Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter. Neal Pease
especially to Fr. Włodzimierz Ledóchowski, the Polish Galician aristocrat who became general superior of the Society of Jesus in 1915. Routinely described as the last of the formidable Jesuit commanders of the old school, Ledóchowski had a knack for gaining the ear of his pontiffs, and he acted as the leader of a small but active “Polish lobby” within the Vatican during the war and thereafter exerted no little influence on the shaping of curial policy toward his native land over the next quarter century.21 A Poland under Habsburg tutelage also seemed the best solution to Pope Della Chiesa and his secretary of state, Pietro Cardinal Gasparri, a bluff canon lawyer who impressed many as a living confirmation of the stereotype of slippery Italian diplomacy.22 Making the rounds of the Vatican in February 1916 to sound out Benedict and his lieutenants, Dmowski found no takers for his Allied strategy. While the pope confined himself to vague assurances of his paternal solicitude, Gasparri was blunt, asking the Pole the scolding, incredulous question “Why are you going with Russia? . . . You truly believe that a united Poland will be contented under the scepter of the Russian monarch?” When Dmowski spoke of full Polish independence, Gasparri broke into laughter and protested that the idea was no more than “a dream, an impossible goal! . . . Your future is with Austria.”23
Although Gasparri had failed to take into account the steady relegation of Austria-Hungary to the status of a satellite of Germany, his prediction appeared borne out the following November when Berlin and Vienna announced the creation of a nebulous Polish kingdom carved out of districts captured from Russia. Fanfare notwithstanding, the enterprise amounted to scarcely more than a glorified garrison of the Central Powers, and it drew a skeptical initial response from Rome and the Polish hierarchy. The scheme failed to satisfy Gasparri on the grounds that it granted the Hohenzollerns, not the Habsburgs, a de facto trusteeship over a still-partitioned Poland, and even though many of the Polish clergy of the new “kingdom” inwardly welcomed the Germans and Austrians as liberators of the devout from the more onerous yoke of Petersburg, they thought better of saying so, hedging their bets against a possible Russian recovery.24 Furthermore, this rump state fell far short of the ideal of national reunification. For his part, Bishop Sapieha pointedly refused requests to have the Te Deum sung in honor of the creation of a “Poland” that implausibly excluded his Diocese of Kraków, the queen of Polish cities.25 Nor had the Polish Church forgotten its decades of persecution at the hands of Germany, the primary sponsor of the initiative. To overcome this legacy of ill will, German policy during wartime had made a calculated appeal to Polish Catholics in hopes of securing their loyalty. In the opening weeks of the conflict Berlin hurriedly had withdrawn its objections to the nomination of Edward Likowski to fill the long-vacant archbishopric of Gniezno-Poznań, the traditional primatial see of Poland, and then followed this opening concession with a consistent pattern of scrupulous treatment of the Church in its own Polish provinces and those wrested from Russia. Despite these encouraging signs, Likowski’s successor, Archbishop Edmund Dalbor, did no more than to extend public but pro forma gratitude to the German Kaiser upon the creation of his puppet Poland.
In the oracular custom of its diplomacy, the Vatican never made an unequivocal statement of its Polish policy during the war, despite all manner of hints of the pope’s kind regard for that loyally Catholic nation. Even so, by its own reckoning Rome thought it had made its stance clear enough and in later years showed little patience with Polish critics who contended otherwise. In 1921, stung by one too many accusations of his wartime indifference to the Polish cause, Benedict hotly objected that “only the Apostolic See” had declared plainly “that Poland needed full and complete freedom, that is to say independence.”26 Strictly speaking, this was an exaggeration born of pique; still, he legitimately might have claimed credit as the first head of state to call publicly for an authentic, if ill-defined, Polish self-rule that went beyond the tentative proposals of belligerents that would have tethered the Poles fast to Russia or the Germanic powers. Benedict’s definitive statement on the war, his famous “Peace Note” of August 1, 1917, among other points urged the world to apply the principles of “equity and justice” to the resolution of the Polish question. On its face, this pontification could mean anything, or nothing, but those attuned to the delphic ways of Rome construed it to suggest the fashioning of a fully united Poland with at least autonomous standing. The pope received little recognition or applause for his recommendation. Although his initiative preceded Wilson’s corresponding reference to Poland in his Fourteen Points by several months, it was more vaguely framed and gingerly worded than the American document and evoked no more than a tepid reaction from Polish opinion. It made such a poor impression on the Poles of Galicia that the bishops of the region quietly undertook efforts in damage control to persuade their flock that the pope had not turned his back on them.27
Meanwhile, the Church gradually shed many of its hesitations regarding the kingdom of Poland the Central Powers had patched together. For all its limitations, the protectorate of the Germanic emperors seemed an irrevocable step toward eventual Polish sovereignty, and at any rate it plainly surpassed any offer the Allies had made the Poles so far. More to the point, as Sapieha noted, so long as London and Paris counted on Russia, the Entente would not dare to raise the bid on the Polish card.28 Even so, a full year elapsed before the Polish Church and the Vatican decided to put their money on the German-Austrian horse, not without misgivings, and only after the firm nudge given them in that direction by the onset of revolution in Russia. In autumn of 1917, Berlin got around to forming a government for its satellite Poland, and invited the archbishop of Warsaw, Aleksander Kakowski, to lend the authority of the Church by serving as one of three members of the Regency Council it established as the nominal ruling authority of its fiefdom. The gesture inspired mutual distaste, for Kakowski bore no love for the Germans, and they knew it. Still, the collapse of the tsardom the previous March and the subsequent advent of Bolshevism had sufficed to convince even the invincibly circumspect Kakowski that the perils of inaction outweighed those of decision: Russia looked finished, and the promised kingdom under German sponsorship appeared to him and the predominantly conservative and monarchist Polish clergy as the only possible shelter against Russian disorder, social upheaval, and the rise of republican sentiment among their own people. Shortly before the Bolshevik coup in Russia, having first obtained permission from the pope, Kakowski agreed to enter the Regency Council—against his will, so he privately insisted, and out of a sense of sacrificial duty to his nation and Church.29 Once in office, Kakowski quickly showed that he had not erred in choosing a priestly vocation instead of politics, and his earnest but inept struggles to manage his new civic chores drove his Vatican superiors to distraction.30
Once having made up its mind, the Church at home and abroad showed an increasing commitment to the Polish kingdom cobbled up by the German and Austrian emperors. In January 1918 the pope pronounced a blessing on the Regency Council, whose composition and policies reflected a strongly clerical streak. Polish clergymen made up a substantial share of the administrative apparatus of the protectorate, and its foreign ministry urged the speedy conclusion of a concordat.31 Responding to the appeal of the Polish bishops, Benedict also dispatched to the embryonic state an apostolic visitor, his house librarian, who would become the next pope within months of returning to Italy.
In any case, the dynamic course of the last year of the war nullified all previous calculations regarding Poland, as the collapse of the Central Powers coupled with the widening revolution in Russia produced Polish independence under the banner of the victorious Allies. The addition of the United States to its ranks permitted the Entente to gain a decisive advantage, while the subtraction of Bolshevist Petrograd released the invigorated coalition from the need to cater to Russian sensibilities concerning Poland and enabled it to outbid Berlin and Vienna for the allegiance of the subject peoples of the heart of Europe. Given their innate caution, both Rome and the Polish Church struggled to keep up with the dizzying rush of events, and neither saw the Allied triumph coming until it was practically upon them. Some Polish hierarchs remained loyal to the old regime virtually to its last gasp, while on the other extreme, Archbishop Teodorowicz addressed the Austrian parliament as early as October 1917 to demand the liberation of Poland.32 Until very late in the game, however, the Vatican and most of the Polish bishops continued to pin their hopes on the Austro-Polish conception of a reconstituted Poland under nominal sovereignty of the Habsburgs, and Gasparri was still defending the merits of the project well into the autumn of