Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter. Neal Pease
and Jews were Jews, the largest Jewry in the world and the only significant body of non-Christians in the country, for the most part not assimilated into Polish culture and destined to pose a singularly delicate and difficult challenge of coexistence both for the secular and sacred authorities of interwar Poland. As a corollary, religious identity prompted inevitable and sometimes accurate inferences concerning political loyalty to the Polish state, or its lack. Protestant Poles labored mightily to combat the impression that their membership in a denomination so closely associated with Germanic persecution was somehow outlandish and unpatriotic. In the east, Orthodoxy inescapably carried the taint of Russophilia, while the Greek Catholic sect functioned virtually as a national church of west Ukraine.
Looked at from the other angle, the demographic arithmetic also demonstrated that, for practical purposes, the old saw was true, after all: that in Poland, indeed, the Poles were Catholic, and the Catholics—at any rate, the Roman Catholics—were Poles. Exceptions to both generalizations could be found easily enough. Measurable fragments of the Polish nation adhered to Protestant groups or to Orthodoxy or, more often, to Judaism as “Poles of Mosaic faith.” By the same token, national minorities accounted for about two hundred thousand of the western Catholics of the country, Germans making up a little more than half the total, with the remnant filled out by the small but overwhelmingly Roman contingent of Lithuanians plus odds and ends of the Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Czech populace. These were the anomalies that proved the rule. None of this changed the blunt facts that all but 2 percent of the 17.4 million Latin Catholics resident in Poland were Poles, and that 91 percent of Poles declared themselves Catholics. In other words, like many stereotypes, the doctrine of polak-katolik and the related idea of Catholicism as the Polish national religion contained a semblance of validity, quite enough to satisfy those inclined to defend such propositions.
Rooted in the soil of a historically agrarian society, Polish Catholicism exhibited many of the attributes of its rural origins and upbringing. The peasant masses supplied the base of its constituency and gave their church its definitive earthy qualities: sturdy if unlettered piety, an emphasis on outward devotion, a conspicuous Marian streak, and—so said its critics—a blinkered, bigoted, and stultifying provinciality. Aside from filling the pews of the churches, the folk of the countryside peopled its sanctuaries as well, furnishing the bulk of the more than ten thousand clergy and religious. Hewing to timeworn patterns, nearly half of the episcopate sprang from the nobility or landed gentry, while parishes found their priests among the sons of the peasantry. With greater advantages of birth, and usually the possessors of higher education, the bishops as a group reflected the values and abilities of the elite. Whether well born or plebeian, the typical Polish cleric did not enjoy a high reputation. He and his colleagues were frequently described as wanting in aptitude and formation, seldom rising above the prejudices and narrow horizons of their rustic background; collectively, they remained “in knowledge mediocre: in literary and scholarly accomplishment worse than mediocre,” according to Ermenegildo Pellegrinetti, Nuncio Ratti’s chargé d’affaires, betraying the wearied air of one accustomed to dealing with them.41 What Polish churchmen lacked in education and polish, they made up in zeal and readiness to mix in politics, a trait carried over from the partition era, when the priest acted as the grassroots spokesman for Poles against the alien regime. Emerging into the changed conditions of independence, the Catholic clergy retained its instinct for excitable, sometimes crude nationalism and took for granted its right and duty to enter the civic fray in word and deed, rarely subtly, usually on behalf of the parties of the Right, and by no means always in line with the wishes of the Vatican. Such habits, reported Monsignor Pellegrinetti at the end of the Ratti mission in 1921, had caused the Warsaw nunciature no little anxiety and trouble, a diplomatic way of saying that they had cost his chief his job.42
At the pinnacle of its hierarchy, the reassembled Polish Church had inherited a generation of leadership that has inspired few superlatives. Neither of the two archbishops from the German and Russian zones, Edmund Dalbor (b. 1869) and Aleksander Kakowski (b. 1862), owned a strong personality, and both bore the tarnish of unpopularity as relics from the days of national servitude, widely suspected of having kowtowed to foreign masters. Dalbor and Kakowski paid a dear price in public esteem for their grudging wartime bows toward Berlin, for in the light of the changed perspective that prevailed in Poland after 1918, they never entirely shed an undeserved reputation as lukewarm patriots, onetime lapdogs of the Germans insufficiently devoted to the ideal of complete independence. Although few Poles could match these prelates for patriotic convictions, in the glare of hindsight their cautious wartime approach to the Polish question was seen as halfhearted and unduly deferential toward the occupier. Indeed, when Pope Benedict promptly announced his intention to confer a cardinalate on the archbishop of Warsaw in recognition of the renewed sovereignty of his country, the Polish government grumbled mildly on the grounds that the honor might be construed as a reward for Kakowski’s unhappy service in the German Regency Council, which in fact was precisely the idea; the pontiff relented only to the extent of simultaneously elevating Dalbor and Kakowski to the purple in 1919.43 Dalbor assumed the status of primate, the president of the national episcopate, which historically accompanied his see of Gniezno-Poznań, but the post almost might have remained vacant for all the difference it made. Retiring and passive by nature, Dalbor had no taste or gift for politics, and his public demeanor was subdued to the point of invisibility. He ranks as one of the least memorable and least remembered of Polish primates. For his part, Kakowski also shunned the spotlight, but as the ordinary of the capital he could not evade notice so easily as the all-but-faceless Dalbor. By and large, observers were unimpressed by what they saw. Contemporaries tended to describe Kakowski as a goodhearted mediocrity, bright enough, perhaps, but clumsy and erratic, distinguished above all by an invincible capacity for discretion and fencesitting. Kakowski was not cut out for politics, and knew it. His lackluster performance as wartime regent had won him nothing but trouble and opprobrium, and it is scarcely surprising that afterward he reverted to his habit of keeping his cards close to his vestments. No one knew for certain his inner partisan sympathies, but throughout his career he showed himself reliably able to get along with the authority of the day. Despite his reputation as a bumbler, the Holy See appreciated his loyalty to Rome and viewed him as its man within the hierarchy of Poland, but he carried no great influence in the country and seemed content to maintain an unobtrusive profile.44
The reticence of the two cardinals magnified the importance of the Galician bishops, Sapieha of Kraków (b. 1867) and Teodorowicz of Lwów (b. 1864), who possessed in abundance the energy and decisiveness their nominal superiors so obviously lacked. Fast friends and allies of long standing, they shared an enthusiasm for the Dmowski Endecja and diligently worked in tandem to galvanize the Catholic episcopate in support of the nationalist Right. Although not yet an archbishop—he would not receive that designation until 1925—Sapieha stood out as the most naturally impressive figure within the Latin hierarchy, his innate talents enhanced by the prestige of his family name, one of the most illustrious in the rolls of Polish nobility. His lengthy custody of the historic royal cathedral on Kraków’s Wawel Hill began before the First World War and did not end until after the Second, and in his later years he numbered among his protégés the young priest Karol Wojtyła. Fearless, headstrong, and irascible, imbued with aristocratic pride and arrogance, he commanded respect even from his numerous enemies. Teodorowicz was, to borrow the phrase of Evelyn Waugh, Sapieha carved by an Aztec, reproducing in coarser, exaggerated form the features of his patrician colleague. Sapieha was resolute, impatient, and combustible; Teodorowicz obstinate, rash, and combustion itself, a human volcano in constant eruption. He also exerted a strong sway over the bishop of Kraków, his junior in age and rank. Teodorowicz lived and breathed politics and intrigue, and his light load of pastoral duties as curate of Poland’s few Armenian Catholics afforded him ample time to engage in his favorite pastimes, to the despair of the many who conceded his undeniable abilities but thought of him mainly as a reckless troublemaker who also brought out the cantankerous worst in Sapieha.45 As time went on, the Vatican would make a point of warning newly appointed papal nuncios to Warsaw to watch their step around Teodorowicz, based on the unhappy experiences of their predecessors.46
Apart from Sapieha, only one member of the Catholic hierarchy of reborn Poland bore the stamp of true greatness, and as fate would have it he was an outsider generally regarded by Poles as a national and religious