilgrimages to Images in the Fifteenth Century, for a discussion of the medieval origins of Częstochowa pilgrimages. 5. Bilczewski, Królowa Korony Polskiej, 16. 6. Andrzej Datko, “Sanktuaria i Pielgrzymki: pątnictwo w Polsce po 1945 roku,” in Zdaniewicz and Zembrzuski, Kościół i religijność Polaków, 312. 7. Wincenty Zaleski, “Czytania na maj,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 108, no. 2 (1982): 89; “Jasna Góra: 3.5 miliona pielgrzymów w 2002 roku,” Katolicka Agencja Informacyjna ( January 2, 2003), http://system.ekai.pl/kair/?screen=depeszadodruku&_scr_depesza_ id_depeszy=102379. The record for one year, four million, came in 1979 because of the newly elected pope’s visit to the shrine that year. 8. Among the best studies on popular Marian devotion are Blackbourn, Marpingen; Carroll, The Cult of the Virgin Mary; Christian, Person and God; Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street. 9. Lewandowski, Naród w dziejach zbawienia, 108–9. 10. Boss, Empress and Handmaid, 40. Boss points to a linkage between maternity and authority in medieval Marianism and argues that the Virgin’s changing image has tracked a diminution in the power ascribed to motherhood more generally. In contrast to Boss, Echeverria and Perry argue that Marianism is inextricably linked to right-wing militarism in the twentieth century (Under the Heel of Mary, 1). See Boss, Empress and Handmaid, 18, for a response to their work. 11. The text of this apocryphal Gospel can be found at www.earlychristianwritings.com/infancyjames.html. The story of the virginal conception of Jesus is told in both Matthew 1:18 and Luke 1:26–38. Aside from this, the Bible contains references to Mary’s discovery of Jesus teaching in the Temple as a child, to her involvement in Jesus’ first public miracle, and to her presence at the crucifixion. 12. “Pragniesz korony niebieskiej, naśladuj cnoty Najśw. Maryi Panny Wniebowziętej,” Przewodnik Katolicki 2, no. 32 (1896): 249. 13. Augustine, A Treatise on Nature and Grace, against Pelagius, www.newadvent.org/ fathers/1503.htm. 14. Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus, (no numeration). 15. Pius XII, Munificentissimus Deus, paragraph 44. 16. Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus, (no numeration). 17. For an explanation of the spelling change, see Andrzej Bardecki, “Ryzyko zgorszenia,” Tygodnik Powszechny 15, no. 8 (1961): 3.

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18. On latria, dulia, and hyperdulia, see Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries, 102. The difference between intervention (what God does) and intercession (what Mary and the saints do) is also stressed in Catholic writings. For a recent example of the long-standing effort to emphasize these distinctions, see Jan Kracik, “Królowa nie z tego kraju,” Tygodnik Powszechny 17 (April 27, 2010), http://tygodnik.onet.pl/1,45585,druk.html. 19. Krukowski, Nowe nauki majowe, 61. 20. For the full text of Jan Kazimierz’s pledge, see Witold Sawicki, “Regina Poloniae. Akt z 1 IV 1656 roku w świetle prawa ustrojowego państwa polskiego,” in Z zagadnień kultury chrześcijańskiej, 440–41. This text is often spoken of but very rarely cited and almost never quoted in full. The only instance I have found in the popular press comes from 1928: Wisława, “Wiekopomne śluby,” Przewodnik Katolicki 34, no. 18 (1928): 5. On the significance of this act within the political and religious polemics of the day, see Stanisław Litak, “Z dziejów kultu Matki Boskiej Częstochowskiej w XVII–XVIII wieku. Sprawa zasięgu społecznego,” in Z zagadnień kultury chrześcijańskiej, 447–54; Tazbir, Historia Kościoła katolickiego, 100–102, 162. The ritual of crowning Mary as queen of an earthly monarchy was not unprecedented at the time; earlier in the sixteenth century similar ceremonies had been held in Bavaria, France, and Portugal, and according to legend King St. Stephen (977–1038) had crowned Mary as Queen of Hungary. On the phenomenon of crowning the Virgin in early modern East Central Europe, see Baranowski, “The Coronation.” 21. This song originated with the Bar Confederation (1768–72). The complete text is reprinted in Jabłońska-Deptuła, Czyż może historia popłynąć, 21–23. 22. Pamiątka z Jasnej Góry, 17. 23. Wyspiański, Wesele, Act III, scene 33. My thanks to Halina Filipowicz for pointing out this verse. 24. Program Kongresu Marjańskiego, 2. Hetman is also used to refer to the chess piece that we call the queen, but here the masculine form of the noun indicates that this does not involve the de-gendering of a female monarch, but rather a transformation of the chess board into an entirely masculine space, with the king’s field commander occupying the place where we position his queen. My thanks to Wojciech Beltkiewicz for bringing this usage to my attention. 25. Walczyński, Podręcznik do kazań, 104, 251, emphasis in the original. 26. “Przemówienie Biskupa Michalkiewicza podczas uroczystości koronacyjnej Matki Bożej Ostrobramskiej w Wilnie,” Rycerz Niepokalanej 6, no. 9 (1927): 259. 27. Mrowiński, O czci Matki Boskiej w Polsce, 67. 28. Pamiątka z Jasnej Góry, 11. 29. Pelczar, Kazanie, 8. 30. Jan Trzecieski, “O Kongregacyach maryańskich w Polsce,” in Chotkowski, Wiec katolicki, 367. 31. Bilczewski, Królowa Korony Polskiej, 23. 32. Kakowski, “Wezwanie Arcybiskupa Warszawskiego do duchowieństwa i ludu o modlitwę za ojczyznę” (Warsaw, 1917), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 503, teka I.4.3, p. 13. 33. Kakowski, “List Pasterski do Wielebnego Duchowieństwa i Wiernych Archidyecezji Warszawskiej” ( July 30, 1921), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 1295, teka I.4.3. 34. Kmiecik, Misje Ludowe, 402. See also Teodorowicz, O ducha narodu polskiego, 8–10. 35. Maria Friedrich-Brzozowska, “Miłość Polaków dla Marji,” Posiew 27, no. 18 (1933): 2. Priests continue to present the events of 1920 as an example of miraculous intervention by the Virgin, and the phrase “Miracle on the Vistula” is familiar to every Pole today. For a more recent example, see “Kazanie w rocznicę Powstanie Listopadowego” (Warsaw, November 28, 1982), in Kazania wojenne, 50. 36. Aleksander Rumiński, “Kazanie na 1 sobotę maja,” Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 32.16, teka T. I. 32, p. 2. No specific date is given for this document, but the

444

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

Note s to Pag e s 3 6 7 – 3 7 5 typeface and the paper would seem to link it to other documents in this file that date from the 1950s. “Konkurs na hymn milicyjny,” Rycerz Niepokalanej 12, no. 11 (1933): 326. “Hymn milicyjny (na konkurs, ciąg dalszy),” Rycerz Niepokalanej 12, no. 12 (1933): 356. Przedstawiciel Krakowa, “Maryja jedynym ratunkiem naszym,” in Ślubujemy, 31–32. Piwowarczyk, “Uroczystość na Jasnej Górze,” Tygodnik Powszechny 2, no. 36 (1946): 1. Zaleski, “Czytania na maj,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 108, no. 2 (1982): 69–128, 89, 109, 115. Isakowicz, Kazanie, 7–8. Wyszyński, “Na dzień poświęcenia się Narodu Polskiego Niepokalanemu Sercu Maryi (Lublin, September 8, 1946),” in Wyszyński, in Listy pasterskie, 25. Paweł Staniszewski, “Koronacja obrazu Matki Bożej Łowickiej,” Niedziela 14 (September 6, 2002). Kmiecik, Misje Ludowe, 402–3, 406. Lourdes, Fatima, and La Salette are among the ten Marian apparitions that have received official recognition by the Church. Of these ten, only one (Guadalupe) occurred before the nineteenth century. Marpingen was not acknowledged by Rome as genuine, nor was Gietrzwałd. See Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries, 178. For a general survey of modern Marian apparitions, see Zimdars-Swartz, Encountering Mary. On the Marian movement in the nineteenth century, see Pope, “Immaculate and Powerful.” Walczyński, Podręcznik do kazań, 278. On the growth of popular Marianism in Poland in the nineteenth century, see Jabłoński, Jasna Góra; Olszewski, Polska kultura religijna, 140– 44, 180–200. Krukowski, Nowe nauki majowe, 6–8. Walczyński, Podręcznik do kazań, 168–243. “Na uroczystość zwiastowania N. M. P.: Matka Boga i nasza,” in Pokłosie Słowa Bożego, 163–64. See the entry on “The Brethren of the Lord” in The Catholic Encyclopedia www.newadvent. org/cathen/02767a.htm. When a first-century ossuary was discovered in 2002 with the inscription “James, Son of Joseph, Brother of Jesus,” the find was interpreted by orthodox Catholics as a reference to some other first-century family with the same names. See, for example, Jimmy Akin, “Burial Box of St. James Found?,” Catholic Answers, www.catholic. com/library/Burial_Box_of_St_James_Found.asp. The discovery was announced in an article by André Lemaire, “Burial Box of James the Brother of Jesus,” Biblical Archaeology Review 28, no. 6 (2002): 24–33. “Kazanie majowe: Księżyc nocy ducha,” in Pokłosie Słowa Bożego, 185. Kosiak, “Maryja wzorem wychowania i wychowawców chrześcijańskich,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 70, no. 3 (1963): 182. “Dobrodziejstwo pracy,” Rycerz Niepokalanej 19, no. 2 (1945): 24–26. Stagraczyński, “Źródło zbawienia,” in Wybór kazań, 1:251; “Ofiara Maryi,” in Wybór kazań, 1:126. Maria Friedrich-Brzozowska, “Królowa Maja, Królowa Korony Polskiej,” Posiew 33, no. 18 (1939): 274, emphasis in the original. Stagraczyński, “Prawdziwa ofiara,” in Wybór kazań, 2:287. P. Kosiak, “Patronka i wzór godności kobiety,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 104, no. 1 (1980): 39. See, for example, Lumen gentium, paragraph 56, and John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater paragraph 19. Cieszyński, “A oni poszli za nim,” 80. Wyszyński, Zapiski więzienne, 124. “To nie ja,” performed by Edyta Górniak, music by Stanisław Syrewicz, lyrics by Jacek Cygan, Dotyk (Pomaton EMI, 1995). Stagraczyński, “Zapłata zasłużona i sprawiedliwa,” in Wybór Kazań, 2:68, emphasis in the original.

Note s to Pag e s 3 7 5 – 3 8 2 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72.

73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

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John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater, paragraph 38. Walczyński, Podręcznik do kazań, 87. S. M., “Dobroć mojej Matki,” Rycerz Niepokalanej 12, no. 1 (1933): 11. Program Polskiego Stronnictwa Chrześcijańskiej Demokracji, 20–23. Wyszyński, Kazania Świętokrzyskie, 8. For a collection of Wyszyński’s sermons on what he calls “the dignity of women,” see Wyszyński, Godność kobiety. Wojtyła, “Odpowiedzialna miłość mężczyzny: Homilia wygłoszona na Studium Teologii Małżeństwa i Rodziny” (Kraków, January 15, 1978), in Kazanie, 485. John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater, paragraph 46. On the Matka-Polka model, and more generally on the image of women in national rhetoric in nineteenth-century Poland, see Blobaum, “The ‘Woman Question’ in Russian Poland”; Filipowicz, “The Daughters of Emilia Plater”; Filipowicz, “Othering the Kosciuszko Uprising”; Jaworski and Pietrow-Ennker, Women in Polish Society; Łepkowski, Rozważania o losach polskich; Markowska, “Rola kobiety polskiej w rodzinie”; Joanna Podgórska, “Cień Matki Polki,” Polityka 21 (May 24, 2003): 92–95. On women in communist and postcommunist Eastern Europe, see Funk and Mueller, Gender Politics; Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender; Gal and Kligman, Reproducing Gender; Goven, “The Gendered Foundations”; Haney, Inventing the Needy; Holc, “Liberalism and the Construction of the Democratic Subject in Postcommunism”; Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance”; Kruks, Rapp, and Young, Promissory Notes; Lampland, “Unthinkable Subjects”; Long, We All Fought for Freedom; Renne, Ana’s Land; Verdery, “From Parent-State to Family Patriarchs.” “Myśli o kobietach,” Pielgrzym 5 (September 1846): 246. “Zdania” Pielgrzym 1 (September 1842): 373–74. The most extended repudiation of “emancipation” (and affirmation of women’s special role as emotional guidepost) on the pages of Pielgrzym came in an article by J. J. Kraszewski, “Synowie wieku,” Pielgrzym 1 (October 1842): 36–49. “Myśli o kobietach,” 258–60. “Czeskie autorki,” Pielgrzym 4 (December 1845): 232–326. On the feminization of religion in the nineteenth century, see McLeod, “Women’s Piety”; Welter, “The Feminization of Religion.” Kalinka, O czci świętych patronów polskich, 22. For a nuanced exploration of the role of gender and sexuality in the debates between nineteenth-century liberals and Christians, see Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion. Jabłońska-Deptuła, Zakony i zgromadzenia zakonne w Polsce w XIX i XX wieku,” 1659, 1673, 1676, 1678. Similar growth could be seen in other Catholic countries, with similar cultural consequences. See, for example, Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns. Wojtyła, “Do młodzieży akademickiej” (Kraków, kościół Św. Anny, April 9–14, 1962), in Kazanie, 187–88. His audience for this particular presentation was made up entirely of young women. In the final passage quoted here he employed the first-person feminine to adopt the voice of a woman. “Homilia: Kobieta w planach Bożych” (March 8, 1975), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 32.16, teka T.I.32. “Biskupi polscy ogłaszają w Polsce Święto Maryi Matki Kościoła ( Jasna Góra, May 4, 1971),” in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 647–51. Wyszyński, “Oddanie archidiecezji gnieźnieńskiej w macierzyńską niewolę Bogurodzicy za wolność Kościoła Świętego,” in Listy pasterskie Prymasa oraz Episkopatu, 484–86. Cieszyński, “A oni poszli za nim,” 89–91. Kmiecik, Misje Ludowe, 299–302. “Dla Matek,” Wskazania Duszpasterskie 7 (1951), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 33.20, teka T.2.33, p. 35. “Triduum przed świętem patronalnym kobiet katolickich w roku życia (October 8–11, 1959),” Wskazania i Pomoce Duszpasterskie (1959), Archiwum Archidiecezjalne Warszawskie, sygn. 33.25, teka T.2.33, p. 24.

446

Note s to Pag e s 3 8 2 – 3 8 9

89. Kazimierz Pielatowski, “Rodzina wobec cierpienia,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 68, no. 1 (1962): 13–14. 90. “List pasterski Episkopatu Polski w obronie życia nienarodzonych” (1956), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 117–24. Although I have found no references to how this text was received by the faithful, it might be significant that when the bishops issued their next letter about abortion, they shifted their argument a bit. In 1956 they continued to insist that the possibility of the mother’s death could never justify abortion, but they justified this by saying that modern medicine made it possible to save the woman’s life in almost every case. “List pasterski Episkopatu Polski o rodzinie” ( Jasna Góra, 1956), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 159. 91. On the use of the expression moherowe berety (mohair beret) as an insulting term for poor, elderly, devout women, see Maja Narbutt, “Labirynty księdza prałata,” Rzeczpospolita, October 23, 2004, www.rzeczpospolita.pl/dodatki/plus_minus_041023/plus_minus_a_5. html. 92. Juliusz Eska, “Maryjność i ‘nowa fala,’” Więź, May 1962, 55. 93. Jan Popiel, “Kult Maryi a religijność ‘nowej fali,’” Tygodnik Powszechny 22, no. 18 (1962): 1–2. Popiel also remarked that many of the reformers who complained about popular Marianism in Poland were the same ones who argued for far-ranging accommodations to local culture by missionaries India or Africa. 94. Jerzy Narbutt, “Katolicy wschodu i zachodu,” Tygodnik Powszechny 16, no. 33 (1962): 3–4. 95. Bohdan Cywiński, “Niepokojący fakt,” Tygodnik Powszechny 16, no. 37 (1962): 1–2. 96. Kosiak, “Maryja wzorem wychowania i wychowawców chrześcijańskich,” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 70, no. 3 (1963): 180. 97. Wojtyła, “Narodzenie Matki Bożej (Limanowa, September 11, 1966),” in Kazanie, 116–23. 98. Paul VI, Marialis Cultus, paragraph 20. Alongside efforts to modernize Mary, one can also find (sometimes harsh) Catholic feminist critiques of Marianism. See Hamington, Hail Mary?; McPhillips, “Believing in Post-Modernity”; Warner, Alone of All Her Sex. 99. “List pasterski biskupów polskich o pomocy Polski katolickiej dla czwartej sesji Soboru Watykańskiego Drugiego” (Warsaw, June 23, 1965), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 403. 100. “Stenogram kazania biskupa I. Tokarczuka wygłoszonego w dniu 10.VII.71 r. o godz. 19.00, w czasie uroczystości nawiedzenia MB w parafii Jarosław-Fara,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Zbiór Urzędu do Spraw Wyznań, sygn. 125/255, p. 12. 101. “List na rozpoczęcie czwartego roku wdzięczności za dar sześciowiecza obecności obrazu Matki Bożej Częstochowskiej” (Warsaw, November 28–29, 1978), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa oraz Episkopatu, 385–87. 102. Stagraczyński, “Marya Królową,” in Wybór kazań, 2:161. 103. Wyszyński, Zapiski więzienne, 120. 104. For an example of Wyszyński’s fondness for this pledge, see the pastoral letter for Ash Wednesday, 1957: “Wielkopostne przygotowanie do przyrzeczeń jasnogórskich,” in Listy pasterskie, 275–77. 105. The text of the “Pledge of Jasna Góra” can be found in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 166–68. Later the Episcopate issued a pastoral letter in which they affirmed their belief that Mary was responsible for Cardinal Wyszyński’s release, and that her intervention was a response to the Pledge. “W latach wdzięczności wobec Matki Bożej Jasnogórskiej (Warsaw, November 18, 1976),” in Listy pasterskie Prymasa oraz Episkopatu, 273–76. 106. Franciszek Blachnicki, “Matka a religijne odrodzenie rodziny (nauka dla niewiast),” Biblioteka Kaznodziejska 58, no. 1 (1957): 60. 107. “Akt oddania Polski w macierzyńską niewolę Maryi Matki Kościoła za wolność Kościoła Chrystusowego ( Jasna Góra, May 3, 1966),” in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 442–43. 108. Wyszyński, “List pasterski w pierwszą rocznicę milenijnego aktu oddania 3 maja 1966 roku” (April 1, 1967), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa, 555, emphasis in the original. 109. “List Episkopatu Polski do duchowieństwa i wiernych na uroczystość 3ego maja na Jasnej Górze i we wszystkich świątyniach (Warsaw, March 20, 1968),” in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 515–16.

Note s to Pag e s 3 8 9 – 3 9 6

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110. “Sześć wieków królowania Maryi w Polsce poprzez jasnogórski wizerunek” (Warsaw, February 19, 1976), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa oraz Episkopatu, 243. 111. “List Episkopatu Polski na trzechsetlecie śmierci Przeora Augustyna Kordieckiego” (Warsaw, January 25, 1973), in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu, 734. 112. “Wezwanie Episkopatu Polski do Narodu w obronie życia religijnego (Warsaw, March 21, 1973),” in Listy pasterskie Episkopatu,736–37. The term Deluge is used to refer to the disastrous wars that nearly destroyed Poland in the seventeenth century. 113. “Modlitwa maryjna na dzień jasnogórski,” in Listy pasterskie Prymasa oraz Episkopatu, 312. See also the similar appeal in “Sześć wieków królowania Maryi w Polsce poprzez jasnogórski wizerunek” (Warsaw, February 19, 1976), in Listy pasterskie Prymasa oraz Episkopatu, 247.

Conclusion 1. Bogusław Mazur, “Rozłam w Kościele: Kościół toruńskokatolicki kontra Kościół rzymskokatolicki,” Wprost 1033 (September 9, 2002), www.wprost.pl/ar/13911/Rozlam-wKosciele/?I=1033. 2. Mazur, “Rozłam w kościele, c.d.,” Wprost.pl, September 10, 2002, www.wprost.pl/ ar/28898/Rozlam-w-kosciele-cd. The politician in question was Antoni Macierewicz. 3. Agnieszka Kublik and Monika Olejnik, “Nie uciekniemy od medialnej lustracji,” Gazeta Wyborcza, January 13, 2007, 11. 4. Jacek Hołub, “Prezydent Torunia kontra poseł Jan Rokita,” Gazeta Wyborcza, January 13, 2006, 2; Julia Jaskólska, “Prawda z magla,” Nasz Dziennik, December 31, 2006, www. radiomaryja.pl/artykuly.php?id=7197; Zbigniew Nosowski and Tomasz Wiścicki, “Ani łagiewnicki, ani toruński,” Więź 2 (2006): 48. 5. Opinie o działalności instytucji publicznych. 6. Zaufanie do osobistości życia publicznego. 7. On attitudes among the clergy toward Radio Maryja, see Bogumił Łoziński, “Blisko 60 proc. księży popiera integrację z UE,” Katolicka Agencyjna Informacyjna, January 7, 2003, http://system.ek ai.pl/k air/?screen=depeszadodr uku&_scr_depesza_id_ depeszy=102519; Michał Okoński, “Duchowni AD 2002,” Tygodnik Powszechny 3 ( January 19, 2003), www.tygodnik.com.pl/numer/279303/okonski.html. 8. An outspoken Catholic critic of Radio Maryja, Sebastian Duda, has reluctantly acknowledged that the worldview of Rydzyk and St. Maksymilian Kolbe are not really that different. See Sebastian Duda, “Miłość i wojowniczość: Teologia Radia Maryja,” Tygodnik Powszechny 10 (March 9, 2003), www.tygodnik.com.pl/numer/280010/duda.html. 9. Łoziński, “Blisko 60 proc. księży popiera integrację z UE.”

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers in bold indicate illustrations. abortion, 11, 74, 77–79, 356, 382–83, 387, 389 Adamski, Fr. Józef Stanisław, 224 Æterni Patris, 96, 98 aggiornamento, 50, 52, 111, 192 agnosticism, 104 alcoholism, 75, 77, 262–63, 276, 291, 294, 357, 389 alienation, 153 Ancyporowicz, Zenonim, 94–95, 235–36 Anczarski, Fr. Józef, 49 antemurales christianitatis, 329, 333, 364 anticlericalism, 6–8, 37, 81, 88, 152, 180, 203, 210, 215 anticommunism. See communism antimodernism. See modernism anti-Semitism. See also Holocaust; Jews; Judaism apocalyptic struggle, 313 “A-Semitism”, 285–86 Catholic Convention, 281–82 Catholic periodicals, 293–96, 297–98 clergy, 315 communism, 322 conspiracy theories, 234, 272–73, 282 Easter display in Gdańsk, 322–23 and the Freemasons, 282–83 Hitler’s Germany, 183 homophobia, 325–26 interwar years, 272–73, 290–91, 314 Lutheranism, 286 Mały Dziennik (The Little Daily), 138, 307 militant rhetoric, 313–14 modernism, 324 National Democrats, 180 national egoism, 301 Nostra Aetate, 319, 326 Polak-Katolik, 293–94 Posiew (Sowing), 293–96 Protestantism, 286–87 public education, 290, 311–12

racism, 273, 285, 289 Radio Maryja, 279, 324 Rola (The Soil), 279–80, 288 Second Vatican Council, 41, 319, 321 secularism, 279, 301, 303 supersessionism, 273–74 types of, 272 xenophobia, 287 Życie i Praca, 302–3 apocalyptic struggle, 313, 331 Aquinas, Saint Thomas. See Thomas Aquinas, Saint Armenian Catholics, 5, 104 asceticism, 55, 67, 70, 148 Assumption, 363 atheism, 127, 142, 156, 187–88, 193, 196, 234, 242–43, 268–69, 286, 310–13, 317, 320, 350 Augustine, Saint, 241, 362–63 Auschwitz, 307, 309, 314, 324. See also Holocaust authoritarianism, 106, 183–84 axiological neutrality, 200

Badura, Fr. T., 266 Bajda, Fr. Jerzy, 269, 325–26 Balicki, Zygmunt, 233 Bandurski, Bishop Władysław, 242 Baraniak, Bishop Antoni, 40, 50–51 Bartnik, Fr. Czesław, 156, 263, 268–69, 324, 351–52 Basista, Fr. Władysław, 154–55 Belarusians, 9, 213 Bender, Ryszard, 324–25 Benedict XVI (pope), 89, 203 biblical exegesis, 103 Biblioteka Kaznodziejska (The Homiletic Library). See homiletic guides Big Bang theory, 95 471

472

Ind e x

Bilczewski, Saint Józef on being Catholic, 3–4, 11, 131 biblical exegesis, 103 Catholic-Social Union, 133 democracy, 172 Marianism, 361, 367 modernism, 105 patriotism, 240 progress, 102 Rerum Novarum, 126, 138 social reformer, 24, 246 state vs. nation, 334 birth control, 78–79, 356–57, 382 Blachnicki, Fr. Franciszek, 387–88 Black Madonna icon. See Virgin of Częstochowa Błoński, Jan, 315 Bobicz, Fr. Ildefons, 106, 243 Bodzianowski, Fr. Feliks, 247, 300–301 Bogdalski, Fr. Czesław, 27 “Bogurodzica” (She Who Bore God), 364 Bolshevism, 184, 242–43, 312–13, 328–30, 395–96. See also communism The Books of the Polish Nation and the Polish Pilgrimage, 86–87 Boudou, Adrian, 332 boycott, 297–98, 311–13 “Boże, coś Polskę” (God Save Poland), 226–27, 334, 340–41 Brotherhood of the Most Holy and Gracious Mary, the Royal Queen of Poland, 230–31 Brzozowski, Fr. Mieczysław, 116, 197–98, 348–51 Cantius, John. See Kanty, Saint Jan capitalism, 125, 129, 138–39, 141–42, 145–46, 154–57, 268, 271. See also Rerum Novarum Capuchins, 25 Caro, Leopold, 127–28, 138–39 catechism after Second Vatican Council, 70 Bełza, Władysław, 3 clerical authority, 32 Council of Trent, 31, 92 economic reform, 155–56 freedom, 198–99 Hell, 60–62 Krukowski, Józef, 56–57, 88 Lord’s Prayer, 83 messianism, 89 nineteenth century, 16 papal infallibility, 19 pride, 68 religious classes under communism, 192 salvation and good deeds, 54 sin, 76–77 superficiality of religion, 12 Tenth Commandment, 118

Catholic Action, 34–35, 136–38, 184, 249, 251, 392 Catholic Convention, 23–24, 127, 130, 224, 280, 366–67 Catholic Encyclopedia, 95 Catholic Society of Polish Workers, 123, 132, 136 Catholic-National Party, 132 Catholic-Populist Club, 22–23 Catholic-Social Union, 133 Cegiełka, Fr. Franciszek, 355 censorship, 76, 319, 341–42, 347 Centesimus Annus, 155, 198 Chadecja. See Christian Democratic Party (Chadecja) chastity, 63–66, 74, 373 Chmielewski, Fr. Stanisław, 117 Chościak-Popiel, Archishop Wincenty, 293 Chotkowski, Fr. Władysław, 90, 164, 219, 228–30 Christian Democratic Party (Chadecja), 21, 140–41, 145–46, 173, 184–85, 376, 393 Christian humanism, 149–50, 152 Christian Social Party, 280–81 Christian Union of National Unity (ChZJN), 177 Christian-National Party, 304, 335 Church Militant. See Ecclesia Militans Cieszkowski, August, 85, 88 Cieszynski, Fr. Nikodem, 242, 329, 374–75, 381–82 Cimniewski, Fr. M., 234 Circle of Servants of the Divine Cause, 84 civic religion, 7 civil unions, 11 clergy. See also anticlericalism anti-Semitism, 315 asceticism, 55 authority of, 19–20 Catholic Action, 35 in Catholicism, 31 celibacy, 262 Church of Choice model, 206 clerical authority, 23, 29, 31–32, 42, 44–45, 48, 119–20 clerical scandals, 21 and communism, 142, 258 Conference of the Clergy, 180 decline in numbers, 81–82 desacralization, 39–40 elections, 176–80, 203 Germanization, 163 Glos Kaplana Polskiego (Voice of the Polish Priest), 91–92, 166 Home Army, 315 income of, 135 loyalism, 217, 220, 366 Marianism, 372 National Democrats (Endecja), 240, 254

Ind e x in nineteenth-century rebellions, 165–68 Oath against Modernism, 29, 98 obedience, 51, 53 otherworldliness, 126 partisan politics, 176–80 partitioning of Poland, 163, 332 political endorsements, 203 popular culture, 82 progress, 117 in Protestantism, 31 Radio Maryja, 393 Second Vatican Council, 48–50 sin and sexuality, 63 social class, 120 social reform, 121, 131–32 Union of Warriors for Freedom and Democracy, 142 urbanization, 81–82 World War II deaths, 36, 254 clericalism, 6–7, 133 Collegium Secretum, 180 commodification, 122, 141 communism anticlericalism, 37 anticommunism, 9, 142, 150, 258–59, 263 anti-Semitism, 322 and atheism, 142, 196 censorship, 341–42, 347 and the clergy, 142, 258 Communist Party, 298 Divini Redemptoris: On Atheistic Communism, 185 elections, 187, 197–98, 298 fall of, 77–78, 116–17, 197 and the Jews, 299–301, 312, 323–24 Marianism, 387–89 and materialism, 339 and modernism, 108, 116–17 and moral decline, 77 Polak-Katolik, 341 in Poland, 186–87 Prayer for the Fatherland, 260 separation of church and state, 259 Solidarity movement, 77 state vs. nation, 342 World War II, 37 concentration camps, 316–17. See also Auschwitz Confederation of Targowica, 210 conservatism, 105, 116 conspiracy theories alcoholism, 262–63, 291 anti-Semitism, 234, 272–73, 282 Catholicism, 244 concentration camps, 316–17 Cristero rebellion, 337–38 European Union, 325, 358 Freemasons, 249, 283–84, 307–8

473

globalism, 358 and the Holocaust, 314–15, 317–18, 324–25 interwar years, 389–90 Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy, 328–30, 386, 395–96 Jews, 282, 291–93, 299, 312–13 Judaism, 209, 308 Kaczyński, Lech and Jarosław, 201–2 Manichaean heresy, 248 militant rhetoric, 336 Nazism as a Jewish plot, 339 popular culture, 244 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 308 racism, 293 Radio Maryja, 269–70, 393 and Satan, 247–49, 254, 269 secularism, 244, 389–90 and sin, 244–45 socialism, 244 Torun Catholic Church, 392 and World War II, 316 Zionism, 321–22 żydokomuna, 302, 323 consumerism, 74, 77–78 conversion, 6, 276–77, 285, 288–90, 309, 311, 347 Council for Religious Dialogue, 327 Council of Trent, 31, 92, 160, 235 Counterreformation, 6, 346 courtship, 64–65 Cristero rebellion, 337–38 Cum Primum, 8–9, 160, 166, 332 Cywiński, Bohdan, 5, 384 Czas (Time), 22 Czerkawski, Włodzimierz, 133, 288

Dąbrowski, Fr. Tomasz, 65–66, 238, 275 damnation, 55, 72–73, 77–78 dancing , 55–56, 63–64, 66 Day, Dorothy, 246 De Fide et Ecclesia, 98–99 death penalty, 10–11 Dębicki, Fr. Władysław, 97 the Deluge, 209, 364 democracy and atheism, 268–69 On the Catholic Foundation of National Democracy, 180 in Catholicism, 35, 45, 171–72, 189–90, 263, 396 Centesimus Annus, 198 in the Church after World War II, 37 and dignity, 193 and freedom, 184–85, 194–95 French Revolution, 168 as illegitimate rule, 168 Immortale Dei, 170

474

Ind e x

democracy (continued) and Judaism, 172 Leo XIII (pope), 168, 174, 186 Mirari Vos, 170 and nationalism, 191 Second Vatican Council, 41–42 and secularism, 158–59 separation of church and state, 204–5 and Stalinism, 269 state vs. nation, 345 Union of Warriors for Freedom and Democracy, 142 deportation/emigration, 304–6, 309–10 desacralization, 39–40 dialogue, 391 dignity, 122, 144–45, 147–48, 150, 152, 193 discourse, 257, 291 Dives in Misericordia, 153 Divine Providence, 220–22 Divini Redemptoris: On Atheistic Communism, 185 divorce, 75, 77, 249–50, 283, 356, 387 Dmowski, Roman, 181–83, 232–34, 240, 301–2, 328 Dogmatic Constitution of the Church, 45 Donatist heresy, 30–31 drunkenness, 66 Drzewiecki, Fr. Mirosław, 266, 271 Duda, Sebastian, 270 Dulles, Avery, Cardinal, 150 Dunajewski, Albin, Cardinal, 281 Durzyński, Fr. Stanisław, 250 Dylągowa, Hanna, 6–7 Dziwisz, Stanisław, Cardinal, 201

Eastern Orthodox , 5, 162, 213 Ecclesia Militans, 33, 88, 209, 232, 239–40, 245–46, 250–51, 253–55, 271 Ecclesia Penitens, 33, 232 Ecclesia Triumphans, 33, 232 ecclesiology authoritarianism, 121 clerical authority, 19–20, 32 defined, 54 and John Paul II, 47 and the laity, 17–18 Mariavites, 28–29 and natural law, 169 nature of the Church, 16–18 People of God, 33 reason and faith, 98–99 Second Vatican Council, 41–42, 45–46, 53 separation of church and state, 204–5 social reform, 133, 137 ecumenicism, 347–48, 349 education, 6, 22, 68–69, 93, 173–74, 188, 250, 283, 290, 311–12, 320, 339, 379, 389–90

1863 revolt, 9, 30, 161, 165–68, 216–18 elections, 6, 22–23, 176–80, 187, 192, 197–98, 203, 298 Endecja. See National Democrats (Endecja) Enlightenment, 6–7, 125, 168–69, 210 entertainment, 74 Eska, Juliusz, 383–84 ethnic cleansing , 341, 344 ethno-Catholics, 13–14, 167–68, 170 Eucharist. See Holy Communion eugenics, 312–13 European Union (EU), 207, 325, 358, 392 evolution, 95, 101, 107 excommunication, 20–21, 24, 92, 104 exorcism, 256

faith, 92, 94–96, 99–100, 108, 231, 333, 349–50, 358 fascism, 145. See also Nazis fatalism, 58, 223, 246 Felician Sisters, 30 Feliński, Archbishop Zygmunt, 67–68, 91, 119–20, 161, 166, 214–15, 218–20, 223–24, 226, 228, 233, 276–79 femininity, 68, 72, 361–62, 372–77, 379, 381–82, 384–86, 390, 395 feminism, 284 Fijałkowski, Archbishop Antoni Melchior, 32, 59–60, 82, 120, 161, 213–14 First Plenary Synod, 139 First Vatican Council, 98 Fourth Commandment, 355 Franciscans, 27–28 Frankowski, Bishop Edward, 270 free will, 54, 185, 193, 220–22, 243, 374 freedom, 184–85, 192–99 Freemasons and anti-Semitism, 282–83 and Church hierarchy, 263 conspiracy theories, 249, 283–84, 307–8, 337–38 European Union (EU), 325 and homosexuals, 326 Humanum Genus, 283 Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy, 328–30, 386, 395–96 and the Jews, 249, 301, 337 Militia of the Immaculate, 309 and modernism, 283–84 Polish prime ministers, 178 Rerum Novarum, 283 secularism, 283 and sin, 246 free-thinking , 336 French Revolution, 168, 282, 284 Friedrich-Brzozowska, Maria, 367, 374 “From the Smoke of the Fires,” 216–17

Ind e x Gałecki, Bishop Antoni, 161 Galicia, 8, 22, 124–25, 132–33, 216, 288 Galileo, 92 Gaudium et Spes, 45, 70, 149, 192 gay rights, 325 Gazeta Świąteczna, 294 Geppert, Fr. Ignacy, 180 Germanization, 163, 237 Germany, 8–9, 36, 133, 163, 171, 183, 339–40 Gierek, Edward, 259 Giller, Antoni, 215, 225–26 Giraud, Archbishop Pierre, 122 Glemp, Primate Józef, 9, 260, 323–24, 391 globalism, 358 Głos Kapłana Polskiego (Voice of the Polish Priest), 91–92, 166 Gnatowski, Fr. Jan, 26, 90–91, 125, 129 Gocłowski, Archbishop Tadeusz, 391–92 “God Save Poland” (Boże, coś Polskę), 226–27, 334, 340–41 Godlewski, Fr. Marceli, 132 Golian, Fr. Zygmunt, 59, 62 Gołubiew, Antoni, 109 Górecki, Antoni, 227–28 Gospel of James, 362 Gowin, Jarosław, 204–5 Graszyński, Fr. Alfons, 247–48 Great Depression, 60 Great Novena, 258 Gregory XVI (pope), 8–9, 160, 164, 166, 170, 211 Grodziecki, Tomasz, 56 Gross, Jan, 322–23 Gutkowski, Bishop Marceli, 162

Habsburg Empire, 7–8 Heaven, 33 Hell, 60–62, 70, 73, 79–80 heresy, 25–26, 30–31, 84, 89 heretics, 19 Hetmanka. See Marianism Hetnał, Fr. Józef, 252 hippies, 116 Hispanicization, 185 historiosophy, 83, 85, 89, 104, 108–9, 209 Hitler, Adolph, 183–84, 255, 317, 339. See also Nazis Hlond, August, Cardinal, 34–35, 37, 107–8, 111–12, 136–38, 169, 173, 179, 184, 250–51, 253, 255, 311–12, 316–18, 338 Hlond, Bożena, 315 Holocaust, 9, 272, 314–19, 324–27, 341 Hołownia, Fr. Bernard, 252–53 Holy Communion, 27–28, 33, 48 Home Army, 315

475

homiletic guides abortion, 74, 78–79, 356, 382–83, 387, 389 agrarian strikes, 120 alcoholism, 389 antemurales christianitatis, 329 anti-Semitism, 274–76, 278–79, 289–90, 319 asceticism, 67 atheism, 320 battle between good and evil, 252–54 Biblioteka Kaznodziejska (The Homiletic Library), 48, 56–57, 153, 267–68, 319 birth control, 78–79, 356–57 chastity, 63, 74 Christian humanism, 150 clerical authority, 19–21 communism, 71, 128, 262–63, 320, 338 conspiracy theories, 248–50, 262–63 dancing , 63–64, 66 death and hope, 58 divorce, 356, 387 drunkenness, 66 Ecclesia Militans, 238–40, 250–51 entertainment, 74 exorcism, 256 fatalism, 58 government authority, 159–60 Great Novena, 258 happiness in this life, 62–63 Hell, 60–62 hippies, 116 Holocaust, 326–27 Jewish riots, 310 John Paul II (pope), 72–73 and the laity, 66 legitimacy of authority, 158–62 Marianism, 360, 369–70, 373–74, 380–83, 393 marriages, 74 mass media, 76 militant rhetoric, 246–47, 261–62, 336 misery, 62 as model for Catholic behavior, 56 modernism, 111–12 moralistic teaching , 54–55, 63 national egoism, 233–34 and nationalism, 80 neighborly love, 235–38, 264–67 Nowa Biblioteka Kaznodziejska (The New Homiletic Library), 56 obedience, 71, 162 partitioning of Poland, 224, 228 patriotism, 240 penance, 226, 228 Polak-Katolik, 343–46 Polish independence, 242 poverty, 119, 121–24, 134–35 progress, 105–6, 112, 114–16, 255 property rights, 126

476

Ind e x

homiletic (continued) rebellions, 219 redemption, 70 salvation, 80 Second Vatican Council, 57, 70–71, 73 secularism, 117 separation of church and state, 188, 199–200 sexuality, 74 social reform, 141 Solidarity movement, 259–61 theology of the nation, 350–54 threats to the nation, 75–76 vengeful God, 60–61 voter’s guide, 179 World War II, 57, 69–70, 80 youth culture, 71 homophobia, 325–26 homosexuals, 11, 65 Hozakowski, Fr., 180 Hryniewicz, Fr. Wacław, 156–57 human nature, 72 human rights, 149–50, 158–59 Humanae Vitae, 356–57 humanism, 70 Hussites, 31, 83 hyperdulia, 363 hypermasculinity, 380–81

Iłczyk, Fr. Stanisław, 268 illegitimacy, 63–64 Immortale Dei, 170, 172, 283 imperialism, 354 Index of Forbidden Books, 84, 88, 181 individualism, 50, 147, 283–84 Ineffabilis Deus, 363 intelligentsia, 10, 81 interwar years antimodernism, 108 and anti-Semitism, 272–73, 290–91, 314 conspiracy theories, 389–90 Ecclesia Militans, 271 economic crisis, 243 and the Jews, 291, 292, 295–96, 299–301 militant rhetoric, 248–50, 253–54, 309 pessimism, 106–7, 254 Poland as a battleground, 248–50 progress, 106–7 rewriting nineteenth-century history, 332–33 Isakowicz, Izaak, 370

Jabłońska-Deptuła, Ewa, 7 Jabłoński, Fr. Tadeusz, 50 Jakubowicz, Maksymilian, 90 Janiszewski, Fr. Józef, 275–76, 305–6, 332, 336 Jankowski, Fr. Henryk, 322–23

Jaroszewicz, Piotr, 259 Jasna Góra monastery, 209, 364, 389. See also Virgin Mary Jedynak, Fr. Witold, 325 Jehliczki, Fr., 140 Jeleński, Szczepan, 100 Jeske-Choiński, Teodor, 288–89 Jesuits, 21 Jews. See also anti-Semitism; Judaism anti-Jewish riots, 310–14 and atheism, 286, 310–13 boycotting of, 297–98, 311–13 and communism, 299–301, 312, 323–24 conspiracy theories, 24, 282, 291–93, 299, 312–13 conversion of, 276–77, 285, 288–90, 309, 311 deportation/emigration, 304–6, 309–10 economic domination, 294–96 as embodiment of evil, 285 and Freemasons, 249, 301, 337 General Government, 36 “God Save Poland” (Boże, coś Polskę), 226–27, 334 Jedwabne Jews massacre, 322–23 the Jewish question, 303, 328, 340 Kielce pogrom, 318–19 materialism, 285, 289 and modernism, 277–80, 312 and moral decline, 77 Nazism as a Jewish plot, 339 occupational breakdown, 291, 292 Polish partitioning , 291 as predatory beasts, 288–89 Republic of Poland-Lithuania, 5 and Satan, 300–301, 317 Second Republic, 9 and the Soviet Union, 339–40 under Stalin, 298–99 state vs. nation, 334 usury, 275, 280, 310–11 żydokomuna, 298–302 Jeż, Bishop Ignacy, 41 John Paul II (pope) abortion as Holocaust, 79 Centesimus Annus, 155, 198 dialogue, 391 ecumenicism, 349 freedom and Christianity, 196 German forgiveness letter, 265–66 Koźmiński beatified, 30 liberation theology, 153–54 Marianism, 376, 385 nations as families, 355 personalism, 150–52 on Poland and Catholicism, 4 Polish clergy, 258 Radio Maryja, 270

Ind e x Redemptor Hominis, 152–53 Redemptoris Mater, 375 and the Second Vatican Council, 45, 114–15 Tertio Millennio Adveniente, 354 Totus Tuus, 360–61 women’s emancipation, 379 John XXIII (pope), 41, 50, 52, 112, 192 Jop, Bishop Franciszek, 52, 113 Jordan, Henryk, 131 Judaism. See also anti-Semitism; Jews blood sacrifice, 280 conspiracy theories about, 209 and cultural decadence, 250 and democracy, 172 Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy, 328–30, 386, 395–96 judeo-messianism, 302 Judeophobia, 278–79 and liberalism, 22 national messianism, 88 and progress, 277–78 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 308 under Russian partition, 214 and socialism, 177–78, 299 supersessionism, 273–74 Zionism, 296–97 just war, 219, 306

Kaczmarczyk, Fr. Józef, 102, 299–301 Kaczyński, Lech and Jarosław, 201–2, 325 Kakowski, Aleksander, Cardinal, 34–35, 64, 134–35, 171, 176–77, 241–42, 247, 251, 310–11, 331, 367 Kamiński, Bishop Zygmunt, 32–33, 149, 193–94, 262–63, 345, 357–58 Kamperda, Jan, 56 Kanty, Saint Jan, 102 Kazimierz, Jan (king), 360, 364, 387 Ketteler, Bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von, 122 Kielce, 318–19, 323 Kingdom of God on earth, 18, 26, 43–44, 86, 90 Kłoczowski, Jerzy, 5–6 Kłopotowski, Fr. Ignacy, 293 Kmiecik, Fr. Ireneusz, 57–60, 62, 64–65, 135, 234–38, 243, 251, 371, 381–82 Knights of the Immaculate, 367–68 Kolbe, Saint Maksymilian, 307–9, 367–69 Kołłątaj, Fr. Hugo, 7 Kolski, Fr., 96 Kominek, Bolesław, Cardinal, 41–42, 193, 320 Komorowski, Bronisław, 202 Kopyciński, Fr. Adam, 100–101, 125, 158, 273 Kordecki, Prior Augustyn, 389 Korfanty, Wojciech, 106–7, 140–41, 145–46, 184–86 Kościuszko, Tadeusz, 210

477

Kosiak, Prior Paweł, 261, 373–74, 384–85 Kossak-Szczucka, Zofia, 314–15 Kowalczyk, Fr. Stanisław, 156 Kozłowska, Sister Feliksa, 26–32, 42 Koźmiński, Fr. Honorat, 29–30 Krasicki, Bishop Ignacy, 7 Krasiński, Zygmunt, 85–86, 88, 365 Krętosz, Fr. Józef, 116–17 Krotoski, Kazimierz, 181 Krukowski, Fr. Józef, 16, 57, 60–62, 66, 68, 88, 119, 121–22, 236, 278–79, 372–73, 391 Krzaklewski, Marian, 10 Kubicki, Bishop Paweł, 332 Kubik, Jan, 109 Kulturkampf, 7, 158, 163

Labor Party, 185 labor unions, 122, 132–33, 139 Laborem Exercens, 153–54 L’Action Française, 181 Łagiewniki Church, 392 laity, 17–18, 33–34, 37–39, 41–42, 46–47, 49–50, 53, 133, 142, 176–78, 203 Lamennais, Fr. Félicité de, 170 Lamentabili Sane Exitu, 29, 99 Latin America, 151–52, 154 Latin Mass, 42, 48, 50 L’Avenir, 170 Law and Justice Party (PiS), 201, 203, 268 Le Manifeste au service du personnalisme, 145 Ledóchowski, Bishop Mieczysław, 163 Lefebvre, Archbishop Marcel, 104 legitimacy (rule), 158, 160 Lemaitre, Georges, 95 Leo XIII (pope), 96, 125, 138, 140, 160, 168, 170, 172, 174, 186, 283. See also Rerum Novarum Lepa, Bishop Adam, 10, 268 Lewalski, Krzysztof, 272 Lewandowski, Fr. Jerzy, 345, 347, 353 liberalism, 22, 96, 125, 141, 170, 193, 219–20, 278 liberation theology, 83, 147, 153–54, 246 liberty, 193 Lindenwald, Herman Czecz de, 125 literacy, 8, 21 Lithuanians, 9 Łobos, Bishop Ignacy, 23 Lord’s Prayer, 83, 85 love/struggle duality, 267–68, 271 loyalism Boże, coś Polskę, 226–27 Catholic hierarchy, 8, 12, 91, 166–68 clergy, 217, 220, 366 Cum Primum, 160, 166, 332 Leo XIII (pope), 160

478

Ind e x

loyalism (continued) National Democrats, 180 and nineteenth century patriotism, 330 partitioning of Poland, 163, 211, 213–14 Przegląd Katolicki, 164–65 Regency Council, 171 Lubelski, Fr. Józef, 169, 282 Lublin, 8 Lueger, Karl, 280–81 Łukomski, Bishop Stanisław, 179 Lumen Gentium, 45 Lutheranism, 132, 246, 286, 334 Lutosławski, Fr. Kazimierz, 253 Lux Mundi, 315 Łyskowski, Kazimierz, 101–2

Majdański, Walenty, 340–41 Mały Dziennik (The Little Daily), 138, 307, 330, 368 Manichaean heresy, 241, 248, 252, 254, 256 Marialis Cultus, 385–86 Marian Congress, 20 Marianism. See Virgin Mary Mariański, Fr. Janusz, 206 Mariavites, 26–27, 30, 42 Maritain, Jacques, 143–48 marital infidelity, 249–50 marriages, 8, 64, 74–75, 162, 188, 211 Marszewski, Bishop Michal, 120 martial law, 260, 266–67, 312 Marxism, 122, 145–46, 149, 190–91 Maryknoll, 246 masculinity, 72 Mass attendance, 11, 12, 258, 262 masturbation, 65 Mater Dolorosa, 381–82 materialism, 78, 98, 112, 146, 148, 285, 289, 339 Matka-Polka, 376–77, 379, 381, 390 Maurras, Charles, 181 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz, 200, 324 Mediator Dei, 33 meekness, 264–65 Mendel, Gregor, 95 messianism, 86–87, 89 Mexico, 337–38 Michalkiewicz, Bishop Kazimierz, 365–66 Michnik, Adam, 152 Mickiewicz, Adam, 22, 84, 86–88, 96, 222–23, 229–30, 332–33, 352 Mieroszewski, Count Krzysztof, 131 Mieszko I, 258, 352 Mikoszewski, Fr. Karol, 166 Milewski, Józef, 97–98, 127, 129, 171 militant rhetoric, 246–50, 253–54, 256, 261–62, 309, 313–14, 330, 336, 368–70 Militia of the Immaculate, 252, 309, 368

millenarianism, 84, 89 Mirari Vos, 170 misery, 62, 70, 73 misogyny, 395 Mit Brennender Sorge: On the Church and the German Reich, 185 Młodzież Wszechpolska, 240 modernism. See also progress antimodernism, 98, 104–5, 108, 110, 117 anti-Semitism, 279, 324 authoritarianism, 183–84 Catholic Action, 136 and Catholicism, 14–15, 81, 105, 111–12, 117 and communism, 108, 116–17 consumerism, 74 Enlightenment, 6–7, 125 and Freemasons, 283–84 and the Jews, 277–80, 312 Lamentabili Sane Exitu, 29 Marianism, 380–81, 390 Oath against Modernism, 29, 52, 82, 98 Pascendi Dominici Gregis, 29, 245 People of God, 33 Pius X (pope), 245 and religion, 10 Second Vatican Council, 109 and secularism, 15, 81 and sin, 113 and social reform, 124 Society of Christian Workers, 132 Tygodnik Powszechny (The Universal Weekly), 40, 109 and the Virgin Mary, 385 and World War II, 108 Modrzejewski, J., 296 moralistic teaching , 54–55, 63 Morawski, Franciszek, 101, 131 Morawski, Maryan, 233, 285–86 Morawski, Bishop Seweryn, 23 motherhood, 379, 381 Mounier, Emmanuel, 143–46 Mrowiński, Fr. W., 366 Munich Conference, 338 Munificentissimus Deus, 363 Muscovites, 209 Muslims, 5 Mysł Narodowa, 240 Mystical Body of the Christ, 32–33, 42

Narbutt, Jerzy, 384 Nasz Dziennik (Our Daily), 269–70, 393 National Armed Forces (NSZ), 315–16 national Catholicism, 358–59 National Democrats (Endecja), 179–82, 186, 232–35, 240–41, 254, 282, 301, 328, 393 national egoism, 233–35, 240, 301–2

Ind e x national messianism, 84, 87–88, 90 National Party, 182 National-Christian Populist Party, 177 nationalism and abortion, 79 and atheism, 234 The Books of the Polish Nation and the Polish Pilgrimage, 86–87 and Catholicism, 208, 216, 218, 302, 328, 330–31, 341–43 civic religion, 7 conspiracy theories, 244, 302 and democracy, 191 1863 revolt, 216–18 Marianism, 366 national egoism, 233 penance, 223–25 Polish Workers Party, 341 and religion, 7 repudiation of, 256 state vs. nation, 333–34 theology of the nation, 350, 354 threats to, 74–75 tribalism, 208–9 universalism, 350 natural disasters, 59–60 natural law, 168–70 Nazis, 36, 183, 186, 338–39 neighborly love, 234–38, 264–67, 279–80, 286–88, 302–3, 314–15, 395 neoliberalism, 155 neo-pagans, 183, 250 Niedziałkowski, Bishop Karol, 176, 234 Niedziela (Sunday), 156 Niemcewicz, Julian, 296–97 1905 Revolution, 25 Nosowski, Zbigniew, 11 Nostra Aetate, 319, 326 Nowa Biblioteka Kaznodziejska (The New Homiletic Library), 56, 140 Nowak, Fr. Mieczysław, 10 Nowak, Jerzy Robert, 325, 358 Nowak, Archbishop Stanisław, 371 Nowiny Polityczne Polskie (The Polish Political News), 215 Nowosad, Witold, 240

Oath against Modernism, 29, 52, 82, 98 obedience, 51, 53, 71, 162, 374 Oppitz, Fr. Aleksandr, 309 organic work, 85 The Origin of Species, 95 original sin. See sin Orthodox religion, 246 orthodoxy, 14 otherworldliness, 57, 118, 126

479

Ottomans, 209, 329, 364 Ozanam, Frederic, 122

paganism, 219, 255 Pamiętnik Religijno-Moralny, 96 papal infallibility, 19, 98 Papal States, 81 paranoia, 359 parliamentarianism, 171–72 Paroles d’un croyant, 170 partitioning of Poland, 7–8, 27, 120, 163, 210–11, 212, 213–18, 224, 227–29, 291, 332 Pascendi Dominici Gregis, 29, 245 Paszkowicz, Archdeacon Adam, 160–61 patriotism, 21, 71, 86–87, 215, 218–20, 229–30, 234, 237, 240, 330, 335, 343, 355, 358 Paul VI (pope), 259, 356–57, 385–86 Pauline Fathers, 106 Peasant Party Union (ZSC), 23 Pelczar, Archbishop Józef, 99, 133, 172–73, 230, 234, 242, 247, 284, 303, 331, 366 penance, 223–26, 228–30, 237, 243 People of God, 33, 44–45, 50, 53, 232 Peretiakowicz, Antoni, 302 personalism, 143–48, 150–52, 154–55 pessimism, 69, 104, 106–7, 254 Piasecki, Bolesław, 142 Piątkowski, Fr. Marion, 153 Pielatowski, Fr. Kazimierz, 71 Pielgrzym (The Pilgrim), 16, 18–19, 54, 93–94 Pierzchała, Fr. Rafał, 268 Pilch, Fr. Zygmunt, 289–90 pilgrimage, 22, 202, 225–26, 230, 258, 261, 329–30, 363–66, 369, 372, 383, 387 Piłsudski, Józef, 140, 178–79, 183 Piotrowski, Mirosław, 156 Pius V (pope), 363 Pius VI (pope), 210 Pius IX (pope), 19, 82, 84, 95, 168, 211, 214–15, 252, 254, 363 Pius X (pope), 27–29, 82, 92, 98–99, 104–5, 107, 245 Pius XI (pope), 33, 136, 138, 177–79, 181, 185, 240, 337 Pius XII (pope), 33, 37, 142, 363 Piwowarczyk, Fr. Jan, 191, 256 Piwowarski, Fr. Władysław, 40, 109, 146, 206 Plater-Zyberkówna, Cecylia, 130 pogrom, 310, 318–19, 323 Pohl, Fr. Mieczysław, 48–49 Polak-Katolik, 208, 293–94, 332–34, 341, 343–46, 348–50, 359–60 Polak-Katolik (magazine), 331 Polish Brethren, 6 Polish Catholic Populist Party, 304

480

Polish Christian-Social Party, 133 Polish Constitutional Assembly, 177 Polish Labor Union for Christian Workers, 132–33 Polish People’s Center, 133 Polish Socialist Party, 178–79 Polish Trade Union, 136 Polish United Workers Party, 192 Polish Workers Party, 341 Poor Sisters of St. Clare, 30 Popiel, Fr. Jan, 384 Popiełuszko, Jerzy, 260–61 popular culture, 8, 55–56, 64–66, 76, 82, 244, 389 Populist-National Union (ZLN), 181–82 pornography, 310–11, 313 Portych, Fr. T., 234 Posiew (The Sowing), 99–100, 139, 183–84, 221–22, 274, 293–96, 304, 331 Potocki, Andrzej, 281 Potocki, Stanisław, 8 poverty, 22, 118–19, 121–24, 134–35, 151 Pozńan Uprising of 1848, 161 Prawdziwy Patriota (The True Patriot), 215–16 prayer, 230–31, 259 Prayer for the Fatherland, 260 pride, 67–68 Primate’s Social Council, 138–39 Proclamation to the Polish Nation, 330 progress. See also modernism aggiornamento, 111 authoritarianism, 106 and Catholicism, 15, 92–93, 100, 117 and the clergy, 117 vs. conservatism, 96, 116 interwar years, 106–7 liberalism, 219–20 and materialism, 112 messianism, 90 Second Vatican Council, 114–15 and secularism, 112–13 social reform, 126–27, 220 urbanization, 106 World War II, 109 property rights, 122, 126, 153–54 Protestantism. See also Reformation aid programs, 347 anti-Semitism, 286–87 birth control, 356 free will, 221 and Freemasons, 337 heretical nature of, 19 national egoism, 240 nature of salvation, 26 Piłsudski conversion, 178 Reformation, 5–6, 11–12, 125, 346 Republic of Poland-Lithuania, 5

Ind e x revelation and scripture, 29 role of clergy, 31 salvation, 54 Second Republic, 9 Virgin Mary apparitions, 372 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 308 Prussia, 7–8, 210–11, 218 Przegląd Homiletyczny (The Homiletic Review), 289 Przegląd Katolicki (The Catholic Review), 96, 164–65, 171, 279–80, 283–84, 286–87 Przegląd Powszechny (The Universal Review), 101, 125, 133 Przegląd Wszechpolski (The All-Poland Review), 180, 237 Przewodnik Katolicki (The Catholic Guide), 35, 124, 127, 137, 140, 174, 178, 183, 245–46, 290, 295–98, 305, 335 Przezdźiecki, Archbishop Henryk, 238 Pulikowski, Fr. Jacek, 78–79 purgatory, 33 Puzyna, Bishop Jan, 19–20 Pylak, Archbishop Bolesław, 205, 268 Quadragesimo Anno, 138 Quanta Cura, 252

racism, 273, 285, 289, 293 Radio Maryja, 201, 206, 268–71, 324, 326, 358–59, 361, 383, 391, 392, 393 Radio Niepokalanów, 368 rationalism, 94, 194 Ratti, Monsignor Achille. See Pius XI (pope) reason, 92, 94–96, 99–100, 108 rebellions agrarian strikes, 120 the Deluge, 209 1830 uprising , 8–9, 160–61, 164, 211, 227 1863 revolt, 9, 30, 161, 165–68 Gdańsk strike, 259 Germanization, 163 against government authority, 159 and penance, 225 Pius VI condemnation of, 210 Poznań Uprising of 1848, 161 as sin, 219 Solidarity movement, 259–60 strikes in 1970, 195–96 struggle for survival, 245–46 student strikes, 237 redemption, 70 Redemptor Hominis, 152 Redemptoris Mater, 375–76 Reformation. See Protestantism

Ind e x religious diversity, 4–5, 11–12, 331, 339 Republic of Poland-Lithuania, 5–6 Rerum Novarum, 118, 122–25, 130, 137–38, 140, 146, 153, 155, 283 Resurrectionist Order, 67, 90, 211 Righteous among the Nations, 314, 316 Rokita, Jan, 392 Rola (The Soil), 279–80, 288 Romanov, Alexander (tsar), 227 Romanov, Constantine, 226–27 Rosieński, Fr. Edmund, 169 Rostworowski, Fr. Jan, 172, 175, 181, 303, 329, 333 Ruch (The Movement), 215 Rucz, Fr. Marek, 110 Ruether, Rosemary, 274 Russia, 7, 27, 131–32, 171, 210, 212, 213–17, 242, 291. Rycerz Niepokalanej (The Knight of the Immaculate), 66, 69, 137, 147–48, 248, 251–52, 255, 307–9, 340–41, 368, 374–75 Ryczan, Bishop Kazimierz, 200–201 Rydzyk, Fr. Tadeusz, 117, 201, 269–70, 326, 391, 393

sacred time, 83 salvation, 54–55, 60, 70, 80, 87, 90, 351–55, 370, 377–78 Sapieha, Archbishop Adam, 37, 177, 179 Satan, 247–49, 254, 269, 300–301, 316–17 science, 93–94, 103–4, 250 Second Vatican Council aggiornamento, 50, 192 anti-Semitism denounced, 41, 319, 321 asceticism, 70 democracy, 41–42 Dogmatic Constitution of the Church, 45 ecclesiology, 41–42, 45–46, 53 ecumenicism, 347–48 Gaudium et Spes, 45, 70, 192 human rights, 149 humanism, 70 impact of, 45 laity, 33–34, 38–39, 41–42, 49–50, 53 liberation theology, 246 modernism, 52, 109 natural law, 169 neighborly love, 265 pastoral letter, 47–48 People of God, 50, 232 and political activism, 195 political tolerance, 192 progress, 114–15 resistance to reform, 52–53

salvation, 55, 70 secularism, 159 social Catholicism, 246–47 supersessionism, 273 secular time, 83 secularism anti-Semitism, 279, 301, 303 Catholicism, 43, 110 conspiracy theories, 244, 389–90 and democracy, 158–59 education, 250, 283, 320, 339, 389–90 Enlightenment, 6–7 Freemasons, 283 marriages, 8, 162 modernism, 15, 81 National Democrats, 180 Polish constitution, 10 Polish independence, 242–43 popular culture, 389 progress, 112–13 tolerance, 190 Sejm, 6 self-abnegation, 67–69 Sembratowicz, Archbishop Sylwester, 281 Semeńenko, Fr. Piotr, 67, 90, 211, 224–25, 233, 238 sexual relations, 55–56, 77 sexuality, 11, 64, 74, 76, 148 Sikorski, Rudolf, 131 Silesia, 338 sin absolution of sins, 224 alcoholism, 276 birth control, 78–79 catechism, 76–77 commodification, 122 conspiracy theories, 244–45 economic crisis, 250 electoral politics, 177 femininity, 72 and freedom, 72, 199 Freemasons, 246 Great Depression caused by, 60 and love for the sinner, 238 Lutheranism, 246 masturbation, 65 and misery, 73 modernism, 113 original sin, 11, 54, 362–63 origins of, 55 partitioning of Poland, 227 and personal dignity, 148 pride, 67–68 and rebellions, 219 as the root of all evil, 73 and salvation, 60 Second Vatican Council, 70

481

482

Ind e x

sin (continued) sexual misconduct, 63 and wealth, 119 willful repudiation of virtue, 169 World War I, 60, 241–42 Skarga, Piotr, 56 skepticism, 97 Skonieczny, Fr. Mieczysław, 249, 251 Skórkowski, Bishop Karol, 164 Skorowski, Fr. Henryk, 354 Skowronek, Jerzy, 6 Skwarczynska, Stefania, 319 Skwarnicki, Marek, 110 Słowacki, Juliusz, 84, 332, 352 smoking , 75 Sobalkowski, Fr. Szczepan, 175 Sobieski, Jan (king), 364 social Catholicism, 118, 122, 128, 133, 138–40, 154, 156–57, 232, 246–47, 249, 280–81 social contract, 169 social reform capitalism, 125 Catholic Action, 136–38 Catholic Convention, 24, 130 Catholic Society of Polish Workers, 123, 132, 136 Christian Democratic Party (Chadecja), 140–41 and the clergy, 121, 131–32 ecclesiology, 133, 137 human rights, 149–50 personalism, 143–48, 154–55 Polish Trade Union, 136 Primate’s Social Council, 138–39 progress, 126–27, 220 Rerum Novarum, 130, 140 resistance to reform, 123 socialism, 127, 140 Society of Christian Workers, 136 Stojałowski, Fr. Stanisław, 21 Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, 136 urbanization, 130–31 socialism, 127–28, 140, 143, 152, 177–78, 183, 244, 283, 299 Society for Popular Education and Work, 22 Society of Christian Workers, 132, 136 Society of Pius X , 104 sodalities, 230, 367 Sokół, Wojciech, 263 Solecki, Bishop Łukasz, 23 solidarism, 139 Solidarity movement, 4, 77, 154, 259–61, 357 Soviet Union, 36, 254, 339–40 Śpikowski, Fr. Władysław, 252 Spis, Fr. Stanisław, 224 spousal brutality, 381–82, 395 St. Petersburg Spiritual Academy, 67–68 St. Vincent de Paul Society, 122

St. Wojciech Publishing House, 56 Stablewski, Archbishop Floryan, 62, 123–24, 163, 236 stagnation, 108 Stagraczyński, Fr. Józef, 56, 58–60, 63–64, 105–6, 124, 236, 274–76, 375, 386–87 Stalinism, 184, 254, 257, 264, 269, 298–99, 317 Stankiewicz, Henryk, 221 Starowieyska-Morstinowa, Zofia, 110 Staszic, Fr. Stanisław, 7 state vs. nation, 333–34, 336–37, 342, 345, 354 Stefanek, Bishop Stanisław, 325 Stojałowski, Fr. Stanisław, 21, 23–24, 44 Stomma, Stanisław, 190–92 Straszewski, Maurycy, 171, 233–34 Straznica (The Watchtower), 215–16 Stychel, Fr. Antoni, 132 Summi Pontificatus, 37 supersessionism, 273–74 Swedes, 209 Święcicki, Józef Marian, 146–47, 190–91 Swieżawski, Stefan, 53, 81 Syllabus of Errors, 82 Synod of Arles, 31 Szajkowski, Bogdan, 9 Szech, Antoni, 24, 29–30, 32, 43, 63, 128–29 Szeptycki, Bishop Andrzej, 237 Szulc, Fr. Serafin, 166 Szymański, Fr. Antoni, 35–36, 137, 138, 183–84, 249, 264–65

Talmud, 308 Tarnowski, Stanisław, 281–82 television, 76 Tenth Commandment, 118 Teodorowicz, Archbishop Józef, 104, 106, 131, 134, 173, 177, 249, 253–54, 331, 335–36 Tereszczuk, Fr. Janusz, 78 Tertio Millennio Adveniente, 354 theocracy, 169 theology of the nation, 350–54 theosis, 353 Third Order of St. Francis, 30 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 98, 144, 363 timelessness, 91 Tischner, Fr. Józef, 111, 194–95, 204, 256 Tokarczuk, Bishop Ignacy, 18, 45, 76, 113–14, 193–94, 320, 343, 386 tolerance, 173, 180, 190, 348–49 Tomanek, Fr. Rudolf, 140 Toruń Catholic Church, 391, 392, 396 totalism, 146, 183–86, 188 totalitarianism, 317, 324

Ind e x Totus Tuus, 360–61 Towiański, Andrzej, 84 tribalism, 189–91, 205, 208–9 Tribus Circiter, 27–29 Trinitarian Christianity, 143–44 Truszkowska, Zofia, 30 Trzeciak, Fr. Stanisław, 297 Turowicz, Jerzy, 42–45, 110, 147, 192–94, 204 Tygodnik Katolicki (The Catholic Weekly), 169 Tygodnik Powszechny (The Universal Weekly), 40, 42, 45, 50, 52–53, 104, 109, 146–47, 318–19, 322 Tyrrell, George, 98 Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, 136 Ujejski, Józef, 306 Ujejski, Kornel, 216–17, 240 Ukrainians, 9, 213, 281, 333 Uncle from Baranów, 305, 307 Union of Trade Unions, 136 Union of Warriors for Freedom and Democracy, 142 unions, 34 United States, 142 Universal Declaration on Human Rights, 147, 149–50 universalism, 148, 348, 350, 353 Urban, Fr. Jan, 240–41 urbanization, 81–82, 106, 130–31 usury, 275, 280, 310–11 utopianism, 83–84, 87, 89–91, 96, 146

vale of tears, 55–57, 69, 71 Vatican, 37, 41, 45–46 Vatican II. See Second Vatican Council Vaussard, Maurice, 301–2 vengeful God, 60–61 Virgin Mary. See also Virgin of Częstochowa as the anti-Eve, 374–75 apparitions, 360, 372, 386 Assumption, 363 chastity, 373 as Exemplar, 371–72 and femininity, 372–77, 384–86 Marialis Cultus, 385–86 Marianism, 360–66, 368–77, 380–84, 386–90, 393, 395 as Mediatrix , 366, 371 Militia of the Immaculate, 252 Miracle on the Vistula, 367 Mother of God of Ostrobrama, 365–66 national ideology, 355 Queen of Poland, 360, 364, 367, 370, 387 Redemptoris Mater, 375 salvation, 370, 377–78

483

Virgin of Częstochowa, 106, 209, 225–26, 258–59, 329–30, 361, 363–66, 369, 372, 383, 387. See also Jasna Gora monastery Volksverein, 133 voter’s guide, 177–78

Walczyński, Franciszek, 63, 162, 365, 372–73, 375 Wałęga, Bishop Leon, 20, 31, 105, 284–85 Wałęsa, Lech, 259 Warsaw, 8 Warsaw Confederation, 5, 209 Weber, Max , 81 Wiadomość Duszpasterska (Pastoral News), 188 Wielogłowski, Walery, 211, 222 Wieniec i Pszczólka (The Wreath and the Bee), 21 Więź, 322 Windthorst, Ludwig , 133 Wojtyła, Karol. See John Paul II (pope) women, 75, 93, 197, 283–84, 378–80. See also femininity World War I, 60, 241–42 World War II, 9–10, 36, 57, 69–70, 80, 108, 254, 315 Woronicz, Archbishop Jan Paweł, 8, 58, 118–19, 224–25 Woroniecki, Fr. Jacek, 187–88 Woźniakowski, Jacek, 110–11 Wprost (Directly), 391–92, 396 Wujek, Jakub, 56 Wysłouch, Fr. Izydor. See Szech, Antoni Wyspiański, Stanisław, 365 Wyszyński, Stefan, Cardinal alcoholism, 357 Catholic ecclesiology, 17–18 centralism, 47 concentration camps, 317 democracy, 37–40 detention, 254 divorce, 356 exorcism, 255–56 femininity, 381 freedom, 197 Great Novena, 258 Marianism, 361, 370–71, 375–76, 387–89 militant rhetoric, 261–62 modernism, 111–14 neighborly love, 264–65 nonviolence, 342 personal dignity, 148 personalism, 152 Polak-Katolik, 341, 343, 346–47 on Poland and Catholicism, 4 political atheism, 350 Solidarity movement, 259–60 state vs. nation, 345–46 theology of the nation, 352–54 Wyszyński, Tadeusz, 315

484

xenophobia, 287, 396

youth culture, 71, 116

Zagórski, Jerzy, 256 Zaleski, Fr. Wincenty, 369–70 Zamoyski, Andrzej, 228 Zdziechowski, Marian, 133, 302 Zięba, Fr. Maciej, 270 Ziemięcka, Eleonora, 59, 68–69, 93, 96, 121, 168–70, 211, 220–21, 377–79

Ind e x Zimmermann, Fr. Kazimierz, 133 Zimny, Fr. Henryk, 49 Zionism, 296–97, 298, 321–22 Znak (The Sign), 189–90, 204, 322 Znak circle, 192 Żuber, Fr. Ryszard, 270 Żychiewicz, Tadeusz, 38 Życie i Praca (Life and Labor), 66, 302–3, 313 Życiński, Archbishop Józef, 156, 205, 324, 358 żydokomuna, 298–302, 317, 319, 323–24 Żywczyński, Fr. Mieczysław, 332