The Catholic Church in Polish History

Palgrave Studies in Religion, Politics, and Policy Series Editors Ted G. Jelen University of Nevada, Las Vegas Las Vegas, Nevada, USA Mark J. Rozell George Mason University Fairfax, Virginia, USA A generation ago, many social scientists regarded religion as an anachronism, whose social, economic, and political importance would inevitably wane and disappear in the face of the inexorable forces of modernity. Of course, nothing of the sort has occurred; indeed, the public role of religion is resurgent in US domestic politics, in other nations, and in the international arena. Today, religion is widely acknowledged to be a key variable in candidate nominations, platforms, and elections; it is recognized as a major influence on domestic and foreign policies. National religious movements as diverse as the Christian Right in the United States and the Taliban in Afghanistan are important factors in the internal politics of particular nations. 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Ramet Sociology & Political Science Norwegian University of Science & Technology (NTNU) Trondheim, Norway Palgrave Studies in Religion, Politics, and Policy ISBN 978-1-137-42622-2 ISBN 978-1-137-40281-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-40281-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936490 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A. For Dr. Patricia Fresen and in memory of Benedictus de Spinoza (1632–1677) PREFACE This volume is not exactly a history of Polish Catholicism; the writing of such a history has already been accomplished in English translation by the Polish scholar Jerzy Kłoczowski. This volume is rather a history of the Catholic Church in Polish history. By that I mean that, in the following pages, I intend to embed the story of the Catholic Church within its time, and to show how the great events affecting all of Poland provided the framework within which the Church lived. To achieve this it will be necessary to explore some events and developments which did not have a direct impact on the Church but, nonetheless, helped to shape the framework within which the Church had to work. The story of Catholicism in Poland is conventionally dated to 966, the year that Duke Mieszko I converted to Christianity and began the process of imposing the Christian faith on the Poles. As in other lands, there was at first resistance from ordinary people, whose traditional religion was polytheism. But over time, the memory of polytheism faded, and Christianity took hold. The hegemony of the Church of Rome in Poland, as elsewhere, was threatened in the 1500s by the Protestant Reformation and, at the peak of Protestant influence, a large number of Poles had converted to the new faith. But Catholicism prevailed for a number of reasons, including prominently that the peasants remained loyal to the pope and viewed Protestantism, which had taken hold in the cities, as foreign to their way of life. Thus, peasant distrust of city-folk played its part in the ultimate success of the Catholic Counter-Reformation in Poland, alongside the institutional strength of the Church of Rome, the high caliber of its intellectuals, and the emergent Marian devotions. vii viii PREFACE But it was the three partitions of Poland – in 1772, 1793, and 1795 – in the course of which Poland was divided between Prussia, Russia, and the Habsburg Empire, which wed the Poles more deeply to Catholicism. Where Prussia championed Lutheranism and Russia championed Orthodox Christianity, the Catholic Church prioritized protecting its own institutional interests and presence; accordingly, the Holy See and most of the Polish bishops urged Poles, during the years of foreign occupation, to accept German, Russian, and Austrian rule as anointed by God. With pressures from state-sponsored Protestantism in Germany and state-sponsored Orthodoxy in Russia, the Catholic Church was on the defensive in those two empires. Then, with the restoration of statehood in 1918, something remarkable happened. The Catholic Church, no longer on the defensive, took on the role of ecclesiastical hegemon, laying claim to Orthodox Church facilities which had been seized by the Russian Orthodox Church in the nineteenth century; local Ukrainians did not view this as a restoration of the Catholic Church’s original title to the properties, but as the seizure of properties legitimately belonging to the Orthodox Church. A particularly painful episode involved the burial of Marshal Józef Piłsudski in Wawel Cathedral in Kraków. The Archbishop of Kraków, Adam Stefan Sapieha, did not want to see Piłsudski’s last remains interred in the cathedral and, ignoring both the President of the Republic and the papal nuncio, arranged to have Piłsudski’s sarcophagus transferred from the cathedral to the Silver Bells tower. This transfer provoked public outcry. These were ripples but more important than the diverse experi- ences in the nineteenth century as a factor affecting Poles’ attachment to the Church was that Poles had achieved independence and, whether they had looked to the Church as their protector during the years of partition or viewed the Holy See as betraying them because of encyclicals advising them to obey the occupation authorities, independence created a new context, in which the Church had both new opportunities and new challenges. In the years 1918–1939, the Church’s hold weakened some- what, especially in the cities. Again, there was a sharp break, with the outbreak of World War Two and the fourth partition between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. With the Nazis enslaving Poles and the Soviets preaching an atheist ideology, the Catholic Church once more cast itself as the defender of the Polish nation – including in retrospect. This revival of the Church’s role as defender of Poles continued into the communist era, when it found itself, from the second half of the 1940s until the summer of 1980, to be PREFACE ix the only independent organization of any note. The imprisonment of Bishop Kaczmarek and detention of Archbishop Wyszyński, both in 1953 which had been intended to weaken the Church, only gave the institution a martyr’s crown, strengthening its hold on Polish hearts.

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